kottke.org posts about Music
In 1967, Steve Reich wrote a piece of music called Piano Phase. The piece is performed by two pianists playing the same piece of music at two slightly different speeds. As the piece progresses, the music moves in and out of phase with itself. Classical percussionist David Cossin performed with a duet of Piano with himself to produce a Piano/Video Phase:
Give it 30-90 seconds for the phase shifting to kick in. For those who aren’t so musically inclined, this pendulum phasing video provides a more visual representation of what’s going on:
(via @pieratt)
Update: See also this Piano Phase visualization from Alexander Chen, Rhythm Necklaces, and an animation of Reich’s Clapping Music. (thx, @anotherny, @RianVDM, and everyone who sent in Chen’s piece)
Update: And whoa, here’s Rob Kovacs playing Piano Phase on two pianos:
That seems….difficult.
This wonderfulness just popped up on Rdio: The Hits/The B-Sides 3 by Prince. (And here on Spotify.)
Three hours, forty-seven minutes, and six seconds of the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’s best music, 56 songs in all.
Marvin Gaye’s isolated vocals on I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The man has pipes.
According to Rolling Stone, 1984 was the greatest year in pop music history. And they made a list of the top 100 singles from that year; here’s the top 5:
5. Thriller, Michael Jackson
4. Let’s Go Crazy, Prince
3. I Feel for You, Chaka Khan
2. Borderline, Madonna
1. When Doves Cry, Prince
1984 was also a fine year for movies and the most 1980s year of the 1980s. Both Bill Simmons and Aaron Cohen agree, 1984 was the best year.
This list of philosophy student karaoke standards by Jarry Lee for McSweeney’s contain some top-shelf philosophy puns.
My Milkshake Brings All the Baudrillard
Psycho Schiller
Hit Me Baby Wittgenstein
Total Eclipse of Descartes
(via @tcarmody)
Red Bull is sponsoring a six-part series on the history of Japanese video game music. The first installment covers the music of Space Invaders through the Game Boy. Highlight: composer Junko Ozawa showing off her hand-drawn waveform library she used in composing scores for Namco. Bonus: Space Invader-only arcades in Japan were called “Invader houses” while arcades in New Zealand were known as “spacies parlours”.
Update: Beep is a feature-length documentary film that will attempt to cover the history of video game sounds from Victorian mechanical arcades on up to the present day games. They are currently raising funds on Kickstarter.
New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones recently compiled a series of five playlists on Spotify of “perfect” songs: vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4, vol 5. Among the songs found on the playlists are Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Blue Moon by Elvis, Pony by Ginuwine, Transmission by Joy Division, Tennis Court by Lorde, No Scrubs by TLC, and Rock Steady by Aretha Franklin. The playlists are also available on Rdio, courtesy of my friend Matt: vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4, and vol 5.
Update: And here’s an Rdio playlist with all five volumes of Perfect Recordings. This will be on shuffle at my place for months to come.
The re/spin service helps you import any Spotify or Last.fm playlist into Rdio. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that before too long, we’ll need a service to convert Rdio collections and playlists to Spotify. (via @capndesign)
As far as these things go, this video of the Muppets singing So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys is pretty near perfect.
See also The Muppets singing Kanye West’s Monster and the Sesame Street gang doing the Beastie Boys’ Sure Shot. Oh, and the classic Bert & Ernie Ante Up rap video:
(via subtraction)
The mixtape that Star-Lord carries around in Guardians of the Galaxy is of course available as an actual album (Amazon mp3, iTunes). The album isn’t on Spotify, but there is a playlist of all the songs.
As Slate notes, the movie merch album isn’t totally true to the movie as it includes two songs from Awesome Mix Vol. 2, but I will never complain of Marvin Gaye’s or the Jackson 5’s inclusion in anything.
If you’ve played Monument Valley, a game so purty it won an Apple Design Award, you know the music is one of the best features of the game. Well, the original soundtrack for the game is now available for streaming on Spotify.
The soundtrack is also available to own on Amazon or iTunes.
(Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s take a moment to witness how nutty app pricing is. Monument Valley costs $3.99. The soundtrack, which is a just a part of the overall game, costs $8.99 at Amazon. And that makes sense how?)
