How to synchronize 5 metronomes. If you only watch one metronome video in your life, make it this one.
Mister Disc is a portable record player, like a Walkman or iPod for phonographs. There's only 12 easy steps to listening to your favorite LPs on the go.
Careful reading the instructions will assure you of many hours of enjoyment from your new Mister Disc.
Whoever greenlit this thing must have been high at the time. (via episode #59 of Starcade)
A suggestion from the inbox: watch the fascinatingly disturbing eagle vs. goats video with a soundtrack of Juan Diego Flórez's encore-inducing tenor solo. Two great links that taste great together. (thx, andrew & rueben)
Update: The mash-up is now on YouTube...no separate soundtrack needed. (thx, james)
Did you know that there was a ban on solo encores at the Metropolitan Opera? Not anymore. After Juan Diego Flórez busted out nine flawless high Cs in a tenor solo, the reaction from the audience compelled the singer into the first solo encore at the Met since 1994.
Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, said on Tuesday that he had asked Mr. Flórez weeks ago whether he would be prepared to repeat the aria, if the audience demanded. Mr. Fl'orez had already done so at other houses, including the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where last year he became the first to violate an encore ban since 1933.
Mr. Flórez agreed to Mr. Gelb's request, and the orchestra and chorus were warned. A system was established. Mr. Gelb kept an open line on the phone in his box to the stage manager. After the explosive reaction he gave the stage manager the go-ahead. The manager activated a podium light for the conductor, Marco Armiliato. Mr. Armiliato held out a questioning two fingers to Mr. Flórez. "He just smiled, and that means 'Yes,' " the conductor said.
Flórez nailed all nine Cs in the encore too. The mp3 of the performance is a thrilling listen.
I'm really enjoying M83's new album, Saturdays = Youth; it's somehow both 80s retro and not. The AV Club gave the album an A and Metacritic gives it a rating of 69.
Two unrelated things:
- amazon.com/mp3 is a quick way to get to the Amazon MP3 store.
- The vast majority of the recent album releases rated by Metacritic are in the "generally favorable reviews" category. A few are rated "universal acclaim" or "mixed or average reviews" and only one is "generally negative". Compare that to the ratings for recently released movies, which are much lower on average. Do people demand higher quality from their music than movies? Or is so much music produced (compared to movies) that the only albums worth compiling reviews for are the good ones?
Jsh Alln explains why the perfect pop song is two minutes and 42 seconds long.
Here's the problem: "More Than a Feeling" is four minutes and 47 fucking seconds long. I don't have time for that kind of nonsense. That's, like, one-seventh of my recreation right there.
Don't get me wrong, slugger. I love "More Than a Feeling." Those who don't are your basic a-holes. But it's like: We get it. The riff, the handclaps, the 10,000 multi-tracked guitars-nice. But then there's another verse and another chorus and infinity more solos and just a really ridiculous amount of balderdash.
If you've got the time, there's a related collection of 2:42 songs to listen to.
Most heard songs
What's the play count on your most played song in your iTunes library? My top five are:
Emerge by Fischerspooner, 97 plays
Alpha Beta Gaga by Air, 76 plays
A Dream by Cut Copy, 68 plays
Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand (Daft Punk mix), 68 plays
Around the World by Daft Punk, 66 plays
Sixteen songs in my library have been played 50 times or more. More than 70 songs have been played at least 35 times. I'm wondering where that lies on the scale of obsession...do I listen to my favorite songs more or less than normal? If you folks can be considered normal.... ;)
An interview with Robin Wilson, the thoughtful frontman of the Gin Blossoms.
It's very frustrating to me that most people don't know [that the Gin Blossoms are still together]. We're still very fortunate that we have a career and that we can make a good living playing our music. And we've got thirty-something-thousand MySpace friends, which is a great number. But, you know, I hang out with these young bands, like this group from Pittsburgh called Punchline-they're friends of mine-and they've got seventy-five thousand MySpace friends. What it works out to, basically, is however many MySpace friends you have: that's about how many records you can sell-at least...on your own.
And so, right now, with the way things are changing-record stores across the country are closing, CD sales are down, digital downloads are up. You don't necessarily need a record company to sell. We don't need a record company to sell our music to those thirty thousand people. We can do it directly. And thirty thousand people are more than enough to support our records and to keep our career going.
Short interview with bassist Colin Greenwood about the State of Radiohead, among other things.
Pitchfork: The Pitchfork review of Hail to the Thief put forth the idea that "anything Radiohead does from here on out will sound like Radiohead"...
CG: That's like a late-night stoner comment. At about three in the morning -- after you've put on Captain Beefheart and you put the red scarf over the light bulb -- it makes a lot of sense. But the next morning you're like, "I don't know, maybe the world is fucked and we didn't solve it." So I don't know about that.
Sounds like he's got Pitchfork figured out. And as your musical sommelier, I'd recommend the 2007 In Rainbows with this interview.
This short blog post by Sasha Frere-Jones about rock show patron drink tipping practices is impossible to excerpt...lots of lovely little bits. Ok, twist my arm:
When Chromeo played, their crowd drank house vodka and Budweiser. Didn't tip. Some of them did what I'll call the slide-backs. They put a dollar down on the bar, wait until you turn your back, then palm their buck and walk away. Classy. When your night starts out with "What's your cheapest drink?" that's also not good."
