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♬ With the shovel out, the ice’s less dangerous / Drop the shovel, entertain us / I feel stupid and contagious / Drop the shovel, entertain us ♬
Magisterial. I love the internet. This is even better than the door that sounds like Miles Davis. (via @slowernet)
Update: Oh, and this nightstand door sounds like Chewbacca. (via @steveportigal)
Behold, 55 hours of music from the 90s, focused on alt-indie music, organized in chronological order. For logistical reasons, it’s split up into three playlists:
Here are some notes on the list’s construction as well as links for the Spotify versions. I was 16 in 1990 and this was exactly the kind of music I listened to for most of the decade. I’m actually afraid to listen…I don’t know what secrets these tracks will unlock in the dark reaches of my soul.
Before we embark on the important business of another work week, we should all appreciate the simple genius of a bird walking in time to Beyonce’s Crazy in Love.
See also bird laughs like a supervillain and goats yelling like people.
You might remember seeing this microscopic photo of vinyl record grooves a few months ago. Ben Krasnow has one-upped that with this slow-motion video of a record player’s needle riding in the groove of a record.
(via @bradleyland)
For your weekend, a 2-hour-long set from Jamie xx and Four Tet for BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix.
Amy is a documentary film about the life and career of singer Amy Winehouse. The director is Asif Kapadia, who also directed the excellent Senna, one of my favorite documentaries from the past few years. Here’s the trailer:
The film studio behind the movie, A24, has been making some interesting films: Ex Machina, Bling Ring, Obvious Child, A Most Violent Year, The End of the Tour, Spring Breakers, Under the Skin, etc.
Filmmaker John Walter is making a film called The Earth Moves about Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera composed Philip Glass and directed by Robert Wilson. Walter and his team are soliciting funds to complete the film on Kickstarter.
In 2011, the original creators of Einstein on the Beach brought the opera to life again for what will most likely be its last presentation in their lifetime. Einstein on the Beach is an opera like no other. Telling its story requires a documentary like no other.
We completed shooting and editing The Earth Moves and we are all working very hard to finish the film for upcoming film festivals this fall. Now we need your support to fulfill the costs of color correction, media licensing, and sound mixing. Time is of the essence and every contribution helps our mission to complete this film.
Any additional support beyond the goal will go towards expanding the distribution of the film through educational markets and independent theaters nationally.
Director and choreographer Wayne McGregor, artist Olafur Eliasson, music producer Jamie XX (new album!), and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet are collaborating on a contemporary ballet performance based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.
Award-winning choreographer Wayne McGregor’s groundbreaking practice embraces dance, science, film, music, and technology to generate intriguing, expansive works. For Tree of Codes, McGregor is collaborating with artist Olafur Eliasson and producer/composer Jamie xx to create a contemporary ballet. Eliasson’s large-scale projects, including The New York City Waterfalls and The weather project at the Tate Modern, have captured the attention of audiences worldwide. Mercury Prize-winning Jamie xx blurs the boundaries between artist and audience in sonic environments like the one he created with his band, The xx, at the Armory in 2014.
Triggered by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (an artwork in the form of a book which was in turn inspired by Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz), this new, evening-length work features a company of soloists and dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet and Company Wayne McGregor.
Two performances are planned so far: at the Manchester International Festival (July 2-10) and the Park Avenue Armory (Sept 14-21). (thx, michelle)
Oh, this is my favorite thing of the month: Shelby Mitchusson performing Eminem’s Lose Yourself in American Sign Language.
Great song and a great performance. Em, sign this woman up for your next tour! (via devour)
Update: Amber Galloway Gallego is an American Sign Language interpreter who specializes in doing rap and hip-hop concerts.
As an American Sign Language interpreter who specializes in music performance, Gallego has interpreted over 300 rap, R&B, and rock concerts, and has worked with everyone from Aerosmith to Destiny’s Child. After a deaf friend told her that “music wasn’t for deaf people,” she embarked on a quest to prove otherwise; today, she’s hired by major music festivals all over the United States to make auditory performances more relatable for the deaf.
To do so, she employs a tireless mixture of hand signs, facial expressions, body movement, and sensibility.
Turns out, if you take Junkie XL’s soundtrack to Mad Max: Fury Road and pair it with a train chase scene from Buster Keaton’s silent film masterpiece The General, it works pretty well.
University of Minnesota student Daniel Crawford and geography professor Scott St. George have collaborated on a piece of music called Planetary Bands, Warming World. Composed for a string quartet, the piece uses climate change data to determine the musical notes — the pitch of each note is tuned to the average annual temperature, which means as the piece goes on, the musical notes get higher and higher.
