Fraction Of One

As well as mentioning older more established sites it's occasionally nice to ramble on about new sites too. Like Fractions of One, a new music site that launched around the beginning of November and concentrates on features, recommendations and in depth interviews rather than record reviews.

Recently the site has featured artists like new Brainlove signing Mat Reviere, bittersweet rock band The Tailors and avant pop upstarts Munch Munch and previously it has featured the likes of Shoes and Socks Off and Alloy Ark.

So indulge your web 2.0 craving and subscribe to their RSS feed or follow them on twitter, it's totally worth it.

Dronea, Dronea

Dronea, Dronea is a blog covering everything from psychedelic folk to ambient pop music which goes well with the cool blue background. When coming across a new blog it's a nice surprise to find a lot of artists I like featuring in the user's Last.fm window which, among other things featured Ben Frost who's release of 'By The Throat' is starting to turn a lot of heads.

However whilst you won't find that on this site, you can find some amazing artists on the front page. The writing is another high point of the site as rather than purely relying on little bits of information written by the artists, or found on press releases, the Dronea team pen their own evocative descriptions, which illustrate well what each release is about without coming across as over wrought or contrived.

Some of my favourite picks from the front page include music from Xela/Grouper two of my most revered Type signings. Improvisational drone from Final and imaginative celestial sounding ambient drone from Aidan Baker & Noveller.

Keytars and Violins

Maybe it's due to my own personal lack of knowledge on the subject or perhaps it's simply the vast amount of material that is covered under it's umbrella, but dance music can often feel like a fairly difficult genre to inroads into. This is probably what makes Keytars and Violins so essential as it covers such a wide variety of different sounds all of which could collectively be described as dance music, alongside some other non dance orientated music.

Over the time I've been reading K/V, about 6 months which is only a small segment of it's 3 year history, I've heard everything from deep Detroit techno to deliciously dark electro and garage tinged dubstep and there are heaps of downloadable mp3s to sample some of the sounds on offer.

One of the recent highlights was Nathan Fake's glitchy 'We Fear Silence' mix is available over on mixcloud

Or you can download it here.

Get it before the RIAA get you colonclosedbracket*.

*May not actually result in being tracked down by the RIAA

Rose Quartz

I came across Rose Quartz whilst looking for more information on the (at the time) forthcoming ES, Chris Forsyth and Ignatz tour which I found alongside some brilliant samples from all the artists involved. Whilst a fair chunk of the site is given over to psychedelic/experimental noise the Rose Quartz team generally cover a wide spectrum of music alongside vivid, informative but stil concise descriptions of each artists and links to their labels/distros.

There are also links to pictures of the various events covered by the transatlantic Rose Quartz team including recent(ish) tours by Pocahaunted and Jackie-O and links to a quarterly Rose Quartz mix which last time featured new and old music by a variety of artists including Nico, Heather Woods Broderick and Washed Out it's definitely worth the download.

They've also been fortunate enough to grab interviews with artists such as surf noise maestro Wavves and the electricity shunning Foot Village and links to all these of can be found on their front page which is handy.

Picking a favourite artist from the front page is difficult but if forced I'd probably go with the blissed out guitar based ambiance of Kevin Greenspon.

Sludge Swamp

The idea of heaviness isn't something which is universal in every musical genre, so often it can be trickier to find music which falls into that particular category. Maybe this is why I find that Sludge Swamp is one of the blogs I can continually come back to since undoubtedly much of the music found there falls into the heavy music bracket with genres such as doom, stoner-rock, black metal and of course sludge featuring regularly on the site alongside other genres such as post-rock and drone.

With a seemingly tireless group of hand selected bloggers staffing the site Sludge Swamp is updated fairly regularly with new content and each release is backed with a few concise paragraphs giving some background to the music, which can be heard by following the links supplied at the bottom of the entry.

There are so many releases on the front page it's hard to pick favourites but the Down demos are well worth sampling and whilst I haven't listened to it yet just by looking at their influences (Sunn, Nadja, Cult of Luna and Neurosis) the Osoka album also sounds it could be a very good listen.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point that pleasegetofftheinternet is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites. So you know surf responsibly, don't surf and drive, stay in school and all that jazz.

Antennas To Heaven

To mark his return to the blogosphere (incidentally I hate myself for using the term blogosphere surely it's one of the worst neologisms from this decade), I thought I'd spend a little looking at Antennas To Heaven which belongs to the occasional rock sound scribe Joe.

Focusing largely on music from the ambient drone end of the music spectrum but also covering a lot of heavier releases such as OM's recent album 'God Is Good' and sublime electronica from the likes of The Sight Below Antennas To Heaven is a delight. Rather than purely focusing on record reviews Joe also fits in the occasional interview including a deeply thoughtful piece featuring John Porras otherwise known as Elm who with 'Nemcatacoa' has released one of the years musical highlights and a brief live review of the recent Fennesz/Grouper/Natural Snow Buildings gig in London which incidentally would be one of my lineups of the year, if I'd managed to get tickets.

There are also links to other multimedia content including podcasts such as the sublime TouchRadio station podcasts and rare live sets including Elms triumphant show at SXSW.

Antennas To Heaven can be found here.

Stoneskilled

Music blogs have always been instrumental in introducing me to bands I probably wouldn't listen to normally and Stoneskilled, is a great example of such a blog, covering everything from obscure psychedelia to stoner rock, noise, doom alongside a plethora of other genres.

The criticism is one of the major of the high points of the blog as rather than relying heavily on the use of musical jargon, stoneskilled instead utilizes a broader palette of terms to describe each release he covers along with helpful directions showing where to buy them and the occasional mp3 sample.

My favourite picks from the first page of the blog are: Bong, Spare Death Icon and Nackt Insecten and you can find stoneskilled here.

In addition to this Bong's soundcloud profile where they've uploaded the entirety of the  'Bethmoora' EP plus some other awesome tracks can be found here.