kottke.org posts about music (kottke.org)

posted Dec 19 @ 11:12 AM by Jason Kottke

The Vanity Fair Interview with Billie Eilish, Year Eight

Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are back with year eight.

I’ve said this before but it’s incredible that they picked Eilish for this:

I still marvel that Vanity Fair embarked on this project with this particular person. They could have chosen any number of up-and-coming 2017 pop singer/songwriters and they got lucky with the one who went supernova and won multiple Grammys.

Her selection over a multitude of other talented, rising stars is truly one of the great talent scouting successes ever.

posted Dec 18 @ 05:24 PM by Jason Kottke

The Muppets’ Carol of the Bells

The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think?

posted Dec 17 @ 10:40 AM by Aaron Cohen

Two More Tiny Desks

Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?)

Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums.

And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch.

This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the concerts sound so good.

Sigurdsson’s photo is available as a print.

posted Dec 16 @ 12:54 PM by Jason Kottke

Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk Concert

During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description:

Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There’s no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I’ve ever seen is Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk performance.

You’d think the Los Angeles-born singer invented the term. Every breath is so full of indulgent melancholy, hopeful regret, at 22 years old she’s become a captivating fixture of what it means, or rather what it feels, to love and lose simultaneously.

Accompanied by a small band and her brother Finneas, Eilish played The Greatest, L’Amour de Ma Vie, i love you, and Birds of a Feather. Lovely.

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posted Dec 6 @ 01:09 PM by Jason Kottke

98-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Stars in Lovely New Coldplay Video

Coldplay tapped Spike Jonze & Mary Wigmore to direct the music video for a song called All My Love from their latest album and the pair decided to turn it into an early 99th birthday celebration of Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke danced a bit, sung a bit, was swarmed by his family, and ruminated on nearing the end of his life:

I’m acutely aware that I could go any day now, but I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me. I’m not afraid of it. I have the feeling — totally against anything intellectual I have — that I’m gonna be alright.

The video is really quite moving — what a splendid human. Watch until the end, when Chris Martin composes a song on the spot for an absolutely delighted Van Dyke. (via @danielgray.com)

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posted Dec 3 @ 05:54 PM by Jason Kottke

Trippy Extreme Close-Ups of Everyday Objects

It is difficult to categorize the kinds of videos that Posy makes — they are part science demo and part visual art. His latest video, Household Objects (But Extremely Close), uses a powerful macro lens to look at everyday objects like toothbrushes, sponges, and pencils, turning them into swirling abstract films. His music is lovely too — you can find it on Bandcamp.

Musical Skiers

Icelandic photographer Haukur Sigurdsson captured this aerial image of Nordic skiers looking like musical notes on a staff. Someone on YouTube played the tune:

Laura Jane Grace’s - Hole in My Head

posted Dec 2 @ 12:54 PM by Jason Kottke

Playing Music With Barcode Scanners

A Japanese group called Electronicos Fantasticos! figured out that by connecting a supermarket barcode scanner to a powered speaker and rhythmically scanning barcode-like patterns with it, you can make music. This is so fun!

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posted Nov 27 @ 01:21 PM by Jason Kottke

The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2023)

Oh man this is so great: electronic music sample breakdowns from 1990 until the present day. The visualizations on these are fantastic — just watch a bit of the first one (Groove Is In The Heart) and you’ll see what I mean. They’re not all that great (some of these producers are out here working harder than others, is what I’m saying), but these are some of my favorites:

Groove Is In The Heart by Dee-Lite (Eva Gabor Green Acres sample!)
Firestarter by The Prodigy (sample from The Breeders?)
Praise You by Fatboy Slim (It’s a Small World from Mickey Mouse Disco? Fat Albert Theme?!)
One More Time by Daft Punk
Robot Rock by Daft Punk
Archangel by Burial
First of the Year by Skrillex
Girl by Jamie xx
Pick Up by DJ Koze
leavemealone by Fred again

Is DJ Shadow electronic? I would have liked to have seen something from Endtroducing… but maybe they couldn’t even locate the samples. 😂

I could have also gone for more Daft Punk, but I guess you need to let others have a shot. Luckily the same channel has breakdowns of a few more Daft Punk tunes from Discovery and an extended breakdown of One More Time.

Also from the same channel (and even better IMO): The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973-2023).

See also The Making of Burial’s Untrue.

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posted Nov 22 @ 11:52 AM by Aaron Cohen

Josh’s Albums of the Year

My friend Josh LaFayette spends the very last part of the year making fan art for his favorite albums of the year and despite all the pieces being visually different there’s a through line which make all of them immediately recognizable to me as his art. He’s putting out a few a week on his Instagram, but I grabbed these two because I also loved these albums.