Top ten artists suffering the Lindsey Buckingham Paradox.
The Lindsey Buckingham Paradox is what happens when otherwise brilliant musicians decide they're better than their bandmates (creative differences, natch), strike out on their own with solo "careers", and somewhat curiously never again manage to grasp his or her own genius in the way we all know is possible.
Sting clocks in at #2:
Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers brought their own special flavors to the Police party, and without them, Sting is just a big bowl of goddamned puffy cheetos. Like Bono, maybe, without the passion or, you know, cred.
GQ interview with Keith Richards. Do I even need to say it's rambling?
Q: You should sell your body on eBay.
Yeah, I think so. Apparently, I do have an incredible immune system. I had hepatitis C and cured it by myself.Q: How?
Just by being me.Q: Do you regret not moisturizing your face?
No. I leave that up to other people.Q: Ever think about getting Botox?
No one's ever talked me into doing that. You're lucky if you walk out of there alive. God bless you.Q: Are you still cutting your own hair? You've done that all your life, right?
Yes. I did this bit here yesterday. [holds up a few strands on the side of his head] Also, I'm letting the dye grow out, since I'm not on the road. If the wife likes it, I'll keep it.
(via goldenfiddle)
If you can ignore the stupid one-logo-per-page interface, check out the 25 best band logos.
Music video for Orbital's The Box from 1996. That's Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, yo.
Harlem rent parties and Fats Waller
According to Wikipedia, a rent party is:
a social occasion where tenants hire a musician or band to play and pass the hat to raise money to pay their rent. The rent party played a major role in the development of jazz and blues music.
Further reading suggests that rent parties started in Harlem in the 1910s as a way to offset rising rents.
Harlemites soon discovered that meeting these doubled, and sometimes tripled, rents was not so easy. They began to think of someway to meet their ever increasing deficits. Someone evidently got the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord's scheduled monthly visit. It was a happy; timely thought. The guests had a good time and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the party. Besides, it cost each individual very little, probably much less than he would have spent in some public amusement place. Besides, it was a cheap way to help a friend in need. It was such a good, easy way out of one's difficulties that others decided to make use of it. Thus was the Harlem rent-party born....
Jazz pianist Fats Waller was associated with these parties and lived a short but colorful life.
The ebullient young man with the dazzling jazz style was a big hit at the Sherman Hotel. His nightly audience included men with wide lapels and bulging pockets. One evening Fats felt a revolver poked into his paunchy stomach. He found himself bullied into a black limousine, heard the driver ordered to East Cicero. Sweat pouring down his body, Fats foresaw a premature end to his career, but on arrival at a fancy saloon, he was merely pushed toward a piano and told to play. He played. Loudest in applause was a beefy man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone was having a birthday, and he, Fats, was a present from "the boys".
The party lasted three days. Fats exhausted himself and his repertoire, but with every request bills were stuffed into his pockets. He and Capone consumed vast quantities of food and drink. By the time the black limousine headed back to the Sherman, Fats had acquired severeal thousand dollars in cash and a decided taste for vintage champagne.
I was inspired to read about rent parties and Waller by this interview with Michel Gondry, director of Be Kind Rewind. Gondry says about his film:
It's important in the story that there's a parallel between what's happening in the film and what happened in the past with rent parties, which were very real. Fats Waller became the great musician he was through those parties. When someone could not afford the rent for one month, they'd make a party. You'd bring a dollar, and there would be a piano contest all night long. People making their own entertainment, that's exactly what it is.
Here's Waller performing one of his most well-known pieces, Ain't Misbehavin'.
Jad Abumrad from Radio Lab curates The Morning News' Video Digest and selects clips from movies with good music.
1. See a map of the world made out of musical notes.
2. Now, listen to the map.
Update: I misread the text associated with the second link...the music does not correspond to the notes on the map. But anyone wants to give it a shot, send along an MP3 of your recording. (thx, bill)
Rebecca Mead on young composer Nico Muhly in the New Yorker.
When Muhly composes, the last thing he thinks about is the actual notes that musicians will play. He begins with books and documents, YouTube videos and illuminated manuscripts. He meditates on this material, digesting its ironies and appreciating its aesthetics. Meanwhile, he devises an emotional scheme for the piece-the journey on which he intends to lead his listener. Muhly believes that some composers of new music rely too heavily on program notes to give their work a coherence that it might lack in the actual listening. "This stupid conceptual stuff where it's, like, 'I was really inspired by, like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis,'" he says.
A sampling (no pun intended) of Muhly's music is available on the New Yorker site and on his personal site (which seems to be in a similar vein to The Believer and McSweeney's Store, design-wise).
Just purchased: Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood soundtrack on the recommendation of Alex Ross in the New Yorker.
Greenwood is better understood as a composer who has crossed over into rock. Trained as a violist, he worked seriously at writing music in his youth, and had just embarked on studies at Oxford Brookes University when, in 1991, Radiohead was signed by the EMI record label. He dropped out of college to join the band on tour.
Guitar Zero is a band that has repurposed the Guitar Hero game controllers to make real music with them. Even better: they've posted the instructions so you can make your own. (thx, nick)
Reconsidered!
