I'll Have the Groove Salad With Extra Bread, Please

Stephen King, in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, riffs on drifting away from music then rediscovering it via the cyberhighway. I can relate.

My interest in music has seen two giant spikes since the turn of the century, and both spikes were brought about by online services.

The first of these was Napster in its original thumbing-your-nose-at-the-record-companies incarnation. (FWIW, I am now a monthly dues-paying member of Napster's new legit version, too.) Unlike many of the folks who used Napster primarily to avoid paying for music, I used it to find stuff I wanted that was either unavailable or was so difficult to find that it might as well have been. I'm guessing not too many others were looking for "Give Up Your Guns" by the Buoys or the withdrawn and banned "U2" by Negativland.

OK, I got a lot of other stuff, too. But it never stopped me from buying anything. In fact, on the contrary, my Napster dabbling sent me on a buying spree. When I hear new stuff, MP3's without the cover art are poor substitutes for the real thing. If I like it enough to keep it, I want a shiny new store-bought copy.

Thanks to the appeals court who decided to pull the plug on Napster, I saved a lot of money and eventually settled back into a musical coma, buying the occasional item here and there based on a review or a friend's recommendation. I mean, face it: radio sucks, and MTV hasn't been about music for over a decade. No exposure to cool sounds = no spending money on new Music. (Don't worry - I found other ways to piss away my money. You didn't expect me to put it in savings, did you?)

But lately, things have taken an expensive turn for the worse. I have discovered "Groove Salad," one of several internet radio stations broadcasting from http://www.somafm.com/ .

God help me.

What a wonderful resource. I hadn't heard of at least half of the artists whose music was featured in any given set, but there was always something that completely captured my imagination.

So, of course, I wanted to buy the music. I kept a running list of songs that I wanted to track down. The only problem is that much of what I was hearing was either out of print or had never been released in the USA. In other instances, the track that I craved was only available on a various artists collection (also usually out of print).

Think I'm kidding? "Letter in Three Parts" by #9 Dream was released on a CD called Rhythm and Irrelevance on the German Recycle or Die label which went out of business years ago. Looking for a copy of DJ Bubba's "Dreamtime Planet"? That'd be on the long out of print second Barramundi sampler of the same name. How about Jaydee's "Think 4 a While"? Same story, except that one is on the first Barramundi sampler An Introduction to a Cooler World . Out of print , by the way. Hey, at least Legion of Green Men's "Ambrosia" is on a sampler that's still in print. I know, because I bought it from an online shop based in France.

Thank God for Ebay. Oh, and also, damn you Ebay. I am going broke.

Fortunately, there are also plenty of things that are relatively recent and still in print. Where have you been all of my life, Sasha? Airdrawndagger is one of the most amazing records I have ever heard. Same goes for The Album Leaf's "One Day I Will Be On Time."

If you like mostly instrumental, downtempo electronica with a beat, I cannot recommend Groove Salad highly enough. And it's free (though donations are encouraged).

Did I say free? Be forewarned - it can lead to an expensive habit.