In Bb

Technology is moving us further and further into the realm of life being played back to itself.....

Here is another example:

http://inbflat.net/

Vegetable Orchestra

German orchestra that makes instruments from veggies......

Los Pikadientes De Caborca

So there are these guys in a Mexican band that recorded a song on their home laptop and handed it out to their friends via memory stick and bluetooth as a cellphone ringtone. Their friends passed it around so much that the song became popular and eventually was played on local radio stations across Sonora, Mexico and people uploaded videos of themselves dancing to the tune on YouTube. One thing led to another and they got a record deal from Colombia.

Click here for the video.

Apparently passing songs by cellphone works in these communities because they have a low rate of computer ownership, broadband access, credit card possession, and itunes accounts. But they do have pre-paid cellphones with bluetooth, so there is a very distributed network there for sharing information and music. I remember seeing people in the Philippines share information on their phones with each other and use them like laptops.

Although it looks like we're breaking away from the corporate music model, when compared to the potential growth of this distributed phone model, are we actually getting anywhere? People use ipods, but they can't talk to each other. I see local music around town and people are still selling CDs...a twenty year old technology. If I want to share it with my friends, I have to take the cd home, burn it to a computer and fileshare it from there, where I could possibly be ratted out by my internet service provider to the RIAA. Or I make copies of the CD to distribute to friends, or I buy more CDs. It'll be interesting to see where things go in the future.

Music Table

I don't exactly know what's going on here, but I think I like it. This device, which is supposed to be going into production soon, is a table that reacts to the blocks that are put onto it. It creates music based upon the orientation and placement of the different blocks. I love living in the future.

Rock-afire Explosion

The Rock-afire Explosion was the robot band that performed at Showbiz Pizza during the 1980s. I remember them from birthday parties held at Showbiz Pizza when I was growing up in New York. Apparently the company that made them still programs them and they started releasing videos to Youtube...here's a Nine Inch Nails performance. It's bizarre...

Girl Talk

If you haven't heard, a number of music critics have listed Girl Talk's Feed the Animals as one of the top 10 albums of 2008. Girl Talk is some kind of computer engineer that has created an album that is composed of samples from 167 different bands and musicians from the past 45 years. I don't believe he plays an original note on the entire album.

It's pretty interesting to see where sampling in popular music is going. Four or five years ago Danger Mouse released the Grey Album, which mashed up music from the Beatles' White Album with Jay Z's Black Album and was very well received. Feed the Animals feels more like flipping through radio stations than it feels like listening to a coherent piece of music. Some of it is whimsical, some of it is annoying, some of it is pretty good. I suggest listening yourself and coming to your own conclusions.

It is free to download the album (click here), but he asks for a donation. If you do download it and listen to it, pull up the Wikipedia page here and follow along.

And perhaps even more audacious, somebody on YouTube has "created" (is that the right word? or just edited? are they the same now?) a video that is a compilation of the videos made for the samples used in Feed The Animals. Below is one of them.



Here's the sample breakdown, courtesy Wikipedia:
10. "In Step" - 3:23

* 0:00 Roy Orbison - "You Got It"
* 0:00 Drama - "Left Right Left"
* 0:00 Jermaine Stewart - "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off"
* 0:30 Arts & Crafts - "What a Feeling" (which samples "Jam on the Groove" by Ralph MacDonald)
* 0:47 Salt-n-Pepa - "Push It"
* 0:57 Deee-Lite - "Groove Is in the Heart" (which samples "Get Up" by Vernon Burch)
* 1:02 Nirvana - "Lithium"
* 1:15 Thurston Moore - "See-Through Play/Mate"
* 1:38 The Gap Band - "You Dropped a Bomb on Me"
* 1:43 Fergie featuring Ludacris - "Glamorous"
* 1:44 Michael Jackson - "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)"
* 1:44 The Spinners - "Could It Be I'm Falling in Love"
* 1:45 Earth, Wind & Fire - "September"
* 1:53 INXS - "Need You Tonight"
* 2:00 Kraftwerk - "Tour de France"
* 2:51 Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine - "1-2-3"
* 2:53 Diddy featuring Keyshia Cole - "Last Night"
* 2:53 The Beach Boys - "God Only Knows"
* 3:16 Snoop Dogg - "Sexual Eruption"
* 3:21 Bizarre Inc. - "I'm Gonna Get You"

Edit - Looking at this post, I'm struck by how oddly music, videos, and information have collided with each other.

The HOOD Internet

I like music. It get me in and out of moods... my mind is so easy controlled by music...

For the last days I was listening mostly to Sigur Ros and Kings of Convenience... no wonder I felt like shit. This morning I decided for a change. My old friend A-Trak (well he doesn't know he's my friend yet) got me with the net-fly to get into this awesome http://www.thehoodinternet.com/ music blog.

what i like the most about music blogs is the music I find there. Reading about all the great musicians is not for me, since my memory won't last more than 5 days - I can hardly recall who were Led Zeppelin (OK, that was a lie)....

So spare your time, and just download this Up-Mood-Maker of today - The hood internet VS Chicago awesome mixtape - you will not be able to sit anymore today...

Kunga!

Here's a video I should have uploaded a long time ago, but I forgot it was on an external drive backup that sat in a closet for storage.   Finally uploaded to youtube three years later!  Got more videos on the way, too.

Rick Astley

20 years ago on March 12, Rick Astley's song 'Never Gonna Give You Up' hit the number 1 spot on the Billboard Top 100. Oh, 1988, it seems like just yesterday...

Keith Richards to Youth: "Lay off the dope...."

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080228091142.rurxd28x&show_article=1

Now you tell me!!!!

New Music

I just got a ton of new tunes, and I was curious what people were listening to.

What you been listening to, Willis?

I've deleted all my tunes off my hard drive (placed on an external), and I've been rocking out to:

Amon Duul II (1960s German Krautrock band. They helped start the scene in Germany)

Cal Tjader (American vibraphone jazz musician. He is one of the early musicians to fuse Latin rhythms with jazz)

John Zorn's Kristallnacht (experimental musical interpretation of the Night of Broken Glass in Germany before the Holocaust)

Madvillain (MF DOOM and Madlib)


Secret Chiefs 3 (Trey Spruance from Mr. Bungle....weird and weird)

Skif Dank

This is an article that ran in Daytona Beach's Newsjournal. This is a profile of one of our dear friends, Marc Tomestic. The picture is hysterical, and the book he last read happens to be a book I had with me, and showed him, the last time I saw him. I'm glad he found it and read.


Here's the link to the article

Ah, how I miss the Dank....

Music Video Monday

Because I can't be bothered to wake up today...

The Mustangs

I got my first 'Video Response' today from YouTube. Over a year ago, I posted a video I took of a kickass rock band in Seoul, Korea called The Mustangs. Somebody responded to that video with this one taken from a television station in Seoul. They're on TV!

Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry is a French screenwriter and director who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He directed many music videos before becoming a feature length director. He permeates his work with very interesting themes, such as dreams and deja vu. Here are three videos that give a sense of some of this style, and I think he works it into Eternal Sunshine. Pretty neat stuff.

Shatner

Pretty funny around the fourth minute.