One of the problems of criticism is—what happens when it takes you just forever to realize that something is totally great? It took me until this week, and lots of it cropping up on shuffle, to realize that the latest PJ Harvey album, "White Chalk," is absolutely her best. (Okay, second best—maybe nothing will ever be as cool as "Rid Of Me," if only because who writes rock music in 5/4? ) Back in September, Pitchfork gave "White Chalk" a 6.8, and I would have given it a worse score even as recently as December. But of course, what does anyone know? "Uh Huh Her" got a 7.6, her Peel Sessions got a 7.9, "Stories from the City..." got a 5.5 and "Is This Desire?" got an Pitchfork 8.
The Kronos Quartet is playing at Carnegie Hall late next month—and on the program is Clint Mansell's "Requiem for a Dream Suite," which is its New York premiere, sort of.
Too Soon/Not Too Soon
I had to go uptown to interview some people this afternoon and Laurie Anderson's "Live in New York" came on the headphones on the way, which made me think about "Cloverfield" and 9/11 and "too soon" again. "Live in New York" was recorded at Town Hall on September 19 and 20, 2001. Is it in my mind, or does she sound uncomfortable singing "I feel like I am in a burning building and I gotta go" on "Let X=X" (iTunes link)? Nexis doesn't deliver any useful accounts of the concert—just a review from Newsday which is appreciative but not very descriptive. (Also, though, now we know that the name "Laurie Anderson" has appeared in the New York Times an astonishing 799 times, and, yes, nearly all of them are her.) Also I'm not convinced she doesn't get choked up during (iTunes link ahoy) "Slip Away." ("What's this? A little dust in my eye.") Anyway, somehow that wasn't too soon.
The audience at Saturday's not-quite-Wu-Tang but still Clan show (it was minus RZA) was "almost uniformly white."
Klaus Nomi, Still Kicking
Apparently there is a new (and exceedingly posthumous) Klaus Nomi album; there are three way-out mp3s from it on this site. Today's Village Voice published a little oral history of the East Village legend. There is also this incredible performance on YouTube—which, oddly, is of quite nearly exactly the music (or at least the harmonic progressions) from Michael Nyman's "Memorial" from "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover"... which came out in 1989, though it was apparently first performed in 1985; Nomi died in 1983. Update: Ah ha! Rumors on the internet say the tune is based on Purcell.
Hey, New Yorker classical music critic (and blogger, and my summer neighbor, and Kottke interviewee) Alex Ross was quite rightly nominated for a National Book Critics Award over the weekend. (How could any book blurbed by Bjork not be?)
Now that Sony's on board, all four of the major music labels are selling DRM-free music on Amazon's MP3 store. Amazon's giving Apple a real run for its money here.
The last part of this video featuring Conan O'Brien singing The Beastie Boys' Sabotage as Edith Bunker from All in the Family makes me laugh over and over and over.
Goodbye, Guitar Hero 3
Sad news. Guitar Hero 3 and I have broken up. Sure, we might hook up occasionally when I'm lonely at night, but our relationship is effectively over. I can play every song1 without effort on Easy mode but can barely make it through any on Medium after dozens of tries. So so lame. I've hit the wall and my pinky is to blame...the damn thing just won't work properly and I'm unwilling to try playing with just three fingers (a la Clapton) because that seems like a dead end once Mr. Orange Button comes into play.
But the real reason is that because I don't have a natural talent for the game, the only way to get better is through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task -- playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Deliberate practice...sounds like fun! Yeah, no. No doubt I could master the game with enough focused effort, but when games stop being fun and become deliberate, that's where I get off. Back to the surprising depth of Desktop TD.
[1] When relationships end, that's when the lies start. The one song I still can't play all the way through is Slayer's Raining Blood. That damn song is just random notes as far I can can tell. ↩
Director File has put out its list of Ten Best Music Videos of 2007. Of particular note on the list is a sweet and heartwarming video for The Bees "Listening Man" directed by Dominic Leung.
Leung began his career as a part of hammer & tongs, the creative team behind many influential music videos as well as the movies Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, on which he acted as 2nd unit director and title sequence director, and the upcoming Son of Rambow, which he edited. (via antville)
The 25 best rock posters of all time, according to Billboard. A hit-or-miss list at best. (via quipsologies)
The Moby Quotient determines the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies.
The equation factors in the artist, how "underground" they are, the social character of the company, and how wealthy the artist is. (via snarkmarket)
Led Zeppelin reunited for one concert last night in London with over 1 million people registering for the 20,000 available tickets. There are video clips available on Google Video and YouTube and two bootlegged songs have surfaced online so far.
Tucked in among The Kinks, The Velvet Underground and Belle & Sebastian, the track behind the animated opening title sequence for the new movie Juno is All I Want is You by the children's folk musician Barry Louis Polisar. It's as inspired a choice for this enjoyable little movie as PT Anderson's inclusion on the Punch Drunk Love soundtrack of He Needs Me (iTunes link), Olive Oyl's love song from Robert Altman's 1980 adaptation of Popeye.
Polisar was a favorite of mine as a kid. In particular, the 1978 album Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls was my undisputed favorite record. Featuring the classics Don't Put Your Finger Up Your Nose and Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan, the album has never gone out of print. Give the tracks a listen on iTunes and if you have kids, this will give them lots of laughs and teach them to rebell against their parents.
The New York Times has a review of Juno here. Amazon link to Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls here.