(via @riondotnu)
For the 30th anniversary of Spin, the editors compiled a list of the 300 best albums released in the past 30 years. The top 20 includes albums by Nirvana, Pixies, Bjork, Radiohead, Beastie Boys, and DJ Shadow. The #1 album is…….. nevermind, you should go find out for yourself. (via @jblanton)
The octobass is a string instrument that’s almost twice the size of a bass, so big that it makes a cello look like a violin. Only a few of these instruments exist and The Musical Instrument Museum made a video showing theirs in action:
(via cynical-c)
Really enjoying this chill remix of Radiohead’s Reckoner by Cubicolor this morning.
The band hasn’t shared anything in over three years, but Radiohead does have a Soundcloud account full of remixes of their stuff, including this remix of Bloom by Jamie xx:
Speaking of Jamie xx, a new track from his upcoming album dropped yesterday. I’ve been wearing out his preview album on Rdio for the past couple of weeks. Good Times. (via @naveen)
WQXR took 46 performances of a selection of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and spliced them together into one piece, highlighting the how varied the performance of the notes on the page can be.
For the first episode of BAM’s new podcast, Philip Glass and several world-class pianists talk about Glass’s piano etudes and what makes them so challenging to perform.
Terry Urban’s 8-song mashup album of FKA Twigs and Notorious B.I.G.
Why not FKA Biggs? Or Notorious T.W.I.G.S.? Twiggie Smalls? (via @frank_chimero)
A new listen-while-you-code/write/design favorite.
I really liked the movie. Matt Zoller Seitz’s review captured it well.
In a series of three articles, Dianna Kenny examines the life expectancy of pop musicians, the myth of the 27 Club1, and how genre affects popular musicians’ life expectancy. It is from the third article that this chart is taken:
For male musicians across all genres, accidental death (including all vehicular incidents and accidental overdose) accounted for almost 20% of all deaths. But accidental death for rock musicians was higher than this (24.4%) and for metal musicians higher still (36.2%).
Suicide accounted for almost 7% of all deaths in the total sample. However, for punk musicians, suicide accounted for 11% of deaths; for metal musicians, a staggering 19.3%. At just 0.9%, gospel musicians had the lowest suicide rate of all the genres studied.
Murder accounted for 6.0% of deaths across the sample, but was the cause of 51% of deaths in rap musicians and 51.5% of deaths for hip hop musicians, to date. This could be due to these genres’ strong associations with drug-related crime and gang culture.
Heart-related fatalities accounted for 17.4% of all deaths across all genres, while 28% of blues musicians died of heart-related causes. Similarly, the average percentage of deaths accounted for by cancer was 23.4%. Older genres such as folk (32.3%) and jazz (30.6%) had higher rates of fatal cancers than other genres.
In the case of the newer genres, it’s worth pointing out that members of these genres have not yet lived long enough to fall into the highest-risk ages for heart- and liver-related illnesses. Consequently, they had the lowest rates of death in these categories.
(via mr)
The 27 Club is a group of musicians who died at the age of 27. Membership includes Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Amy Winehouse, and Robert Johnson.↩
The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie is a good old fashioned musical detective story told by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
In the world of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ‘31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent. In the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century have been numbered among the masterpieces of prewar American music, in particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” twin Alps of their tiny oeuvre, inspiring essays and novels and films and cover versions, a classical arrangement.
Yet despite more than 50 years of researchers’ efforts to learn who the two women were or where they came from, we have remained ignorant of even their legal names. The sketchy memories of one or two ancient Mississippians, gathered many decades ago, seemed to point to the southern half of that state, yet none led to anything solid. A few people thought they heard hints of Louisiana or Texas in the guitar playing or in the pronunciation of a lyric. We know that the word “Geechee,” with a c, can refer to a person born into the heavily African-inflected Gullah culture centered on the coastal islands off Georgia and the Carolinas. But nothing turned up there either. Or anywhere. No grave site, no photograph. Forget that — no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on. The objects themselves — the fewer than 10 surviving copies, total, of their three known Paramount releases, a handful of heavy, black, scratch-riven shellac platters, all in private hands — these were the whole of the file on Geeshie and Elvie, and even these had come within a second thought of vanishing, within, say, a woman’s decision in cleaning her parents’ attic to go against some idle advice that she throw out a box of old records and instead to find out what the junk shop gives. When she decides otherwise, when the shop isn’t on the way home, there goes the music, there go the souls, ash flakes up the flue, to flutter about with the Edison cylinder of Buddy Bolden’s band and the phonautograph of Lincoln’s voice.
This piece originally appeared in the NY Times Magazine, but it works much better online, interspersed with videos and musical snippets cleverly embedded in the text. One of my favorite things I’ve read all month.
Holy crap! Bjork’s released something she’s calling a “moving album cover,” although it appears it’s basically the video for the song “Family” on her Vulnicura album. It’s about the darkest, strangest, most beautiful thing I’ve seen on the internet in a while. The video is a collaboration between Bjork and Andrew Thomas Huang.
