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Watch as farmer Derek Klingenberg calls his cattle in by playing Lorde’s Royals on his trombone.
I can’t tell if this is the perfect Monday video or the perfect Friday video. Maybe I’ll post it again on Friday and we’ll compare. (via the esteemed surgeon and writer @atul_gawande)
There a lots of videos of movies reimagined as 8-bit video games out there (Kill Bill, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction), but I’m posting the Guardians of the Galaxy one because of the excellent chiptune rendition of the Awesome Mix Vol. 1 soundtrack.
Hooked on a Feeling, beep beep doot doot… (via devour)
Helen Green drew all the hairstyles worn by David Bowie from before he was a star in 1964 on up to the present day. Here’s they are in a glorious animated GIF:
Green also did a one-sheet of the B&W drawings. See also every Prince hairstyle from 1978 to 2013. (via @Coudal)
A project called Maximum Distance. Minimum Displacement. analyzed the lyrics of several popular rappers for geographical mentions and had an industrial robot draw each rapper’s lyrical journey through the world. At a glance, you can see how worldly (N***as in Paris) or locally oriented (Straight Outta Compton) each rapper is. Compare world-traveller Jay Z:
with Kendrick Lamar:
Kendrick Lamar’s analysis is culled from the lyrics of his underground & independent albums and is heavy with Compton references. Over the next few years it will be interesting to see how mainstream successes and personal experience change the travel of his lyrics.
During the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick commissioned well-known film score composer Alex North to do the score for the film. North had previously done scores for A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and later received an honorary Oscar for his lifetime of work. As production progressed, Kubrick began to feel that the temporary music he used to edit the film was more appropriate. From an interview with Kubrick by Michel Ciment:
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you’re editing a film, it’s very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene. This is not at all an uncommon practice. Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary music tracks can become the final score. When I had completed the editing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had laid in temporary music tracks for almost all of the music which was eventually used in the film. Then, in the normal way, I engaged the services of a distinguished film composer to write the score. Although he and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks (Strauss, Ligeti, Khatchaturian) and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film.
And so the temporary music became the iconic score we know today. For comparison, the embedded video shows how North’s original score would have sounded over the opening credits and initial scene.
Selections from North’s original score were later released publicly. Here’s a 38-minute album on Spotify:
Kubrick was absolutely right to ditch North’s score…it’s perfectly fine music but totally wrong for the movie, not to mention it sounds totally dated today. The classical score gives the film a timeless quality, adding to the film’s appeal and reputation more than 45 years later. (via @UnlikelyWorlds)
Update: Two additional facets to this story. North first learned that Kubrick ditched his score at the NYC premiere of the film; he was reportedly (and understandably) “devastated”. And even when Kubrick was artistically satisfied with the music he chose, negotiations to procure the rights weren’t necessarily smooth.
2) Kubrick’s associates did obtain licenses from Ligeti’s publishers and from record and radio companies, although they were not forthcoming about the pivotal role assigned to the music in the film; 3) Ligeti learned about the use of his music not from his publishers but from members of the Bavarian Radio Chorus; 4) he attended a showing of the film with stopwatch in hand, furiously scribbling down timings — thirty-two minutes in all;
Kubrick was undoubtably of the “shoot first, ask questions later” school of negotiation. (via @timrosenberg)
The soundtrack for PT Anderson’s Inherent Vice is now on Spotify, well all except for one song. The album is even more partially on Rdio. For the whole thing, you’ll have to head to Amazon.
The fifth track, Spooks, is a variation of a Radiohead song that’s never been officially released. (via @naserca)
Rolling Stone lists the 40 most groundbreaking music albums in history. Kanye West makes the list with 808s and Heartbreaks, Dr. Dre with The Chronic, Nirvana with Nevermind, and the Beatles with Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s. About The Chronic:
The album sold a world to white America that it had never really seen before, and packaged it with a soundtrack so funky there was no avoiding it. It was both raw, uncut underground and carefully composed pop. If Public Enemy confronted white America, The Chronic seduced it. For the first time ever, hip-hop’s mainstream and America’s were one.
I counted only four women artists though: Mary J. Blige, Loretta Lynn, Nico, and Carole King.
A tribute to outer space in movies, featuring clips from Gravity, The Fountain, Alien, Star Wars, Solaris, Sunshine, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more.
Music is from Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Interstellar, which I was initially lukewarm on but have been listening to consistently over the past week or so. (via devour)
Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, and guests cover Naughty By Nature’s 1993 classic Hip Hop Hooray.
See also The Muppets covering The Beastie Boys, Kanye, and M.O.P.