Update: The Forgotten Shores add-on to the game also has its own soundtrack.
New mixtape from The Hood Internet, the eighth in a hopefully infinite series. You know what to do.
This morning’s jam is by Jungle.
Halt and Catch Fire just ended its first season last night and while the show wasn’t perfect, I loved almost every single minute of it. (In Time, James Poniewozik writes about why the series was so interesting.) Even haters of the show can agree that one of the best aspects of the 80s period drama is the music. There are several playlists of the music on Rdio…this seems to be the best one.
Each main character from the show also has their own playlist. Joe MacMillan: Brian Eno, Eurythmics, and The Cars. Cameron Howe: Blondie, The Clash, and The Slits. Gordon Clark: Creedence, Eric Clapton, and Dire Straits. Donna Clark: Mozart, Joni Mitchell, and Billy Joel.
Douglas Wolk isn’t happy with the long-awaited James Brown biopic Get On Up:
Treating Brown’s personality as the interesting thing about him means that Taylor doesn’t end up saying much about Brown’s music, the fascinating way it was made, or the colossal effect it had on the culture around it. As far as Get On Up is concerned, James Brown was an unstoppable personality more than he was a musician; the film suffers from “the Great Man theory of funk.”
Brown’s songs… were collaborative and process-based, more than any other pop star’s work: Both on record and on stage, Brown directed and instructed the band, restructuring arrangements on the fly… In Get On Up, though, there’s no sense that anyone else’s voice mattered to him. Brown’s right-hand man and backup singer Bobby Byrd (played as a hapless second banana by True Blood’s Nelsan Ellis) morosely explains that James is a genius whose coattails he’s lucky enough to ride, and that he himself wasn’t meant to be a frontman. The Byrd who had a decadelong string of R&B hits with Brown backing him up—the best-remembered is “I Know You Got Soul”—might have disagreed.
Here two bad cultural fallacies come together: treating artists like self-contained auteurs and thinking every movie has to be an origin story. In the best stories, like in reality, everything and everyone is in medias res.
Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.
July 25 was probably the 25th anniversary of Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. (Google and a few other sources say the release date was actually June 25, but July 25 is the consensus.) There’s a new mural of the group, painted by Danielle Mastrion, at the corner of Ludlow and Rivington, on New York’s Lower East Side, where the album cover was shot.
This remix of Paul’s Boutique, released a few years ago, has also been recirculating on Twitter and Soundcloud. Caught in the Middle of a Three-Way Mix, by DJ Cheeba, DJ Moneyshot, and DJ Food, recombines the album’s original source tracks and a capella verses with audio commentaries and a handful of newer songs.
The remix is fun to listen to, but mostly, it just reminds you that Paul’s Boutique sounds amazing because its sampled sources were amazing. Like De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, released the same year, Paul’s Boutique lifts tracks that would cost a small mint to borrow from today. (Three Feet High has never had an official digital release because the rights holders still can’t sort out the royalties.) The Beatles, The Supremes, The Ramones, Curtis Mayfield, Dylan, Hendrix, Sly, Bernard Hermann, and James Brown (of course) are all there. But mostly, it’s a love letter to old-school New York City hip hop: Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa and the Jazzy 5, The Sugarhill Gang, The Funky 4 +1, and contemporaries like Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, and Public Enemy are the glue that holds the whole project together.
Now, if you know Paul’s Boutique well, you can’t hear those older songs any more without hearing Paul’s Boutique. There’s specific moments in those songs that hide there waiting for you to trip over them, like quotations of ancient Greek in an Ezra Pound or TS Eliot poem. Beastie Boys didn’t just find a way to make older music sound new; they found a way to invent their own precursors.
It’s still wonderful to go back to the roots. In 2012, I found tracks from a handful of playlists and website listings and edited them together to make a Spotify playlist that I called “Paul’s Boutique Without Paul’s Boutique.” (Later, I updated it using Benjamin Wintle’s comprehensive playlist, which is really the base here — he did an amazing job tracking down these songs.) It’s just the sampled songs, roughly in the order they appear on the album. It’s ridiculously fun. I like it better than the three-DJ mix, and I might like it even better than the Beasties’ album.