John Moreland - Visitor

John Moreland - Vistor copy.jpeg

My favorite part of this series is all of the pieces are physical, not just a file on the computer. Every piece is a reference to the design language present in the age of accessible digital printing—they’re inspired by what some might call “naïve” or “uniformed” designs that are common in the American visual vernacular. The Moreland piece is a take on the flyers for psychics you see all over and the LJG piece is your favorite hippie soap.

John Moreland Flyer.jpg

posted Nov 22 @ 10:56 AM by Jason Kottke

Infinite Content

Animator & filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt on the difference between crate digging & streaming from a recent interview:

Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done — it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.

See also surfing the web vs. *waves hands around at whatever it is we’re soaking in here*. (via @coelasquid.bsky.social)

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posted Nov 20 @ 11:11 AM by Jason Kottke

Today’s Work Music: A Groovy Autumn Mix

A few months ago, I posted about Lane 8’s seasonal mixes and I’m happy to report that the Fall 2024 Mixtape is now out. You can find it on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Apple Music. I’ve been listening for the past few days and it’s 🔥🔥.

posted Nov 13 @ 05:00 PM by Jason Kottke

Jon Batiste Hears Green Day for the First Time

In this video from Pianote, the multi-talented Jon Batiste hears Green Day’s Holiday for the first time (drum & vocals only) and is challenged to come up with a piano accompaniment for it — and he really really gets into it. (How do you find a song that a musical encyclopedia like Batiste has never heard before though?)

These are always so fun to watch — see also Drummer Plays Metallica’s Enter Sandman After Hearing It Only Once. Oh and Green Day’s demastering of Dookie. (via @unlikelywords.bsky.social)

posted Oct 28 @ 12:43 PM by Jason Kottke

The Nirvana Concert “Sabotaged” by Kurt Cobain to Spite an Angry Crowd

When Nirvana played a huge stadium show in Buenos Aires in 1992, an all-“female/queer/trans” band called Calamity Jane opened for them. The crowd pelted the band with objects like coins and rocks, forcing them off-stage and infuriating Kurt Cobain. Instead of refusing to play, the band went out and played a bunch of songs the audience didn’t know, started but then didn’t actually play all of Smells Like Teen Spirit, and generally just had fun pissing the crowd off for more than an hour. Here’s the full video of the show:

A few of the fun parts are the two Smells Like Teen Spirit false starts at 7:34 & 10:29 and Come As You Are at 23:14 (“hey hey hey hey hey”). Here’s how Cobain tells it:

When we played Buenos Aires, we brought this all-girl band over from Portland called Calamity Jane. During their entire set, the whole audience — it was a huge show with like sixty thousand people — was throwing money and everything out of their pockets, mud and rocks, just pelting them. Eventually the girls stormed off crying. It was terrible, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, such a mass of sexism all at once. Krist, knowing my attitude about things like that, tried to talk me out of at least setting myself on fire or refusing to play. We ended up having fun, laughing at them (the audience). Before every song, I’d play the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and then stop. They didn’t realize that we were protesting against what they’d done. We played for about forty minutes, and most of the songs were off Incesticide, so they didn’t recognize anything. We wound up playing the secret noise song (‘Endless, Nameless’) that’s at the end of Nevermind, and because we were so in a rage and were just so pissed off about this whole situation, that song and whole set were one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had.

Calamity Jane vocalist Gilly Ann Hanner recently wrote about the incident:

Somewhere around the second song or so, there is a moment when I open my eyes to finally take it all in, and realize that the crowd is competing with us — they are shouting at us and flipping us off, and even somehow penises are flashed. This really does not compute at first, I am in super punk rock overdrive, but I notice that there is a ring of spit gobs surrounding me on the stage; I look across the stage to my bandmates and there is dismay, anger, and dare I say terror in their eyes. We are now being pelted with clods of dirt, coins, ice cubes, more spit, and inundated with shouts of a word I fully understand “Puta!” (Whore). Looking out on a sea of penises and middle fingers, it is evident that they are not happy, they do not like us, and they want us off the stage. It becomes pretty impossible to continue playing — I mean we aren’t the Sex Pistols — we don’t want the crowd to actively hate us!

Aside from a reunion gig in 2016, Calamity Jane never played again — the Buenos Aires show was their last.

posted Oct 25 @ 03:30 PM by Jason Kottke

Dua Lipa’s (Proper) Tiny Desk Concert

In 2020, during the dark days of our first pandemic winter, Dua Lipa played NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert remotely from London, which is still the most popular Tiny Desk of all time (130M views). This week, NPR had Lipa ‘round the office for a proper set, with the singer playing four songs off of her latest album, Radical Optimism.

