The Fat Planet blog was featured on Friday in the UK’s ‘Guardian‘ newspaper in Chris Salmon’s column ‘Click To Download’. You can also read the column online, reprinted below.
Best for world music: Fat Planet
Stuart Buchanan is a Scotsman living in Australia with a radio show about contemporary world music. In 2003, he set up a blog to accompany his programme, “as an early experiment in fusing broadcasting with an online component, linking to free downloads of music heard on the show”. Bloggers across the globe soon discovered the site and began to write about it. Before long, Buchanan’s readers outnumbered his radio listeners. Almost five years on, the blog still offers a fantastic melting point of cutting-edge international sounds; be it Danish rap-techno, Argentinean cumbia, Israeli dub or Chinese hip-hop. The range and quality of the music Buchanan tracks down is astonishing. “Most of it is sourced from the web,” he says. “You just need to know where to look and spend many hours a week hunched over your laptop.” In other words, Buchanan does the hard work, so you don’t have to.