It feels like you’re at an amazing party at Adam Yauch’s house, the Dust Brothers have control of the record player, and Mike D and Adam Horowitz are watching TV and telling you jokes the whole time. I never want it to end.
Update: Scott Orchard made a version of this playlist on Rdio, for the Rdio fans in the house.
Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.
You probably know that Donald Glover (actor on Community, writer on 30 Rock) also has a rap career under the stage name Childish Gambino. You may not know that the name “Childish Gambino” comes from a Wu-Tang Name Generator.
That’s half of the reason I’m here - I’m dead serious. Like I met RZA and he was like, “you’re a cool dude, man - and your name is perfect for you! It’s like that computer had a brain!” But yeah, I put my name in a Wu-Tang name generator and it spit out Childish Gambino, and for some reason I just thought that fit.
Now here’s where things get a little weird. There are multiple, competing Wu-Tang name generators. (Of course there are.) Most of them seem to work the same way — they run a script matching your name’s characters with a decent-sized database of Wu-sounding words, kind of like a hash. But little differences in the scripts or in the database give you different results.
For instance, at recordstore.com, the “Original Wu Name Generator” (tagline “WE CAN WU YOU!”) spits back “Erratic Assassin” (for “Timothy Carmody”), while “Tim Carmody” yields “Well-Liked Assman.” These names are both awesome.
But the “Wu-Tang Name Generator” at mess.be (“Become a real Wu warrior, entah ur full name ‘n smack da ol’ dirty button”), which proprietor Pieter Dom says was made in 2002, is totally different. There, “Timothy Carmody” and “Tim Carmody” return “Shriekin’ Wizard” and “Gentlemen Overlord,” respectively. Now, while these definitely sound like Wu names, they are definitely The W to the other site’s Enter the 36 Chambers.
Here’s the weird part: both of these Wu-Tang name generators return the same name for “Donald Glover.” It is, of course, “Childish Gambino.”
Is it just a quirk that whatever difference crept in affects most names, but not Donald Glover’s? Did one of the sites hard-code that result in, to boost its credibility with people who heard the Childish Gambino story? Or is Donald Glover somehow necessarily Childish Gambino, across all possible Wu-accessible worlds, in the same way that “Clifford Smith” is always and only “Method Man,” even when he pretends to be an actor?
I don’t think we can ever know. But just as Russell Jones was Ol’ Dirty Bastard, ODB, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, and Ason Unique as well as Osirus, I am content to be known by many names under the Wu.
(Dedicated to “Sarkastik Beggar” and “Lesbian Pimp.” Via @hoverbird.)
Update: The TLDR podcast did a follow-up to this story: The Mystery of Childish Gambino.
From This Must Be the Place, a lovely short profile of Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo, California. Old Town shows silent films with live musical accompaniment. Includes a brief tour of the inner workings of the theater’s wind-powered pipe organ from 1925.
Over at Very Small Array, an analysis of the obscurity of hit songs, i.e. which top ten songs from each year since 1900 have remained popular and which have been lost to the sands of time. Of the least popular hit songs:
Don’t cry for them. All they need is one Wes Anderson movie to get back in the game.
(via waxy)
On each episode of the Song Exploder podcast, Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians about how their songs were made…”where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.” I listened to this episode about the House of Cards theme song via this 99% Invisible episode and the inaugural episode features Jimmy Tamborello of The Postal Service talking about The District Sleeps Alone Tonight:
Today’s jam — ok, not a jam exactly but more like marmalade spread on soft white bread — is Music for Real Airports by The Black Dog.
The title of the album is a play on Brian Eno’s Music for Airports:
Airports have some of the glossiest surfaces in modern culture, but the fear underneath remains. Hence this record is not a utilitarian accompaniment to airports, in the sense of reinforcing the false utopia and fake idealism of air travel. Unlike Eno’s Music for Airports, this is not a record to be used by airport authorities to lull their customers. The album is a bittersweet, enveloping and enormously engaging listen. It is ambient, but focused. This is not sonic mush, nor adolescent noise. Nor is it a dance album. Much of the raw material of the album was made in airports over the last three years. While on tour, the Black Dog made 200 hours of field recordings, much of which was processed and combined with new music in the airport itself, waiting for the next flight. This vast amount of content has been slowly distilled into a set of particularly evocative pieces of music.
