When I turned on Ngoma this morning, the song being played seemed vaguely familiar — after thinking about it for a while, I recognized that it reminded me a lot of Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime (which is not surprising, since David Byrne used a lot of world music in the band’s work).

But that was about the only familiar song I heard during my listening; I enjoyed the beat, but found the music to be more distracting than I wanted today. I might come back occasionally out of curiosity, but it’ll be a rare visit.

I liked Nashville the least of any of the country channels on XM. In many ways, the music there seemed very much like the country music I heard when I was a kid than the other channels — which is odd, since it plays music from the 80s and later — and I really didn’t like country music when I was a kid.

So maybe it was my mood, or maybe the programming really is different, but this is not likely to be a channel I’ll come back to very often.

World Zone is a more diverse Folk Village, playing music in many styles from all over the world. And most of the music has been great — this is a channel I probably wouldn’t ever have gotten around to visiting without Bootcamp, but now it’s likely to become one of my favorites.

I’m not sure what happened, but the server hosting Defenestration Corner was down for about a day, so I wasn’t able to post my thoughts about the channels I visited yesterday until it came back to life, just after lunch West Coast time. So they’re on today’s page, but were actually written yesterday.

When I first got XM, On The Rocks had been temporarily changed to “Holly”, playing all Christmas music all the time — a format of no interest at all to me. And I never bothered to listen after it returned to its normal format, because I already had established my favorite XM channels. And then I missed the proper day during Bootcamp.

But I finally got around to listening today, and this channel is a gas! The music is familiar and mostly upbeat, which makes it good for work — even if it makes me consider beverages which are usually off-limits at work.

Definitely worth another round!