In A Little While

My hope to find some time to blog about my Second Life activities in recent days needs to wait another day or two. It's been one roller coaster of a week. I've seen the depths of hell and soared majestic to the heavens. I probably prefer to live in a Prozac-like state, but extreme ups and downs are interesting too.

Anyway, it's time for the 104th podcast in my weekly Mużika Mod Ieħor series. Mike Bugeja's interview with me about MMI and my podcasting adventures appears in The Times (of Malta) this week so I'm expected at least half a dozen new listeners to discover the podcast at this point. With this in mind, I've put together a very varied edition this week; I'm sure regular listeners will enjoy it and I hope new ones will like it too.

The opening track comes from the debut album by a new Gozitan band. The album is entitled If Symptoms Persist. The band is called Inner Grey and the song is Your Vacant Stare. Metal has come a long way in the unlikely setting of Gozo over the last several years. Inner Grey are much slicker than my darling buds of 2005 Tears of Revenge but I miss the raw passion that makes for soul torturing songs. Still, judging by the rest of the tracks from the album, Inner Grey is one of the best sounding heavy bands to emerge from the northern isle.

My old friend Grimaud provided me with some much needed positive vibrations earlier this week when he released Aquaman on his MySpace page. The song was apparently recorded in 2007 and meant for an earlier release. I hope to catch up with Grimaud during my upcoming visit to Malta and I'll make sure to ask him for the back story to all this. I could email him about it, but why would I want to when I can speak with him face-to-face over a cold pint of Blue Label soon enough.

Also through MySpace I found out about bassist Oliver Degabriele's most recent recordings. He is now a member of the Riot jazz quartet based in France, where he has established his professional base. I hope the French musicians he plays with can appreciate that Oliver brings more than his formidable bass skills to their sets. Riot is an odd name for a jazz combo but somehow the track Kuumatt provides an appropriate balance.

For this week's final offering, I'm delighted to share with you a new recording by Caligula, the UK-based project of Glenda Azzopardi better known as Gia. Infidelity is produced by her husband Muttley Zammit and shows a musician and a singer finding their own voice filtered through what are undoubtedly very eclectic sources. I want to hear more from Caligula and I'm pretty sure that I won't be disappointed.

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