Once I realized what I had gotten myself into (or, really, what I had kept myself out of), I fled San Jose as quickly as I could. To be fair, I didn't really give the town much of a chance before I wrote it off as a loss. To be unfair, that placed just kind of sucked. The cultural and musical environment of the Bay Area was one of the things that I looked forward to learning about when I moved here. And I certainly wasn't going to learn about it in San Jose.Except I did.
The CD section of the San Jose Public Library offered a surprisingly large selection of used CDs. I would make regular trips there to check out any new additions when I was bored. I was bored a lot so my music collection grew pretty nicely. This kind of makes me feel bad for skipping out on a fine I incurred there. As a clearly insufficient attempt to make up for this, today's post is the first of three to feature music that I found at the SJ Library.
One of the things I enjoyed about what I was able to pick up was the broad range of genres available. As I put together a playlist, it became clear that there was simply too much music that had too little in common to present in any kind of coherent way. Hence, the three parts. This time it's the Indie Edition with artists who, in most cases, I knew very little about. (And in every case, I didn't actually own any of the artists' music.) Highlights include a track from Sun Kil Moon's hypnotic 2003 release Ghosts of the Great Highway, PJ Harvey with an assist from Thom Yorke, and an electro-pop gem from LA's The Ray Makers. Download the whole zipped file (39 minutes) or cherry-pick the individual tracks. Don't worry, no late fees will be incurred.
South San Gabriel:: Saint Augustine
Sun Kil Moon:: Pancho Villa
The Ray Makers:: Contact High
Elliott Smith:: A Distorted Reality Is Now Necessary To Be Free
Kings of Convenience:: Toxic Girl
Meat Puppets:: Light
Mr. Airplane Man:: Lonesome Road
Hip Hop/Reggae Edition and Kitchen Cink Edition will be up whenever I get around to them. Show some love to your local library: you never know what treasures you may find.