Update: My favorite funnyblogger Todd Levin chimes in on the Juno soundtrack at tremble.com.
I'm a philosophic man, seduced into carpentry.
-Harry Partch
The Japan Society in New York is currently staging "Delusion of the Fury," the best-known work of Harry Partch. Partch was a pioneer of microtonal music who began modifying conventional instruments, then eventually manufacturing his own instruments in order to write music that conventional instruments couldn't play. In this video from 1968, he is seen playing an instrument of his creation, the harmonic canon.
Update: Ben Tesch, who launched the collaborative weather site cumul.us in October, also developed a site for American Mavericks in honor of Harry Partch and his music. The site allows you to play virtual recreations of a large selection of Partch's instruments. It's very cool.
Activision is working with Nintendo on re-mastering the Guitar Hero III discs for the Wii, which have been mistakenly encoded to reproduce music in mono rather than in stereo. Once the re-mastering has been done, early next year, the company will swap out current Guitar Hero III discs for free.
I honestly hadn't noticed the mono issue, but I'm still waiting for my replacement 'Pet Sounds' to ship.
My anxiously-awaited Top 3 Picks from WXPN's Top 10 Kids' CDs of 2007:
- 'Do What the Spirit Say Do' by Sweet Honey in the Rock (uptempo Gospel to instantly elevate)
- 'Have You Ever Really Looked at an Egg?' by Peter Himmelman (well, have you?)
- 'Poopsmith Song' by Over the Rhine (because the speak-singing of the chorus is perfectly deadpan)
- and Honorable Mention for 'Brush Your Teeth' by the Dream Jam Band (for Mr. T-like earnestness and urban realism)
Roberto Carlos, O Rei (The King)
Influenced by his idol, Elvis Presley and the 1950s rock revolution, he rose to stardom as the main figure of the 60s musical movement known as Jovem Guarda (Young guard, in opposition to the 'old guard' of Brazilian music), which was the first manifestation of the Brazilian pop rock movement.
In 1966 Brazil, this man was bigger than the Beatles.
(thx, chana)
"Thriller" is 25
Epic Records/Legacy Recordings is releasing a 25th Anniversary Special Edition of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," with bonus tracks including remixes by Akon, will.i.am, and Kanye West.
There's a nice interview on NPR with Chris Connelly, who reviewed the album for Rolling Stone in 1982.
An alternate album cover for the original Special Edition of "Thriller" can be found on wikipedia, for a look at what could have been.
Wailing Pull Stars of Super Mario Galaxy
The latest installment of Super Mario has received plenty of notice for its revolutionary style of gameplay. But just as striking is the intricacy of its sound design. One convention of the game is a Pull Star, a floating anchor that Mario can grab with some sort of magical, musical force which, when activated emits a creepy, almost theremin-like wail, wavering just a bit before solemnly sliding down in pitch. This sound is one of those elemental formulas for touching an emotional soft spot. The other day I was playing a level with a series of Pull Stars in succession and my girlfriend implored me to stop, as it was making her sad, and not only because I'm a grown man playing a child's video game. Here is an example of the Wailing Pull Star (and a taste of the very Vangelis-like score scattered throughout the game).
Also: via Boing Boing Gadgets, footage from a live orchestra scoring session for the game. Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto sits aside and supervises.
Also also: I noticed that the menu for selecting levels to play is a musical instrument in its own right, allowing the player to create melody with chord changes and everything. It's a subtle touch.
Been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately...I just played it for the first time recently so of course I'm looking around the web for advice, hacks, YouTube videos, etc. Nothing like a little web research to reinforce how little you know.
Anyhoo, I found this video of a 8-yo kid shredding it up on Guitar Hero 2...he missed only three notes on an expert level song and wasn't even looking at the screen some of the time. Little blighter. If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go have a few alcoholic drinks, smoke some cigarettes, rent a car, and join the Army...let's see him do all that! (P.S. I wrote a hit play!)
Guitar Hero offers a connection to all this, but departs from it in an obvious way: You're not actually playing the guitar. No matter how good you may get at Guitar Hero, if you decide to take up the real instrument at some point, you'll be starting from scratch.
I don't know what it's like to be a rock star and there's no way I can pick up a guitar right now and play it, but the pretend version of the whole rock n' roll thing that Guitar Hero provides is pretty powerful, at least for this impressionable newbie. Playing Guitar Hero and believing you're a rock star might be like eating apple pie on the internet, but if you don't know the difference in the first place, does it matter?
Here's a video of a car driving on Japan's aforementioned melody roads. (thx, kyle)
Japanese researchers have developed "melody roads" that play tunes when you drive on them. You could use this technique for traffic calming...i.e. the road plays music only when you're driving the speed limit and hope that there's no second-order melody that plays at two times the speed limit to entice highway hackers to speed for forbidden tunes.
Tokyo, Seattle, and Moscow all have laptop orchestras.
As a supplement to Alex Ross' musical recommendations, a reader recommends NPR's list of 50 essential classical music CDs and Jazz 100, a list of the best jazz on CD. (thx, john)
Pretty amusing interview with a 9-year-old about music, file sharing, and DRM.
Q: When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?
A: Why would they put [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?
