I GET AROUND: Reader Christian Aranda emails:

I wanted to tell you how impressed I am with your musical choices. Quite some time ago when you said you were listening to BT, I thought it was ‘cool’ but mostly unimpressed. If you haven’t run across it yet, there is an incredible amount of snobbery where it concerns electronica. I’ve fallen victim to this, having ‘graduated’ from Trance and moving on (and staying with) breaks, techno, minimal techno.

When I read that you were listening to Plump DJs, I was impressed. When you casually mention Luciano (Lucien Nicolet) I was stunned! He is one of my all-time favorite DJs, along with people like Loco Dice and Steve Bug. Most people wouldn’t even find this stuff — I’ve only found it after ten years (yikes!) going to clubs.

Where do you get your music from? . . . Also, you should consider going to DEMF in Detroit sometime. I think you’d enjoy the festival. I went this past May and couldn’t believe the diversity of the people there. You wouldn’t be the oldest by about 40 years! (There were walkers and wheelchairs!)

Well, my techno-production days are — well, not over, perhaps, but on hiatus; between the blog, the PJTV, and everything else, I don’t have time (or maybe it’s just neural processing) left to make music. But I try to keep up. People send me things, I poke around on the web, and I read MixMag etc. semi-regularly. I don’t, however, worry much about what’s “cool,” just about what I like since there’s nobody around here to impress anyway. . . . (I even like Crystal Method and Juno Reactor, both of whom are out of favor with the cool kids at present, I think. Is Anders Trentemoller still cool? I’m not even sure.) Still, I”m sure I miss more than I should but what can you do? “The tragedy of life is that not all values can be realized.” But once you’re realizing all you have time for, you can’t really complain . . . .