Two albums I really need to buy soon. Tom Waits’ Real Gone and Björk’s Medulla. I’m listening to the latter now, courtesy of Rhapsody ($2 a month for Berkeley students!), and it’s pretty awesome. She overdubs herself over voices — even the percussive effects are done by voices. Tom Waits does the same thing with his album. He recorded himself beatboxing (!) and lays the music over that. From a review:

You don’t own a run-down turntable with a rusted stylus? No worry, Real Gone has been recorded and mixed to make you believe that you do. Percussion clanks and scrapes like a ruckus in a submarine’s bowels, guitars and turntables (yes, turntables) squeal like midnight transmissions from pirate radio, chairs squeak and banjos hypothesize.

I’m very excited.

On a side note, I constantly type LaTeX commands to get special characters in HTML, and it never works. I need one of those “auto spellchecker” things.