(thx, mark)
Nintendo-themed rap music video: Buy Mii a Wii. My favorite part is when he rhymes Nintendo with Shigeru Miyamoto. (thx, undulattice)
This video features a nerdy-looking Seattle Sonics fan rapping about Dirk Nowitzki, Kobe Bryant, and Steve Nash. I know that doesn't sound very funny, but it somehow is. Very. (via truehoop)
In the ongoing battle between the iTunes Music Store and Amazon's MP3 store, Amazon is giving a 20% referral fee to their associates for each song sold through the end of the year. Wow. That's $1.80 on a $8.99 album...I wonder if Amazon's selling these for below cost (like they did with Harry Potter.) (via nelson)
A comparison of the Last.fm chart and the official UK downloads chart after Radiohead's In Rainbows was released online last week. The top 10 on Last.fm: all Radiohead. Official chart: nada. (via adactio)
Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and the author of a new book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, "a history of the twentieth century through its music". My interest in music skews toward the contemporary popular, so I recently took the opportunity to ask Ross a few questions about classical music from the novice-but-interested music listener's perspective.
Jason Kottke: I've enjoyed classical music whenever I've heard it, but I don't know too much about it. Where might I begin to explore further?
Alex Ross: My big thing is that classical music doesn't really exist. When you have a repertory that goes from Hildegard von Bingen's medieval chant to Vivaldi's bustling Baroque concertos to Wagner's five-hour music dramas to John Cage's chance-produced electronic noise to Steve Reich's West African-influenced "Drumming," you're not talking about a single sound. Whatever variety of noise you desire, we've got it at the classical emporium. I'd suggest plunging it at various ends of the spectrum - some Vivaldi or Bach, the Beethoven "Eroica" or some other big-shouldered nineteenth-century classic, Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (which foreshadows so much pop music to come), and Reich or Philip Glass. The idea is to get a feeling for what composers were trying to express at any given time, and, of course, deciding whether you want to follow them. There's no correct path through the labyrinth.
Kottke: I just received a copy of your book in the mail, and it's got a "Suggested Listening" section following the endnotes with 10 recommended recordings and 20 more if you make it through those. How did you go about choosing those? Narrowing the 20th century musical landscape down to 30 recordings...that's pretty cheeky.
Ross: It's very hard, not to mention cheeky, picking recommended recordings, because so often it's a matter of personal taste, both in terms of what works really "matter" and also in terms of which recordings are best. The almighty "Rite of Spring" has received any number of brilliant recordings over the years. Having picked one of Stravinsky's own versions - he had such a great feeling for rhythm as a conductor - I immediately wondered whether I should have chosen the recent Esa-Pekka Salonen/LA Philharmonic version on DG, which is in gleaming modern sound and is as rock-solid as any "Rite" of modern times. So it's subjective and leads to endless argument. But I was simply recommending a bunch of starting points, not the be-all end-all ultimate Top 10 of all time. I favored recordings that were cheap, that covered a lot of ground in 60 or 70 minutes. People can listen to excerpts on iTunes and Amazon and see if they really want to plunk down the cash. One thing's for sure: you do need to own the "Rite," no matter what kind of music you love. It's the original sexy.
Kottke: Related to the first question, when I go to Amazon and search for "Beethoven", there are over 10,000 results just in the classical music category. There are even more results for Bach. Are there significant differences between all the different versions of their music? How does the bewildered beginner pick the "right" version of Bach's works to listen to? Should you look for brand names (e.g. Yo-Yo Ma), only buy music recorded by major symphonies or put out by certain record labels, or just get whatever is cheapest?
Ross: It's definitely overwhelming - a serious glut. I've been reviewing for fifteen years and in the last year or two I seem to be getting twice as many CDs as ever - not to mention all the MP3s that composers and ensembles have put up on the Internet. There are definitely some significant differences among recordings. You have a lot of expert but boring renditions and then you have the ones that touch perfection or posses exceptional emotional power. Listen to Lorrane Hunt Lieberson singing the Bach cantatas and everyone else will sound a little wan. Certain people are always reliable - Yo-Yo Ma is ever eloquent, Mitsuko Uchida is a great pianist, Claudio Abbado makes one great or near-great orchestral recording after another. You can tell from Amazon reviews when a recording has really knocked people sideways. But live concerts are always better! I'm sometimes more moved by a not great but heartfelt live performance than by a world-class recording. In the hall you feel the weight of the cellos, the resonances of tones in space, the response of the crowd, all those intangibles. Tickets are less expensive than you may think. Particularly if you're a student, you can get amazing deals - $12 tickets for the New York Philharmonic, for example.
Kottke: One of the things I've noticed about classical music recordings is how reasonably priced they are, particularly the pre-20th century music. Have you read any of Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen? In it, he suggests that to get the most value out of your music buying dollar, you should pay more attention to music that hasn't been recently released, the idea being that there are more gems to be found in the last 200 years of music than in this week's Billboard lists. I have a feeling you might agree with that view.
