Pump It
Toni Sant's Blog is officially two years old this week. I wasn't going to bring this up because it's not really a significant milestone -- other than for the fact that it's one of the few Maltese blogs still going non-stop since 2004 -- but all the hullabaloo about Queen Elizabeth's 80th birthday put me in the (in)appropriate frame of mind.
I think that keeping a blog going for two years or longer is not a great feat. What's harder is keeping a weekly podcast going regularly for that long. I thought long and hard about the longevity of my podcasting series this week as I prepared for the 20th episode. I didn't want to do anything special to mark this other insignificant milestone, but I'd be unfair to myself if I didn't step back and point out that the true measure of things is not how long they are or how long they go for but what they do and what they're about.
The 20th Mużika Mod Ieħor podcast opens with a track entitled Bleed from a new Gozitan band called Tears of Revenge. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the first time that I've played music from Gozo in this series. I like the first part of the song as it captures teenage angst in a very classic way. The band has a presence on MySpace and this is where I discovered Bleed. Other Maltese bands use MySpace. Beangrowers and Dripht come to mind immediately but I'm sure there are others I'll discover soon. The best way to explore MySpace is to participate in this ever-expanding online community. Apparently it can do wonders for undiscovered bands. Just ask the Arctic Monkeys.
To keep things in perspective I frequently finger through my CD collection and swell with delight over some disk from the pre-web era. One such CD has tracks from a relatively popular Maltese band from the early 1990s called No Strings Attached. You can hear their song Seize the Day from 1992 on this week's podcast. You can also hear a track called In the Grey from the next band NSA guitarist Mark Agius Cesario played in. The band was called Different Light. They released a CD album in 1996 by the name of All About Yourself. Trevor Tabone was the singer and main songwriter in Different Light and I plan to play something from his solo cassette album released a few years earlier. I need to find it and do a digital dub first, of course.
It's so much easier to play tracks from digital sources on my weekly podcast. Nothing was easier than include a recent recording by Glen Cachia, one of the founding members of The Rifffs, who quit the band before they became well known and recorded the perennial Dance Music for the 80s Depression. Since The Rifffs reunion is slated for next weekend (without Glen, of course) I thought it was appropriate to play his song Happy, which comes courtesy of Mike Bugeja who has done an excellent interview with him for the Malta Independent.
The RSS feed for the podcast is available here or you can simply click here to subscribe directly with iTunes. You can also add the latest episodes to your My Yahoo! page.
Happy Birthday Toni Sant's blog... I love the way you always mark anniversaries because it reminds me to think of mine once in a while... If I hadn't started blogging right when I left Malta I would never remember! :)
Sharon, you're very kind. Thank you!
I have a weird obsession with the passage of time. I believe it holds the secret to the meaning of life. There's a great book by Kevin Lynch on this subject called What Time Is This Place? published about 30 years ago. I recommend it very much...and it may even come in handy for your own research.
I was wondering whether Different Light made any albums other than "All About Yourself". That is excellent - one of my favourites from that period. From what I gather it is their one and only CD.
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