Back in the day, I had a reputation as a headbangin’ rocker. Had an all-girl band, played lead guitar, drove ridiculous distances to attend mega-concerts at auto racing speedways, yada yada yada. Those were good times …. Jump to the present, and I still have the urge to air-guitar and fling my hair around when I hear some heavy metal electronica. I get a kick out of Pendulum, even though they’ve betrayed the DnB purists. Prodigy is the bomb. Far Too Loud is, well, loud. Along those lines, UK band Nursery of Naughtiness has been hard at work cranking out tunes that sound like boulders on roller skates. Don’t you just love a beat that leaves stress fractures in your sternum? More on .

Oftentimes when I get home from the office, all of the problems of the day come along with me. I can tell, because my neck hurts and my shoulders are scrunched up to my ears and inside my cranium it is very noisy with echoing fragments of the day’s conversations. At those times I don’t really want to have to think about anything. It was one of those times last week when I decided to see what new friends I had on MySpace. Sure enough, recent adds came along with some interesting new music, and one song was just the right fit for my worn out and grumpy neurons. “Collect Ur Thoughts” from DnB duo @mospherixz (DJ Rivmic and Kevin Salisbury) offers the opportunity to collect one’s thoughts and compress them down to a smooth shiny pebble. Listen a little longer, and you can skip that pebble across the glassy surface of your deep dark subconscious. Then observe calmly as the pebble’s density pulls it under, detach yourself as it sinks slowly into the shadows, and turn away when it disappears from view. More on .

A lot (a real lot!) of electronic musicians use PLP loops in their compositions, and they can thank Jason Donnelly (DJ Puzzle) for contributing to their sound. I've incorporated several into my tunes, and there's been a couple of times when I've listened to someone else's song and thought, "Hey, wait .... that's MY loop". Earlier this month I received an e-mail from Jason, inviting those of us on his distribution list (extensive, I'm sure), to have a listen to his new two CD set, "Geodesic Peers". The set includes several years of work and covers a lot of ground, genre-wise. One of my favorite tracks from Disc 1 is "Time Change". More on .

My auditory neurons are still working the kinks out after listening to a new album by an artist that we should keep a wary eye and ear on. Prod is either a vastly superior alien being or a secret collaborative project involving Goldie, Prince and Aphex Twin. I just purchased Prod's debut album, "The Artworks Formerly Known as Prints" on Pollinate Records. Seriously, that is an extraordinarily stupid title for an album that is a thousand percent brilliant. At least half of the tracks on this album are challenging enough to set my hair on fire. Apparently, real person Duncan Passey is a virtuoso musician who studied keys and saxophone for a few months before erupting into a full-grown twenty-something electronica wizard. Oh, and did I mention that he can sing? More on .