Pianograms are visualizations of the relative distributions of piano key presses for songs. For instance, this is Prelude in C-sharp by Rachmaninov:
(via @pomeranian99)
RadioISS plays streams of the radio stations that the International Space Station passes over on its continual orbit of Earth. As I’m writing this, the ISS just floated over the southern tip of South American and RadioISS is playing Radio 3 Cadena Patagonia AM 789 from Patagonia, Argentina. Ah, it just switched to Alpha 101.7 FM out of Sao Paulo, Brazil. They’re playing One by U2.
Dancers from legendary Bay Area hip-hop dance crews in the 1970s and 80s reminisce about the old days and show that they still have the moves.
Wonderful. There’s no school like the old school. (via waxy)
Well, lookie here, the platinum edition of Beyonce is out with a second, uh, “disc” of songs, including 7/11 and the Flawless remix w/ Nicki Minaj.
Also on Spotify and Amazon MP3. (via @jennydeluxe)
I have not seen the movie yet (Alan Turing biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley) but the Alexandre Desplat soundtrack is worth a listen.
Also available on Spotify or Amazon.
When you look really closely at record grooves, like at 1000x magnification, you can see the waveforms of the music itself. Sooo cool.
This video shows how the stylus moves through the grooves.
As Lisa Simpson would say, “I can see the music!”
Update: Here’s a great visual explanation of how you get stereo sound out of a record. (via @pcnofelt & @marcrobichaud)
Update: This is a much better video showing the needle riding through a record’s grooves.
What is more fun than watching the Danish National Chamber Orchestra play a piece after having eaten some of the world’s hottest chili peppers? Probably a few things, but this is pretty entertaining nonetheless.
Chili consumption happens at 1:36. Classic highbrow + lowbrow stuff here. The brass and woodwind instrument players in particular should get some kind of award…I can’t imagine blowing on a trumpet in that condition. See also Hot Pepper Game Reviews.
In 1987 or 1988, Kurt Cobain made a mixtape called Montage of Heck. The Guardian has the backstory.
The tape itself is a surreal, often psychedelic insight into the mind of the 20-year-old Cobain: cut-ups of 60s, 70s and 80s TV shows interspersed with the sound of the toilet flushing and people vomiting, bits of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin interspersed with troubled Austin singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston screaming about Satan, and white noise so intense that when Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence starts up it comes as physical relief.
There are snippets of a few unreleased Nirvana songs, too, among the tumult and screaming and dead-end repetition, amid the excerpts of William Shatner, The Partridge Family, Queen, Queensryche, Butthole Surfers, James Brown. In many respects, Montage Of Heck echoes and predates turntable culture, the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up and the Beatles’ experimental sound collage Revolution No 9.
The entire mixtape is available on Soundcloud and Vimeo.
Here’s a rough tracklist. Just a year or two after Cobain recorded Montage of Heck, Nirvana released their debut album, Bleach, and they were off to the races.
In 2013, a group of researchers published a paper called Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts. The paper’s abstract reads:
Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gas-like state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortex-like state called a circle pit. Both phenomena are reproduced in flocking simulations demonstrating that human collective behavior is consistent with the predictions of simplified models.
The authors built an interactive mosh pit simulation based on their simplified models. You can try it out right here:
(via @nickrichter)
Thirty years after starting Def Jam in his NYU dorm room, Rick Rubin returns to the room in question and talks about how Def Jam began.
(via ★interesting)
Prince played Saturday Night Live last night at the request of host Chris Rock, doing one 8-minute medley of songs instead of two separate short performances during the show. Here’s the whole performance:
If Hulu isn’t working for you, try the video embed on Deadspin. A set list is available on Rdio and Spotify. (via @anildash)
Been obsessed with Run the Jewels 2 from Killer Mike and El-P this week.
Anil Dash clued me in to Run the Jewels earlier this week on Twitter:
Okay, RTJ2 is incredible. @KillerMikeGTO & @therealelp make it three classic albums in a row. Is anybody else at their level right now?
I’m not qualified to answer that, but this album is very good. Plus! Run the Jewels 2 is available as a free download.
From her recent memoir, Sheila E. recounts the first time she met Prince.
I never did make it down to the studio to meet “the kid,” but a few months later, in April 1978, I was at Leopold’s record store in Berkeley browsing through records when I looked up to see a new poster. It featured a beautiful young man with brown skin, a perfect Afro, and stunning green eyes. The word Prince was written in bold letters at the top. That was the guy Tom was talking about!
I found his album For You in the rack and immediately looked at the credits: “Produced, arranged, composed, and performed by Prince.”
The staff at the store, whom I’d known for years, let me take the poster home. Before I’d even listened to his record, I’d taped the poster above my waterbed. Then I lowered the needle onto the album on my record player, sat on the floor, and listened to it in its entirety. Tom was right. I immediately heard that funky rhythm guitar part he’d been talking about. It wasn’t only on one song, but the whole album. I stared up at the poster and told him, “I’m gonna meet you one day.”
