Wow - I spent most of my weekend pursuing new music via: a new application, an endless trail of music blogs, and a bunch of download sites.

For those of you in Europe, check out Spotify (or see if you can get a friend to email you an invite).  It's an iTunes-like player that taps into an online library of music.  Unlike Last.FM or Pandora, you can pick and play any song you want, and skip or stop at any time.  They don't have a complete catalog, but it's very extensive already.  (Remember, when I say "complete" I'm referring to my esoteric Brazilian percussion tunes.  Otherwise, it's pretty complete...)

Wandering out from my Gilles Peterson discovery last week, I tapped into a series of rare groove soul / funk / hip-hop /  house music web sites.  Some of these folks date from the days when I was still an acid jazz DJ (read 1995), and it's great to see the progression of folks like Giant Step and Soul-Sides.

• Giant Step:  With an awesome jukebox streaming player.
• Soul-Sides:  Run by Ollie Wang, a long time Bay Area resident (now LA), a great writer, one of the best covering hip-hop in my opinion.  (We met a couple of times when I first landed in the Bay Area, via the Acid Jazz Mailing List).  Good collection of notes and tunes from across the rhythm / soul / hip-hop spectrum, with lots of mp3 downloads.
• Supersaturated:  The music section links to a lot of great jazz mp3s, plus club and hip-hop mixes.  The full feed is NSFW, FYI...
• Loronix:  Where my weekend started, typing in "Brazilian music blogs".  Download full-length out-of-print old Brazilian LPs from the 50-70s via this blog (replete with cover art).  A lot of it is the schmaltzy side of bossa nova that gave us elevator music, but there are treasures in there (Milton Banana, anyone?)
• New mixes:  Full-length club sets on MP3.  Holy crap - hip-hop, dubstep, drum and bass, trance, even indie....
• Gravy Bread's Mega Super Mammoth MP3 Blog list:  Oh, wow.  I can't even begin...

Legality of all of thesedownloads - as is the case with any mp3 download - is anywhere from vaguley to highly suspect.  I figure better luck when it's a DJ set (although owenrship of tunes played can come back to bite you) or out of print LPs....

Happy listening at your own risk....