(via the scissors video)
Com Truise remix of Tycho’s Awake? Yes please.
Now get Kygo to remix the remix and we’ll have the perfect kottke.org sleepy beats trifecta.
Yesterday, I did a round-up of movies, TV, and music available on this weekend in 1984. As a comparison, I thought looking at the same weekend from 1974 would be interesting. Tracking this information down was a little more difficult than with 1984, but I found most of what I needed in the June 23, 1974 edition of the NY Times.
Back in the 1970s (and probably particularly in NYC), movies stayed in theaters a lot longer than they do now. There was no home video market then…you either saw the movie in the theater or you missed it. This is a list of some of the movies available for viewing in theaters that weekend in NYC:
The Sting
The Exorcist
Parallax View
The Sugarland Express
The Conversation
Chinatown
Papillon
The Great Gatsby
The Sting, Papillon, and The Exorcist had been out since late 1973, The Great Gatsby since March, and The Sugarland Express (Spielberg’s directoral debut) and The Conversation since April. Only Parallax View and Chinatown had just opened. Interestingly, the year’s top-grossing film, Blazing Saddles, which opened in February, didn’t appear anywhere on the movie listing pages of the Times that week.
The top 10 on the Billboard chart for that week were:
Billy, Don’t Be A Hero - Bo Donaldson And The Heywoods
You Make Me Feel Brand New - The Stylistics
Sundown - Gordon Lightfoot
The Streak - Ray Stevens
Be Thankful For What You Got - William DeVaughn
Band On The Run - Paul McCartney & Wings
If You Love Me (let Me Know) - Olivia Newton-John
Dancing Machine - Jackson 5
Hollywood Swinging - Kool & The Gang
The Entertainer - Marvin Hamlisch/The Sting
And on TV that weekend, a number of classic shows, all reruns except for 60 Minutes:
Brady Bunch
Sanford and Son
Good Times
Upstairs, Downstairs
The Odd Couple
All in the Family
M*A*S*H
Mary Tyler Moore
60 Minutes
BTW, the entire copy of the Sunday Times was fascinating to page through. The ads for cigarettes, hand-held calculators, and color televisions, real estate listings, job openings, book listings, the NY Times Magazine, car ads, etc.
On this weekend 30 years ago, in the summer of 1984, you could stroll into a movie theater and choose between the following films:
Ghostbusters
Gremlins
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
The Karate Kid
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Top Secret!
The Natural
Police Academy
Plus, Sixteen Candles and Footloose had just closed the weekend before. 1984 was generally a great year for movies. Musically, the following songs were in heavy rotation on the radio and on MTV that weekend:
The Reflex - Duran Duran
Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper
Let’s Hear It for the Boy - Deniece Williams
Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen
Self Control - Laura Branigan
The Heart of Rock & Roll - Huey Lewis
Jump - The Pointer Sisters
When Doves Cry - Prince
Eyes Without a Face - Billy Idol
Borderline - Madonna
On TV that weekend were mostly reruns and movies…networks only showed reruns in the summer back then. The shows airing included:
The Dukes of Hazzard
Fantasy Island
Webster
Dallas
Diff’rent Strokes
60 Minutes
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
Late Night with David Letterman
(via, no foolin’, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man)
The Mozart Project is a book about the life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Or is it an app? Stephen Fry calls it “a completely new kind of book”…you read it in iBooks but it acts more like an app than anything. Over 200 pages of text by leading Mozart scholars is accompanied by hours of music, videos, photo slideshows, all sorts of other goodies.
Curated and authored by some of the most respected experts, The Mozart Project gives new insight into the life of a musical genius, providing the ultimate experience both in terms of contributors and the carefully selected playlist of music and images that they have chosen to feature throughout the book.
We’ve been listening to this quite a bit at home lately: Motown: The Complete No. 1’s.