Ross: That's an interesting theory. If you buy Maria Callas's recording of "Tosca," chances are it's probably still going to deliver the goods twenty years from now, if CDs or MP3s still exist then. Fergie is maybe a riskier long-term bet. Also interesting is Chris Anderson's Long Tail concept, which suggests that there's more hidden commercial power in these thousands upon thousands of classical recordings than anyone suspected, even if they sell only a few times a year. The Naxos label says it gets 30-40% of total digital sales from albums that are downloaded 4 times a month or less. In any case, there's now a huge catalogue of classical CDs that go for $10 or less. The Tashi recording of Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," one of my top 10 picks, goes for $8 on Amazon. The Amazon download site was for a while offering Wagner's entire sixteen-hour "Ring" cycle for $13.98. This turned out to be a clerical error, but enough classical-heads converged on the bargain that for a day or two Richard Wagner was the #1 downloaded artist on Amazon, beating out Kanye West. That amused me. Watch out for these classical guys - they start slow but beat you in the end.
Kottke: Let's say you're still around 80 years from now, writing a sequel to The Rest is Noise about music from 1980 to 2080. What contemporary music (circa 1980-2007) will still be important and relevant in 2080?
Ross: That's a tough question! Critics often turn out to be very wrong about what's truly important in their own time. George Bernard Shaw, for example, considered Hermann Goetz a great composer, a worthy successor to Beethoven. Though is "wrong" the right word? If Shaw had deep feelings about that music, he was, within his personal frame of reference, absolutely right. In classical music we maybe focus too much on the idea that the opinion of posterity is the only one that matters. In any case, here are twelve works that I believe will still matter to me, at least, if by some medical miracle I'm still around in 2080:
Steve Reich, Different Trains
John Adams, Nixon in China
Kaija Saariaho, L'Amour de loin
Sofia Gubaidulina, Offertorium
Gérard Grisey, Les Espaces acoustiques
Arvo Pärt, Da pacem domine
Louis Andriessen, De Stijl
Thomas Ades, Asyla
Georg Friedrich Haas, in vain
Michael Gordon, Decasia
Magnus Lindberg, Kraft
Osvaldo Golijov, St. Mark Passion
---
Thanks, Alex. We'll be checking back with you in 2080 to see how you fared. Ross has a piece out in the New Yorker this week about classical music and the internet that's related to our conversation above. He's also constructed a fantastic enhanced bibliography for the book that includes audio samples of some of the music written discussed in the book, presumably to reduce the dancing about architecture effect.
The Hype Machine is doing something clever with the new version of their site. They're opening the beta up to the public but not until they get a "crowd" of 10,000 people with their browsers open to this page.
Marginal Revolution and CNN (and New York magazine and Reddit and etc.) asked their respective readers: how much did you pay for In Rainbows, Radiohead's new album which is only available as a pay-what-you-want download. I paid around £8.50 (~ US$17), which splits the difference between a typical album price in the UK and the US. (Actually, what I did was download it from elsewhere because Radiohead's online store was down yesterday morning and then went back to pay for it just now.)
Glenn from Coolfer took a spin through the NY Times recently opened online archive and highlighted some interesting news about the music industry, notably about how technology and the Internet changed the game in the late-90s/early-00s.
If someone likes an artist, they're going to buy the CD. The number of those who download and opt against buying the CD is very small. There are plenty of libraries in this country, yet people still buy books. The Napster opponents underestimate the American fascination with ownership.
Radiohead has a new album coming out called In Rainbows. It's only available from their site for now, either as a download (released Oct 10) or as a "discbox" that includes the CD, a bonus CD, two records, and assorted photos, books, etc. (released Dec 3). (via rex)
Update: Also, Radiohead is letting the buyer choose his/own price for the online album. This has been done before, notably by Magnatune, who offers albums for between $5 and $18 with a recommended price of $8...and people often pay more than the recommended. (thx, greg)
Update: Singer Jane Siberry does variable pricing for her music as well. Siberry also cleverly lists what other people are paying (currently $1.18 per song, a bit more than the recommended $0.99). Freakonomics explains. (thx, phil)
I'm thoroughly enjoying Kanye West's new album, Graduation. Standout tracks so far: Stronger and Homecoming, although it took me much longer than it should have to recognize Chris Martin's vocals on the latter.
Amazon has launched their mp3 music store. Files are in mp3 format, no DRM, high bitrate (high quality), and songs are mostly 89-99 cents. A compelling alternative to Apple's iTMS.
Hometracked uncovered some musical history tidbits from the archive of the NY Times, including first descriptions of Edison's phonograph and Marconi's radio.
Steve Reich like flypaper for aspies
From the letters to the editor in the Sept 24 issue of the New Yorker, a letter from John Yohalem, New York City:
I enjoyed reading Tim Page's essay on living with Asperger's syndrome: the insomnia, the social puzzlement, the obsession with various subjects to the exclusion of more common ones -- all are very familiar to me. ("Parallel Play," August 20th). Then came this description: "In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of the subway stations." I was the gentleman in question; although I didn't care about clothes, I don't think I was that ragged. I want to assure Mr. Page that I was never homeless or institutionalized (as he guessed), and I got only one ticket. Mr. Page and I had other things in common; like him, I was at the première of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" at Town Hall. Unlike Mr. Page, I did not find this particular music's structure all-engrossing; I preferred to dance to it. At one performance of Reich's music at the U.S. Custom House, I danced alone around and around the central musicians. For someone as acutely self-conscious as I had been, this seemed a moment of glorious emergence, of living my own life in everyone else's world.
Here's Tim Page's piece on what it was like growing up with Asperger's syndrome.
