So far I've tried Rocket 69 (where I found Another Fine Day, but they
don't stock Aphex - at all), The Quaker Goes Deaf (where I found Ipecac
Loop and saw one of the Analogue Bubblebaths), and Gramaphone (where I
found nothing). Any others I should try for imports, esp. Aphex.
On the trip-hop side of the coin, I saw an import of Maxinquaye at Tower
that was bundled with a Pumpkin maxi-single. Both the album and single
are supposed to contain some unheard tracks, but the price is steep at
$28.99 or something. Is this some sort of limited edition? What about the
extra tracks? Are they worth the price?
Speaking of trip-hop, I'm moving ahead with the creation of
alt.music.trip-hop, unless the negative responses amount to greater than
zero in the next few days. One of the people from these lists who
responded via David Bancroft's repost to this list thought I wanted a
trip-hop mailing list, and this got me thinking. It would require more
support (Hyperreal?), but since I subscribed to the Ambient and IDM
mailing lists a few days ago, I've found them to be vastly superior to
rec.music.ambient in terms of intimacy, lack of degenerative flamewars,
and their general abundance of useful information. So I guess this begins
the newsgroup vs. mailing list poll. Please offer your thoughts.
Finally, besides stores, is there any kind of Chicago scene? At the very
least, cafes which play good (not new-agey) ambient tunes. I only got
into ambient a couple of months ago (my ticket for Garbage at the Metro
incriminates me, though I haven't given up on techno-pop; the Trip-Hop
Test 1 got me into St. Etienne [argh! London is taking over my music
collection with each new record!]) and don't know anyone who shares this
taste (though I got my high school's dedicated PA announcer to play
Alberto Balsalm over the intercom during passing period and he got a
flood of requests for the name of the artist and album afterwards [he
plays a student submission every day, though he never mentions them over
the PA]), so if you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to email.
But REMEMBER, THEY are watching!
Ed