That’s more than twelve hours of music, from The Miracles to Erykah Badu. Some of it, particularly from the 80s, is not so great, but as you listen, you’re of course reminded of how great Stevie Wonder is. Rdio has more than 40 additional hours of Stevie for your listening pleasure. More than 30 hours of the Jackson 5. Hundreds more hours of The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Commodores, Diana Ross, and on and on. And that’s just riffing off of one album in one genre. Freely choosing from an infinite buffet of choices is a completely different way of listening to music than any of us grew up with (unless you had tons of money or worked in a record store). For me, it’s been an incredible way to take advantage of Tyler Cowen’s observation that there’s way more good unheard stuff in the back catalog than there is new music…e.g. if you haven’t heard John Coltrane’s The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, it’s likely to be better than most new music you’ll hear this year.
Let’s talk cultural mesofacts. You likely recall 50 Cent as a rapper In Da Club but much has happened since then. 50 diversified like crazy: started a record label, parlayed a possible Vitaminwater endorsement into an investment worth $100 million, and, relevant to the matter at hand, wrote several books, including a pair of self-improvement books: Formula 50: A 6-Week Workout and Nutrition Plan That Will Transform Your Life and The 50th Law. Zach Baron recently recruited 50 Cent to be his life coach for a GQ piece and it ends up going way better than he expected.
50 Cent thinks for a minute. Actually, he says, my girlfriend — the one I just mentioned, the one I’d just moved in with? 50 Cent would like her to make a vision board, too. Then we’re going to compare. “Take things out of your folder and things out of her folder to create a folder that has everything,” he says. “Now the vision board is no longer your personal vision board for yourself: It’s a joint board.” That joint board will represent what we have in common. It will be a monument to our love.
But there will be some leftover unmatched photos, too, in each of our folders. And that’s what the joint board is really for — what it’s designed to reveal. “The things that end up on your vision board that aren’t in hers are the things that she has to accept,” 50 Cent says. “And the things that she has that you don’t are the things that you have to make a compromise with.” In a healthy relationship, he explains, your differences are really what need talking about. This is how you go about making that conversation happen.
This article just keeps getting better the more you read it. (via @ystrickler)
The Wordless Music Orchestra will offer live accompaniment of two screenings of There Will Be Blood in NYC in September. The composer of the film’s score, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, will play a musical instrument called the ondes Martenot as part of the performances.
This fall, the Wordless Music Orchestra will once again collaborate with Jonny Greenwood for the U.S. premiere of There Will Be Blood Live: a full screening and live film score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece, which will be projected onto a massive 50’ movie screen at the historic and absurdly beautiful United Palace Theatre: the second-largest movie screen in all of New York City.
For these shows, the film’s original score — comprising music by Jonny Greenwood, Arvo Part, and Brahms — will be conducted by Ryan McAdams, and performed by 50+ members of the Wordless Music Orchestra, including Jonny Greenwood, who will play the ondes martenot part in both performances of his own film score.
Tickets on sale now. See you there? (thx, gabe)
Video game producers utilize music to keep you engaged, increase your achievement, and give you the energy to make it to the next level. So maybe you just found your ideal work soundtrack.
Karltorp has found that music from games he used to play as a kid, such as StarCraft, Street Fighter, and Final Fantasy, work best. Because the music is designed to foster achievement and help players get to the next level, it activates a similar “in it to win it” mentality while working, argues Karltorp. At the same time, it’s not too disruptive to your concentration. “It’s there in the background,” said Karltorp. “It doesn’t get too intrusive, it keeps you going, and usually stays on a positive tone, too, which I found is important.”
Shaq calls it dreamful attraction; if you want something bad enough, it will happen. So in that spirit, I’m calling Kygo’s remix of Younger by Seinabo Sey the song of the summer:
Ok, so the song already has millions of downloads and since it was out in December, you’ve probably already heard it, but it just screams summer. Like, “SUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMERRRRRR!!!” The rest of Kygo’s remixes are well worth a listen; I’ve been listening nonstop since Zach tweeted about them. But it’s Sey’s superb vocals that puts Younger over the top; here’s her original version in video form:
Wonderful. Gives one hope for the future.
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