So preoccupied are we with our inner imperatives that the outer world may overwhelm and confuse. What anguished pity I used to feel for pinatas at birthday parties, those papier-mache donkeys with their amiable smiles about to be shattered by little brutes with bats. On at least one occasion, I begged for a stay of execution and eventually had to be taken home, weeping, convinced that I had just witnessed the braining of a new and sympathetic acquaintance.
Of course Yohalem has a blog -- the 21st century equivalent to scribbling Hapsburg lineages on subway walls -- which has a more complete version of the above posted there.
The lyrics for Around the World by Daft Punk.
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Etc., etc., and so on. (via chris)
Currently enjoying Diplo's Pitchfork Mix 02 (track list). Also worth tracking down is Diplo vs. Shadow, the Megatroid Mix.
Legendary party Misshapes was held for the last time on Saturday night in NYC, its overness punctuated by an article in the NY Times on the party's conclusion. My own personal overness was punctuated by not knowing about the end of Misshapes until I read it in the Times. A Mr. Cobrasnake has photos of the final night.
Apple may have announced their ringtone strategy for the iPhone (30-second ringtones cost $1.98 to make and you must purchase songs through the iTunes Music Store), but Ambrosia Software's iToner utility lets you make ringtones from any mp3 or acc audio file with a simple drag/drop, all for $15 (free 30-day trial). iToner seems like the clear winner here.
Update: The just-released new version of iTunes (7.4) makes iToner ringtones invisible to the iPhone. Ambrosia is working on an iToner update. (thx, jim)
Apple is holding a special event today at 10am PT to announce a new product. Or something. No one knows exactly what but it seems to have something to do with music. Popular guesses include a 3G iPhone, a different iPod nano, a touchscreen iPod, and the availability of the Beatles entire musical catalog on iTunes. MacWorld, Engadget, MacObserver, and ArsTechnica (among others) will have live coverage.
Update: Jobs announced 99-cent ringtones, new colors for iPod shuffle, new form factor for iPod nano (fat vs. thin), renamed the iPod to iPod classic, introduced new iPod touch (basically the iPhone without the phone), new mobile iTunes Music Store that will work on iPod touch and the iPhone, odd partnership with Starbucks...click to buy currently playing songs in the store and free wifi for iTMS purchases (how about free wifi, period?), and the 8GB iPhone now costs $399. !!!!! I guess Apple's plan on that was 1) gouge all the early adopters, and then 2) reduce the price to sell iPhones like crazy.
Cupertino, we have a problem
My iPhone bubble abruptly popped this evening when I tried my Shure E3c earphones (the best pair of earphones I've ever owned and far superior to the Apple earbuds) with the iPhone and they didn't work. The ones that came with the iPhone work fine. On their site, Apple says:
iPhone has a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack, so it is compatible with most portable stereo headphones. Some stereo headphones may require an adapter (sold separately) to ensure proper fit.
The earbuds from a v3 iPod didn't work either. The E3c plug is 3.5 mm and the earphones are about 2 years old. Is anyone else having problems with their earphones? I don't understand why this is even an issue. Very irritating.
Update: Others are having similar problems with headphones not fitting. Looks like it's the plastic sheath around the plug that's the problem. (thx, sean)
Update: I cut away a bit of the E3c's sheath with my trusty Exacto knife and it now fits in the jack. I'd love to know the reason for recessing that plug so much...besides pure aethetics of course; it just seems like too much of a trade-off.
Strange musical machines
Who knew you could play the theme song from Super Mario Brothers with a Tesla coil?
So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a "long" piece of fiber optics. What's not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it's firing.
More about Tesla coils at Wikipedia. (thx, mike)
And I don't know what rock I've been hiding under for the past 33 years, but this Gnarls Barkley cover is the first I've heard of the theremin music machine:
In a great illustration of the sometimes odd path that innovation takes, Robert Moog found inspiration in the theremin after it had fallen out of favor in serious musical circles:
After a flurry of interest in America following the end of the Second World War, the theremin soon fell into disuse with serious musicians, mainly because newer electronic instruments were introduced that were easier to play. However, a niche interest in the theremin persisted, mostly among electronics enthusiasts and kit-building hobbyists. One of these electronics enthusiasts, Robert Moog, began building theremins in the 1950s, while he was a high-school student. Moog subsequently published a number of articles about building theremins, and sold theremin kits which were intended to be assembled by the customer. Moog credited what he learned from the experience as leading directly to his groundbreaking synthesizer, the Minimoog.
Update: Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey is a 1994 documentary about the theremin and its inventor. Here's a trailer, a review by Roger Ebert, and the DVD from Amazon. (thx, jeb & mark)
Free fonts from Peter Saville
Peter Saville, the British designer closely associated with Factory Records, is offering free downloads of some of the fonts he used in designing record sleeves and other work for New Order, Joy Division, and other Factory Records artists.
(thx, mark)
Update: Several Peter Saville fans from around the world have written in to say that the above site is not Peter Saville's official site (this is). It's also unclear whether those fonts were indeed made by Saville (probably not) or ever offered for download free of charge (probably definitely not). But they're still neat fonts, so download at your own risk.