Befitting an artist whose newest songs often reflect the pursuit of personal growth — see: “Happy for You” — Lipa and her team breezed through the NPR Music offices with a mix of low-drama professionalism and unmistakable warmth. We’ve dealt with a lot of stars (and their teams) over the years, and as often as people ask us to dish about people who’ve been difficult, we’ve mostly accumulated stories of people who’ve been lovely to have around. Even among all those, Lipa and her people stood out: They were kind, gracious, fun and game.

posted Oct 22 @ 05:23 PM by Jason Kottke

Carpenter’s Symphony

I love this: a carpenter fires his nail gun in time to the music of a band practicing or performing next door. Music, artistry, and playfulness is everywhere.

music
video

posted Oct 16 @ 03:02 PM by Jason Kottke

LCD Soundsystem x Miles Davis

So first of all, this mashup of LCD Soundsystem’s New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down and a recording of Miles David from his Elevator to the Gallows score is just great to listen to musically. But the, let’s call it choreography, is brilliantly spare: a pair of YouTube videos pulled up side-by-side in a now-ancient Safari browser and pressing play to sync them by hand — jazz-like, improvisational.

If you’d like to try this yourself, here’s the LCD Soundsystem and Miles Davis videos; just press play on the David video at 32 seconds into the LCD video.

See also New Yorker film critic Richard Brody on Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows,” and Its Historic Miles Davis Soundtrack. (via James Risley in the Kottke comments)

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posted Oct 10 @ 04:56 PM by Jason Kottke

Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place, 800% Slower

Songs played back at much slower speeds were a thing several years ago — the effect can turn even the harshest rock song or bounciest pop tune into something that sounds like Enya or an ethereal Gregorian chant. I listen to these while I work sometimes and I’ve got a new one for the rotation: Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place, but played 800% slower.

See also the Seinfeld Theme Slowed Down, Justin Bieber slowed down 800%, a whole playlist of 800% slower songs, and, perhaps best of all, 80s Pop Hits sung by Alvin & the Chipmunks played at 16 RPM on a record player (“secretly the most important postpunk/goth album ever recorded”).

Oh, and some artists are releasing their own slowed-down versions of songs. LXNGVX’s Yum Yum comes in regular, slowed (my fave), super slowed, and sped up. Thom Yorke released a slower version of Creep in 2021. And Underworld released Slow Slippy, a slowed-down remix of Born Slippy, in 2017. (via @jameskelleher.pilcrow.ie)

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posted Oct 4 @ 10:48 AM by Jason Kottke

Music By John Williams

Music By John Williams is a documentary film about the legendary composer who did the scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Superman, E.T., Home Alone, Schindler’s List — seriously, one person composed all these?! — Saving Private Ryan, Harry Potter, Lincoln, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and the Olympic Fanfare and Theme that NBC uses for the Olympics.

Anyway, the documentary premieres on Nov 1 on Disney+.

posted Sep 25 @ 02:35 PM by Jason Kottke

Listen to a Performance of Some New Mozart Music

Last week, I posted about the discovery of a “new” piece of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

A previously unknown piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he was probably in his early teens has been uncovered at a library in Germany.

The piece dates to the mid to late 1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement on Thursday.

Via Smithsonian Magazine, here’s the one of the first public performances of the rediscovered work:

Researchers say the music fits stylistically with other works from the 1760s, when Mozart was between the ages of 10 and 13. Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the foundation, tells Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) that the young composer was no longer creating pieces that sounded like this one by the time he was in his late teens.

In his early years, however, Mozart wrote many chamber works like Serenade in C, which his father recorded on a list of his son’s compositions. Many of these works were thought to have been lost to history, as Leisinger says in the statement. Fortunately, this particular piece was saved — thanks to the composer’s sister.

“It looks as if — thanks to a series of favorable circumstances — a complete string trio has survived in Leipzig,” Leisinger adds. “The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the trio specially for her.”

(via open culture)

posted Sep 10 @ 05:48 PM by Jason Kottke

Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2024

If you’re in the market for a chill work mix, Tycho has uploaded his annual Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2024 to Soundcloud.

See also Tycho’s BM sets from 2023, 2022, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Oh, and he’s got a new album out as well: Infinite Health.

music
Tycho

posted Sep 9 @ 04:15 PM by Jason Kottke

Satisfactory Processing Machine

For some reason, this is a full-length version of Radiohead’s OK Computer by @shonkywonkydonkey that uses his voice for everything (vocals, drums, guitar, etc.) I don’t exactly know if I like this, but it is interesting. (via sippey)

posted Sep 9 @ 11:25 AM by Jason Kottke

The Prince Documentary You Might Never See

Ezra Edelman’s OJ: Made in America is probably the best documentary I’ve ever watched — it’s a powerful and illuminating work. For the past five years, Edelman has been working on a documentary about Prince for Netflix that aimed to understand an artist who resisted being known for much of his life and career. Edelman got access to Prince’s archive and talked to many of the people closest to him.

