Sweden

Hello Oedipus!
We just found out that you’ve played our song “Hearts & Bones” in your first podcast at Oedipus1.com! We are honoured and proud, and since it’s our first air time ever in the states (that we know of), also very happy!

We are not a big band, and we haven’t got our break even in Sweden yet, so the fact that you both found us and liked us, came as a bit of a shock. We are also a bit curious about how you found us, how come you stumbled over our music?

At last, if you’ve got any tips on how or where we could try to send our music to in the states, we’d be overwhelmingly happy (can you even say it like that?)!

We wish you the best with your site, and hope you’re able to find a minute to spare, for a tiny trio from Sweden.

All the best!
/Hugo
of
Greta & The One Night Stands

—
Greta & The One Night Stands

myspace.com/gretaandtheonenightstands
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Greta-The-One-Night-Stands/46925576781

I received this wonderful letter from Sweden. This is one of the reasons that this site exists. Less than 10 years ago, to hear new artists from around the world, you would have to tune into my Sunday evening program, Nocturnal Emissions. I found these new music gems by hunting through the import bins at the local record store or by listening to the countless CDs, records and tapes that were mailed to the radio station. But due to the demands of commercial radio, programs of new music were relegated to off-night, late-night programming. Although new undiscovered music could be heard on low-powered college stations, the presentation was generally in lengthy multiple song set segments with the songs and artists laundry-listed at the end. And like all radio, it was appointment listening.

Fortunately this has all changed. Now we can listen on-demand–when we want and how often we want. Also, digital delivery has supplanted much of the difficulty in obtaining new music. This particular song came from MPE, a music delivery service available to music programmers. Yes, I still have to listen to hundreds of songs weekly to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the speed of the net allows more time for research and discovery and communication. The future of radio is on the net and only bandwidth limitations and digital copyright laws will inhibit its exponential growth. But the net has shrunk the world and Sweden is right next door.

[jwplayer mediaid=”4196″]

“Hearts & Bones” by Greta and the One Night Stands

I just finished reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson, the final volume of the Millennium trilogy. What began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and continued with The Girl Who Played With Fire, this final novel is a thrilling satisfying conclusion to wonderfully sophisticated series centering around the intriguing Lisbeth Salander. How rare for a novelist to produce a body of work where each book adds to the others and satiates as you proceed. Larsson elevates crime literature into a realm of larger ideas. Although some of the plotlines are a bit far-fetched and coincidence rears its head too often, his characters are cleverly original and do hold our attention. And his women are particularly strong.

Salander, the punkette with a touch of Asperger’s, is one of the most unique heroines in modern literature. Socially awkward yet physically striking with her tattoos and piercings, she’s a hacker extraordinaire with a photographic memory and a reprehensible abusive past. Set in Sweden, Larsson explores a dark underbelly of corruption, sex-trafficking and serial murder. It’s not the Sweden that we imagine and certainly not the one that I experienced when I lived there in the 1970s before moving to Boston. I had left the kibbutz and flew to Stockholm to live with a Swedish family for a spring/summer. They secured a job for me at the headquarters of the Department of Public Buildings, which basically consisted of picking up discarded packing boxes as a move into the new main facility had recently begun. For lunch a couple of co-workers and I would wander down to the main square to smoke hashish. The perfect summer job during the season where the sun barely sets, in a country that provides for its citizens and where it was uncommonly safe. Many Swedes considered the US to be a much too dangerous place to live, including a woman with whom I was in love at the time but who was actually too afraid to travel with me to the US.

Unfortunately, if you are one of the many Larsson fans in the US you will have to wait until the end of May to acquire a copy locally of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest as the publisher has seen fit to only publish it in the rest of the world! I bought mine through Amazon UK. Such arrogance will only come back to haunt the book publishing industry as it has the music industry. Dismal attempts to desperately control distribution only shows contempt for the consumer in the 21st century. We want it when we want it, where we want it and how we want it. If not, we’ll take it.

Sadly the Lisbeth Salander saga has come to an end. Stieg Larsson died in 2004 at the age of 50 having delivered the manuscripts for this trilogy.