I am learning to despise hotel internet.  Whether I book myself and end up staying in a fucking Travelodge or Mrs. Toad books and we end up staying on one of the larger guest suites at Buckingham fucking Palace, absolutely all of them have such risibly bad internet connections that recording a podcast leaves me tearing my fucking hair out.

I couldn’t even get the online image editor to load properly, so the image is that rather pathetic, borderline clipart stinker you see in the top right hand corner.  Dreadful.  My art teachers would be justifiably disappointed.

Anyhow, this is called the Plancast for one simple and far from compelling reason: the fact that Mrs. Toad and I are down in London and have had to be clinically heartless in who we do and don’t see.  We don’t exactly have lots of friends down South, but still far too many to see in one weekend and at times in the past we have tried to do too much and ended up being inadvertently rude to everyone.

Direct download: Toadcast #174 – The Plancast

01. Love Inks – Blackeye (00.06)
02. Dubstar – The Day I See You Again (04.57)
03. Rev I.B. Ware with Wife and Son – I Wouldn’t Mind Dying (But I Gotta Go By Myself (12.01)
04. Billy Bragg & Wilco – Airline to Heaven (18.30)
05. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons – Hard Time in a Terrible Land (23.12)
06. I Break Horses – Hearts (29.39)
07. Tusk Tusk – Out of Tune and Out of Time (37.22)
08. Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark (41.01)
09. Girls Names – Nothing More to Say (46.02)
10. Thomas Tantrum – Hot Hot Summer (51.33)
11. Jarad Miles – Darjeeling (56.04)

This is all about my beepy-bloopy tendencies and how I got into the stuff in the first place.

I better point out, right at the beginning, that I don’t see there being any difference between indie and electronica exactly.  Or at least, the dividing line is so blurred and there is so much crossover that the distinction is completely pointless, really.

I think the only reason I really make a distinction myself is because I became a music obsessive by listening to the likes of Dylan and Tom Waits and so on, and then moved onto the like of The Pogues and the Waterboys – not a beep in sight, basically.

Consequently, when I heard bands like Saint Etienne for the first time, although I loved lots of it, I didn’t explore much further because I just wasn’t used to electronic noises.  In actual fact, by the end of the podcast I think I come to the conclusion that it was actually an electronic beat which I really wasn’t used to, mostly, but in any case, I found it quite hard to get into anything vaguely electro for ages.  Given that I could barely make a distinction between the two these days, that seems kind of odd, too.

Toadcast #104 – The Bleepcast

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01. The Pet Shop Boys – Rent (03.46)
02. Stereolab – The Light That Will Cease to Fail (12.09)
03. Dubstar – St. Swithin’s Day (15.25)
04. U2 – Lemon (23.05)
05. Jason Lytle – On a Piece of Wood I Go (30.49)
06. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist (35.57)
07. LCD Soundsystem – North American Scum (40.42)
08. Money Can’t Buy Music – We Are All Asphyxiate (48.59)
09. Magic Arm – Daft Punk is Playing at My House (52.41)
10. Parts & Labour – Fractured Skies (57.49)
11. Jon Hopkins – Circle My Demise (King Creosote) (65.13)