But now Prince’s estate is objecting to the portrait of Prince painted by the film: a man of “multiplying paradoxes” who was a “creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity [but] also dark, vindictive and sad”. Sasha Weiss wrote a fantastic article about the documentary, Edelman, and Prince for the New York Times Magazine.

When the screening ended, after midnight, Questlove was shaken. Since he was 7 years old, he said, he had modeled himself on Prince — his fashion, his overflowing creativity, his musical rule-breaking. So “it was a heavy pill to swallow when someone that you put on a pedestal is normal.” That was the bottom line for him: that Prince was both extraordinary and a regular human being who struggled with self-destructiveness and rage. “Everything’s here: He’s a genius, he’s majestical, he’s sexual, he’s flawed, he’s trash, he’s divine, he’s all those things. And, man. Wow.”

I called Questlove a few months later, to see how it had all settled in his mind. He said he went home that night and spoke to his therapist until 3 a.m. He cried so hard he couldn’t see. Watching the film forced him to confront the consequences of putting on a mask of invincibility — a burden that he feels has been imposed on Black people for generations. “A certain level of shield — we could call it masculinity, or coolness: the idea of cool, the mere ideal of cool was invented by Black people to protect themselves in this country,” he said. “But we made it sexy. … We can take dark emotion and make that cool, too.”

The night of the screening, he said he told his therapist, was a wake-up call: “I don’t want my life to be what I just saw there.” It was painful, he said, to “take your hero and subject him to the one thing that he detests more than life, which is to show his heart, show his emotion.”

Ever if you’re not a particular fan of Prince, it’s worth reading the whole thing.

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posted Sep 5 @ 11:50 AM by Jason Kottke

Lane 8 Season Mixtapes

I don’t remember how I happened upon them, but I’ve been enjoying Lane 8’s seasonal mixtapes for the past few years — good upbeat music to work to.

He’s been doing these for 11 years. The Denver DJs mixes are available on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Apple Music. The fall 2024 mix should be out very soon!

posted Sep 3 @ 02:14 PM by Jason Kottke

The District Sleeps Alone Tonight (Sylvan Esso Remix)

Here’s a newly released remix of The Postal Service’s The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by Sylvan Esso. In addition to YouTube, it’s also available on several other sites. (via sippey)

posted Aug 19 @ 12:50 PM by Jason Kottke

The Disciples

For his project The Disciples, photographer James Mollison took photo montages of fans outside of music concerts. See if you can guess which concerts these groups of fans attended:

seven people who attended a Lady Gaga concert, wearing colorful, wacky clothes

seven people who attended a Merle Haggard concert, wearing mostly denim

seven people who attended a 50 Cent concert, wearing baseball caps, baggy jeans, and big jackets

eight people who attended a The Casualties concert, wearing leather and mohawks

eight people who attended a Tori Amos concert, wearing dark, muted colors

Here’s Mollison on the project:

Over three years I photographed fans outside different concerts. I am fascinated by the different tribes of people that attend them, and how people emulate celebrity to form their identity.

As I photographed the project I began to see how the concerts became events for people to come together with surrogate ‘families’, a chance to relive their youth or try and be part of a scene that happened before they were born.

Fascinating! From top to bottom: Lady Gaga, Merle Haggard, 50 Cent, The Casualties, and Tori Amos. Here’s a video featuring some of the photos accompanied by music from the corresponding artists:

Mollison published a book featuring the photos; a signed copy is available from his website.

posted Aug 7 @ 11:33 AM by Jason Kottke

The World’s First Medieval Electronic Instrument

product photo of the EP–1320 Medieval

The EP–1320 Medieval is, amazingly, a real gadget being sold by Teenage Engineering — it’s a “beat machine” (or “instrumentalis electronicum”) loaded with a bunch of musical phrases and instruments from the Dark Ages.

Hurdy gurdys, lutes, Gregorian chants, thundering drums and punishing percussive Foley FX. The EP-1320 is the first of its kind: featuring a large library of phrases, play ready instruments and one-shot samples from an age where darkness reigned supreme, the instrumentalis electronicum is the ultimate, and only, medieval beat machine.

This is ludicrous and I love it.

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posted Jul 29 @ 07:00 PM by Jason Kottke

Drum Beat Typography

a black and white poster that reads RIGHT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT LEFT LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT

a black and white poster that reads LEFT FLAM RIGHT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT FLAM LEFT LEFT RIGHT LEFT

Graphic artist Anthony Burrill has applied his unique typographic style to design posters and t-shirts of iconic drumming patterns for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

The designer, known for his powerful and positive messaging, has created exclusive artworks in partnership with drumming legends, including Paul McCartney’s drummer Abe Laboriel Jnr, Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders, Simple Minds’ Cherisse Osei, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, and Porcupine Tree’s Gavin Harrison.

It would be fun to see a working visualizer that used Burrill’s style to visualize any song’s drum beats. (via daniel benneworth–gray)