(thx This Isn’t Happiness)
HBO will premiere the critically acclaimed authorized documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck later this year on May 4. Here’s the trailer:
Looks promising. The film is directed by Brett Morgen, who also did the excellent The Kid Stays in the Picture documentary about Robert Evans. And the name comes from a late-80s mixtape made by Cobain.
For the New Yorker, Alex Ross writes about movie soundtracks, with an emphasis on the scores for the 2014 crop of films.
This year’s Oscar nominations for Best Original Score did the field few favors, overlooking some significant work. Jonny Greenwood, increasingly known as much for his film music as for his contributions to Radiohead, has yet to be acknowledged by the Academy, despite his idiosyncratic, imaginative collaborations with the director Paul Thomas Anderson, most recently in “Inherent Vice.” Jason Moran deserved a nod for his “Selma” score, which oscillates between subdued moods of hope and dread, avoiding the telltale gestures of the great-man bio-pic. (The Aaron Copland trumpet of lonely American power is in abeyance.) Most baffling was the omission of Mica Levi’s score for “Under the Skin,” which, like Greenwood’s work for Anderson, moves from seething dissonance to eerie simplicity and back again.
I listen to movie soundtracks quite a bit; they’re good to play while working. Here are a few I’ve enjoyed from 2014:
There are only a dozen images so far, but this Tumblr comparing art from before the 16th century and contemporary images of hip hop is fantastic. My favorites:
For Scientific American, Jen Christiansen tracks down where the iconic image on the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures came from. Designer Peter Saville found the image, a stacked graph of successive radio signals from pulsar CP 1919, in a 1977 astronomy encyclopedia but it actually originated in a 1970 Ph.D. thesis.
By now I had also combed through early discovery articles in scientific journals and every book anthology on pulsars I could get my hands on to learn more about early pulsar visualizations. The more I learned, the more this descriptor in the 1971 Ostriker caption began to feel significant; “computer-generated illustration.” The charts from Bell at Mullard were output in real time, using analogue plotting tools. A transition in technology from analogue to digital seemed to have been taking place between the discovery of pulsars in 1967 to the work being conducting at Arecibo in 1968 through the early 1970’s. A cohort of doctoral students from Cornell University seemed to be embracing that shift, working on the cutting edge of digital analysis and pulsar data output. One PhD thesis title from that group in particular caught my attention, “Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars,” by Harold D. Craft, Jr. (September 1970).
When a star gets old and fat, it explodes in a supernova, leaving a neutron star in its wake. Neutron stars are heavily magnetized and incredibly dense, approximately two times the mass of the Sun packed into an area the size of the borough of Queens. That’s right around the density of an atomic nucleus, which isn’t surprising given that neutron stars are mostly composed of neutrons. A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh billions of tons.
A pulsar is a neutron star that quickly rotates. As the star spins, electromagnetic beams are shot out of the magnetic poles, which sweep around in space like a lighthouse light. Pulsars can spin anywhere from once every few seconds to 700 times/second, with the surface speed approaching 1/4 of the speed of light. These successive waves of electromagnetic pulses, arriving every 1.34 seconds, are what’s depicted in the stacked graph. Metaphorical meanings of its placement on the cover of a Joy Division record are left as an exercise to the reader.
Philip Glass did the soundtrack for A Brief History of Time, Errol Morris’ documentary on Stephen Hawking, but it was never released as an album. Until earlier this month. Huzzah! Appears to only be available on iTunes — couldn’t find it on Amazon, Rdio, or Spotify — and I wish they’d done more with that cover. Bleh.
A keyboard-controlled soundboard for Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. See also the Beyonce Soundboardt. (via waxy)
If you take the vocals from The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails and match them to the beats from Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, you get this little bit of magic:
Update: I totally forgot I’d previously featured this awesomeness: NIN’s Head Like a Hole vs. Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. Also of note: Mark Romanek directed the videos for Shake It Off and The Perfect Drug. (via ★interesting, @sarahmakespics, and mark)
Drag and drop an MP3 onto this page and soon you’re flying over a 3D-rendered landscape made with Javascript that pulses in time to the music. (via prosthetic knowledge)
File this under #notfromtheonion: Philip Glass is co-composing the score for the new The Fantastic Four movie.
Ahead of 20th Century Fox’s latest superhero reboot of The Fantastic Four, director Josh Trank has confirmed that composer Philip Glass will be scoring the forthcoming film with Marco Beltrami.
Trank, best known for his 2012 film Chronicle, spoke to Collider about his long time admiration for the composer, and said that he had been working with Glass for around a year on the film after contacting his manager.
Previous films scored by Glass include The Hours, Koyaanisqatsi, A Brief History of Time, and The Fog of War. But this actually isn’t too much of a surprising departure for Glass…he did the scores for both Candyman and Candyman II, horror films based on a short story by Clive Barker.
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