Sounds

I'm going to be away for a few days, and I don't know whether I'll have the chance to Internet while I'm away. (Jeez. I just made "Internet" a verb. Somebody stop me!)

I'll try not to invent any new verbs for the rest of this post.

Since I won't be talking to you, why don't you talk to me? Tell me to what, or to whom, I should be listening.

Music used to be a huge part of my life: I've got thousands of LPs, probably another couple thousand CDs. A few years ago most of my CDs got stolen, and I replaced them with even more CDs.

Yet I seem to be spending less time listening to music. Part of it is that I'm just very busy, and rarely seem to sit in the same place long enough to listen to a whole CD, yet partly I don't listen because when I do, I'm uninspired. When I turn on the radio, I hear a depressing sameness. Or, worse, a depressing familiarity. So much of contemporary music seems to be a pastiche of earlier stuff that was better.

My musical tastes are pretty eclectic. I listen to blues, jazz, soca, rai, and Balkan Beat Box. I listen to classical and opera. Sage Walker turned me on to strange neo-Norse revival stuff, and "kulning" is now a word in my vocabulary. I've never really got excited by rap, though I've heard some rap from Thailand that was pretty strange and cool.

Assume, for the purposes of this post, that I've got classic rock pretty well covered.

To whom should I be listening?