Update: Kai has identified some of the fonts offered as shoddy versions of the following:
Joy Division Closer - Trajan (Adobe)
Blue Monday - Engravers Gothic (Bitstream)
New Order 1981 - Futura (Bauer)
New Order 1993 - Handel Gothic (Linotype)
New Order Ceremony - Albertus (Mecanorma)
New Order 316 - BT Incised 901 (Bitstream) = Antique Olive (Linotype)
New Order Regret - Rotis Serif (Agfa)
In this case, you get what you pay for, I guess.
If you thought that Nevermind's 15th anniversary made you feel old, try this one on: Radiohead's OK Computer was released 10 years ago tomorrow. (via 6f6)
New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down
Partial lyrics for New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down from LCD Soundsystem's latest album, Sound of Silver:
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New York, I love you but you're bringing me down
New York, I love you but you're bringing me down
Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage
New York, I love you but you're bringing me down
New York, you're safer and you're wasting my time
Our records all show you are filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores when you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored once they'd run out of crime
New York, you're perfect don't, please, don't change a thing
Your mild billionaire mayor's now convinced he's a king
And so the boring collect, I mean all disrespect
In the neighborhood bars I'd once dreamt I would drink
New York, I love you but you're freaking me out
There's a ton of the twist but we're fresh out of shout
Like a death in the hall that you hear through your wall
New York, I love you but you're freaking me out
New York, I love you but you're bringing me down
New York, I love you but you're bringing me down
Like a death of the heart. Jesus, where do I start?
But you're still the one pool where I'd happily drown
--
Meant to note this a few weeks ago, but the Baltimore post put it back in my mind.
Song of summer 2007?
Is there a song for summer 2007 yet? Something along the lines of Crazy in Love in 2003 and, what, Since U Been Gone in 2005...a song that comes to identify the summer to a wide variety of people. There's been some discussion of this question, but no definite answers yet. I've heard MIMS' This is Why I'm Hot in a wide array of contexts...might be a contender, but does it have the mass popularity and longevity?
Clive Thompson on the new way to make it big in the music biz: spend hours a day communicating with your fans via the web. "Virtually everyone bemoaned the relentless and often boring slog of keyboarding. It is, of course, precisely the sort of administrative toil that people join rock bands to avoid."
Update: Related: How to Be a Star in a YouTube World.
If you're writing a song, you probably don't want to use any of the following phrases: "serious as cancer", "Serengeti", "nuclear war", or "Aztec priest".
Photo gallery of heavy metal bands from the early 80s. These aren't glossy magazine photos...they're snapshots from the crowd, backstage, and at the afterparties.
The White Glove Tracking site needs your help in finding Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of Jackson's performance of Billy Jean. "Rather then write unnecessarily complex code to find the glove in every frame of the video I am asking for the assistance of 10,060 individual internet users to simply click and drag a box around the glove in one frame." Don't stop 'til you get enough (white gloves located).
Video of Rodrigo y Gabriela performing at PopTech. Here's my writeup from October. What isn't apparent from the video (at least through my puny laptop speakers) is how loud the bass was from them thumping their guitars.
Andrew of Songs To Wear Pants To makes songs from suggestions you send him. You can even commission a song from him for a special occasion like a birthday or anniversary. Recent tracks include a Tetris rap and a song written for a guy who likes a girl but doesn't know how to express it (she's got "beautiful light blue eyes, long brown hair, and great athletic body" which Andrew translates as "I don't even care about her personality" in the song).
Last 100 posts, part 7
It's been awhile since I've done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson's C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson's whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a "manifesto" by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb's idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou's Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion's 'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart, I said "I'd rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications". American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune's Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer's attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they're not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it's only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People's Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn't hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC's greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). "Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable." (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July's new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges' site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I'm ashamed to say I'm still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you've finally convinced yourself that you've wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it's a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode...you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you're not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I'd never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication...a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback's self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez's Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits' logo by LogoMaid.
Apr 19, 2007 • tags: cities kottkedotorg kenthompson securitynassimtaleb nytimes journalism katespicer food twitter music lastfm movies caddyshack jonestown maps videogames games globalwarming nyc nickelback mirandajuly noonebelongsheremorethanyou backtothefuture desktoptd energy dorothealange photographyVideo of a two-song Arcade Fire show, one of which is sung in a freight elevator and the other in the middle of a Parisian crowd through a megaphone.
A tale of two hoes
Snoop Dogg recently explained the difference between the language used by old, white radio announcers and rappers:
It's a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about hos that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit, that's trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him.
What Mr. Dogg is arguing here is that it's ok to refer to actual hoes as hoes in the service of artistic expression but it is not ok to refer to college basketball players as such for the purpose of demeaning people. As we're currently engaged in another go-round on the issue of speech, political correctness, and its potential enforcement, it's not hard to imagine that someday an argument like Snoop Dogg's will be deployed in a court of law. I wonder if anyone will buy it?
Duncan Watts on the results of a study which show that a cultural product's popularity is partially determined by inital social adoption patterns. "This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors -- a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous 'butterfly effect' from chaos theory." The effort to explain why popular things got popular is probably impossible...working your way back from effect to cause in non-linear systems is tough.
Audio demonstration of how two Nickelback songs released two years apart are actually, to a rough approximation, the same song. "You bastards, you're taking advantage of those tone deaf MTV brainwashed twats who are too thick to notice you're releasing song that are EXACTLY THE SAME as ones your recorded earlier."