(via @anildash, probably)
With A Little Help From My Fwends is The Flaming Lips full-length cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. NPR has a first listen to it. ft. Foxygen, Miley Cyrus, Moby, Tegan And Sara, and others.
Last year’s pulverizing and strangely pretty The Terror was often punishingly uncompromising, but With A Little Help From My Fwends tackles its impossible task with a comparatively light touch. That lightness is clear from the title alone, and yet The Flaming Lips’ audaciously playful streak (required in order to cover Sgt. Pepper’s in the first place) still gets undercut with moments of abrasiveness, aggression and detours down strange side roads.
From A Continuous Lean, a review of some of NYC’s most beloved bygone music venues, including The Cotton Club (closed 1940), The Gaslight Cafe (closed 1971), and CBGB (closed 2006).
Despite being located in Harlem, and showcasing many black performers, The Cotton Club actually had a strict “whites only” policy.
After playing four straight days of Beyonce tunes, a Houston news radio station settled on its new format: classic hip hop. It’s the first major market radio station to do so.
In many ways, this is an idea whose time has come, which is another way of saying that hip-hop, and its first-wave fans, are, well, old. Dre will be 50 in February; Ice-T is just 10 years away from his first Social Security check. Licensed to Ill topped the Billboard charts in 1987; three years later, hip-hop made up one-third of the Hot 100. By 1999, it was the country’s best-selling genre, with more than 81 million albums sold. The fans who propelled the early boom probably don’t know Young Thug from Rich Homie Quan, and don’t want to.
The obvious parallel is to classic rock radio — a format that emerged in the early-1980s as baby boomers rejected punk and disco, and radio execs realized it was easier to serve up old songs than convince their aging audiences to try new music. It eventually morphed into a touchstone of middle-age: Every so often, a cultural observer wakes up, checks his bald spot and wonders how Green Day or Smashing Pumpkins or some other band of his own youth got lumped in with Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith on the radio dial.
Not this cultural observer! I’ve never done anything of that sort ever.
Annnnyway, here’s a Spotify playlist (Rdio) of the sort of thing Boom 92 will be playing. (via @tcarmody)
Underworld put out their seminal record, Dubnobasswithmyheadman, 20 years ago. To celebrate, they’ve released a “Super Deluxe / 20th Anniversary Remaster” version of the album with the original tracks, remixes, alternate versions, live versions, and other stuff, 6 hours and 15 minutes of music in all.
(via @aaroncoleman0)
Watch and listen as Anna-Maria Hefele demonstrates polyphonic overtone singing, a technique where it sounds as though she’s singing two different notes at the same time.
This blew my mind a little, particularly starting around the 3:00 mark, where she actually starts to be more fluid in her singing. (via @anotherny)
Update: See also Tuvan throat singing, Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq (who posted a photo online of her infant daughter next to a dead seal, a “sealfie”), and many other cultures who practice overtone singing. (thx, @bmcnely, @ChrisWalks1 & james)
The soundtrack for David Fincher’s adaptation of Gone Girl is out and as with his last two films (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the music is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Whenever the words “Reznor”, “Fincher”, “Atticus”, and “soundtrack” get into a sentence together, you know it’s good news for your earholes. (via @arainert)
ps. Speaking of Fincher, he spoke to Disney about directing a Star Wars movie and had an interesting take on the original trilogy:
I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man.
Just dropped: a new album from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke called Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. The album is being distributed on BitTorrent; one song and a video are free with the rest of the album costing $6 to d/l. On Twitter, Yorke says: “I am trying something new, don’t know how it will go. but here it is:)” (via @naveen)
DJs now routinely make deliberate mistakes mixing tracks so that people will know they’re mixing the tracks by hand and not just using software to automatically match beats.
DJs all over the world are now deliberately making mistakes during their mixes to prove to fans and critics that they are in fact real DJs.
The latest craze, known as miss-mixing, is proving very popular amongst digital DJs as a way of highlighting that they are actually manually mixing tracks rather than using the sync button.
Michael Briscoe, also know as DJ Whopper, spoke about miss-mixing with Wunderground, “Flawless mixing is now a thing of the past, especially for any up and coming digital DJs. You just can’t afford to mix without mistakes these days or you’ll be labelled as a ‘sync button DJ.’”
As computers get better at things like DJing, cooking, writing, and the like, imperfection may become a mark of human-produced goods and media. In the future, we’ll be urged to buy not just hand-made but Human Made™ the way people go for American made, locally made, organic, artisanal, or vintage goods nowadays. The problem, as Tyler Cowen notes, is if computers are smart enough to DJ, they’re certainly clever enough to be a little sloppy too.
Update: I gots hoodwinked! Wunderground is a satirical site…DJs are not intentionally making mixing mistakes. But the idea is not all that farfetched! Under the doctrine of even if it’s fake it’s real, I’m satisfied with my conclusions. (thx, ken & mumoss)
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