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LCD Soundsystem is back with a new album and a new music video directed by Spike Jonze, who is also back. Directing music videos that is.
Fun! Not sure what Jonze was going for there though…maybe a visual representation of a typical YouTube comments thread?
Watch as a pair of Tokyo DJs play a bunch of musical shoes.
Please note:
The NIKE FREE RUN+ is absolutely a running shoe.
Shoes sold at retail will NOT make music when bent or twisted.
(via @ftrain)
Love it. Robin Sloan has previously discussed this type of “production as performance” video on Snarkmarket but Pomplamoose has started using the term “VideoSong”:
This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules:
1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
As NPR explains, the band is actually making a living from their covers…they sold 100,000 songs last year. Here’s their album of covers on iTunes.
A long article from last week’s New York magazine about how Lady Gaga came to be. There are waaaay too many great quotes by Gaga in this article to pull out just one. What’s the phrase?…if Lady Gaga weren’t real, we’d have to invent her. Which I guess someone did.
The playlist sent out into space with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft include songs by Bach, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry, and Blind Willie Johnson.
For all you wannabe DJs out there, a multi-touch turntable app for the iPad.
This wannabe DJ is pretty excited! (via jimray)
Almost 200 people singing while sitting at home in front of their own computers are stitched together into one big virtual chorus:
Nice presentation. Here’s how it was organized. A bunch of audition videos from the singers are available on YT as well (for example).
(thx, claude)
Almost more fun than watching Lady Gaga’s music videos is watching people try to figure out what it all means. One of the most entertaining analyses of the Telephone video is this Robert Langdon-esque take:
Lady Gaga’s 9-minute video featuring Beyonce is steeped in weirdness and shock value. Behind the strange aesthetic, however, lies a deeper meaning, another level of interpretation. The video refers to mind control and, more specifically, Monarch Programming, a covert technique profusely used in the entertainment industry. We’ll look at the occult meaning of the video “Telephone”.
This might be the last great music video. Beyonce picks up Gaga from jail in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill! But Christ, the product placement. This thing has more brands in it than Logorama.
An interesting article about how composer and programmer David Cope found a unique solution for making computer-composed classical music sound as though it was composed by humans: he wrote algorithms that based new works on previously created works.
Finally, Cope’s program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach’s spirit — and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he’d begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would’ve taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.
Gosh it’s going to get interesting when machines can do some real fundamental “human” things 10,000x faster and better than humans can.
I don’t know what took me so long, but I finally tracked down the soundtracks for both Moon and Sunshine…hiding in plain sight on iTunes. They are both great in their entirety. If you just want a taste, at least get Welcome to Lunar Industries from Moon and Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor) from Sunshine.
Update: Forgot to add that the Sunshine soundtrack is only available through iTunes and the Moon soundtrack is available in the US as an expensive import (and not on Amazon’s mp3 site or anything like that) so your best bet is iTunes there as well.
You’ve gotta have a scroll wheel (or trackpad) to play Record Tripping, a game in which you utilize DJ scratching to solve little puzzles.
In an interview with DJ magazine, Carl Cox talks about how his DJ setup has changed through the years.
What I am worried about and don’t want to fall into, is dependence on too many screens to play a set. It’s bad enough having one computer screen. After all, it’s all about the performance and the people. I want to be looking at the crowd and them looking at me, interacting with one another. If we start getting dependant on screens it is going to ruin the art of performance.
(via @jessicadeva)
The most interesting of several infographics related to The Beatles is the first one depicting the declining rate of collaboration within the band gleaned from songwriting credit data.
(thx, bryan)
To ponder over the weekend: twenty pieces of music that changed the world. #11 on the list is Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. (via @bobulate)
Video of Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel singing Two-Headed Boy at the Knitting Factory in NYC on March 7, 1998.
Intensity.
Jesus, this is nerdy (and hilarious): a Lady Gaga parody about a typeface.
(via @caterina)
A delightfully low-tech but colorful music video from OK Go. Looks like it was shot it one take.
You may remember OK Go from their famous treadmill video. (thx, mike)
Update: Here’s how they made the video. (thx, everyone)
Somehow Ricardo Autobahn has constructed a coherent mix-video song from all sorts of movie and TV clips. It’s just flat-out awesome; watch it:
See also Christian Marclay. (via fimoculous)
Just out. Haven’t listened yet (downloading now) but if the last three are any indication, this is gonna be a great Monday for listenin’. Sample tracks:
5. Lil Wayne (feat. Babyface) vs Royksopp - Comfortable Up Here
15. Michael Jackson vs Ratatat - Billie “Wildcat” Jean
19. R. Kelly (feat. Keri Hilson) vs Sally Shapiro - Number One Christmas
31. Ghostface Killah vs Beirut - Save Me Concubine
Today only on Amazon: 99 Vivaldi masterpieces on mp3 for $2.99. (US only.) See also other great Amazon music deals.
Alternate post title: I’ve got 99 Vivaldis but a Bach ain’t one.
Amazon has a sampler album of music from Philip Glass available right now for free. Not sure how long that will last so snap it up. See also lots of inexpensive classical music on Amazon.
Update: Here’s a list of all the free mp3 albums on Amazon, 141 in all.
Star Guitar music video. Music by The Chemical Brothers. Video directed by Michel Gondry.
The making of the Star Guitar music video.
Ever since this video blew my mind when I first watched it, I’ve wondered how it was made. Turns out Gondry tested the concept out on a sidewalk with oranges, shoes, videotapes, and drinking glasses. Alas, the making of doesn’t cover the three months of post production required by the finished product, although the video isn’t completely digital as you might expect:
The video is based on DV footage Gondry shot while on vacation in France. They shot the train ride 10 different times during the day to get different light gradients.
Still love that video.
Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)
Alex Ross has moved his blog from The Rest is Noise to the New Yorker site. It’s now called Unquiet Thoughts.
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