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Zadie Smith on the distinction between reading like you passively watch TV and reading like you actively interprete a musical piece at the piano. “When you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it.”
Merlin Mann recently wrote two posts about managing your music library using iTunes Smart Playlists. His suggestions for making music-only playlists (for those that have a lot of podcasts & audiobooks in their libraries) and the “sure you really like that?” playlist are especially helpful. One of my recent favorite Smart Playlists is helpful for discovering good stuff that I haven’t listened to in awhile:
The Last Skipped bit is in there because while listening to this playlist, I found myself skipping stuff I didn’t want to hear and that rule gets it out there so that it doesn’t come up again. An item on my Smart Playlist wishlist is the ability to measure popularity acceleration (basically, something like “gimme the most played over the last week”), but there’s no way (that I can find) to ask iTunes how many times a song has been played in the last x days.
Several more Smart Playlist suggestions are available at smartplaylists.com and Andy Budd.
Comedian Aries Spears does awesome impressions of LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Jay-Z. Here’s a shorter bit of him doing Michael Jordan and Shaq. (via zach)
Commerical for a game called Gears of War featuring a cover of Tears for Fears’ Mad World by Gary Jules (which you might remember from Donnie Darko). The ultraviolence and poignance is an interesting juxtaposition.
Update: Greg Allen uncovers the original music video for the aforementioned Mad World cover, directed by Michel Gondry.
Update: So, the long GoW video posted above was created by a fan using the original version (also at YouTube) directed by Joseph Kosinski (David Fincher consulted on it as well, I guess). (thx, chris)
Pixies fans, this is the news you’re all been waiting for: new album in 2007. (via plastcibag)
A couple from Ireland (by way of Mexico), Rodrigo and Gabriela totally blew the audience away here at PopTech with their thrash metal-influenced Latin percussive acoustic guitar. I know that’s not much to go on, but trust me on this one. Check out some of their stuff on YouTube and then buy their new CD. (Best part of their set: they threw in a little Enter Sandman by Metallica, which went over the head of everyone in the audience over 35, i.e. almost everyone.)
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich’s piece showed him that:
1. You don’t need much.
2. The composer’s role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener’s brain.
I’d never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I’d seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel’s show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich’s concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses’ track Sweet Child O’Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song’s music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He’s veered away from video games, but Cory’s new work is looking really interesting these days.
Slideshow of photographs from the last show (+ archival photos) at CBGB, a beloved New York music venue. Several photos of the club’s final days are available on Flickr as well.
The Wordless Music Series is an attempt to bring together classical music and more contemporary music, the differences between which “are an artificial construction in need of dismantling”. The next concert is on 11/15/2006 in NYC and tickets are priced for young concertgoers in mind.
Top 100 most popular classical music pieces, featuring stuff like Beethoven’s 5th, Pomp and Circumstance, and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
The soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette contains tracks by Aphex Twin, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Squarepusher, and The Strokes. Boy, people are either going to love or hate this movie.
Ben Folds cover of Such Great Heights by The Postal Service using found percussion instruments (like a champagne glass and a plastic mail bin). (thx, james)
Stylus magazine has a list of their top 100 favorite videos, complete with embedded YouTube clips of the videos themselves for your instant gratification. Ok, now let’s fight about what was excluded and how wrong that is… (via paul)
The seminal Icelandic band, The Sugarcubes, will perform one last time on November 17 in Reykjavik. How will the concert hall hold all of Bjork’s fans?
A list of the 50 worst things ever to happen to music, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (#50) to Suge Knight (#2)…I won’t spoil #1.
Great video explaining how to turn a Britney Spears song into a Bach-style fugue. (via waxy)
The Wire influenced a Baltimore hip-hop producer to make a mix tape called Hampsterdam and now season four of the show will be featuring more of the local music scene there. (thx, doug)
This is old news, but I missed it while I was gone, so apologies if you’ve seen this. Banksy replaced copies of Paris Hilton’s new CD in stores around the UK with his own copies containing doctored album art and a 40-minute song by Gnarls Barkley’s Danger Mouse. Banksy made a video of himself pulling off the stunt. Copies of the CD are on eBay for $180-1,300. An mp3 of the song contained on the doctored CD is available.
Profile of Walter Werzowa, the man responsible for the Intel Inside theme. More here about tiny music makers, including the Windows 95 startup sound by Brian Eno, the THX theme, and the Mac startup sound.
The difficulties of interviewing Bob Dylan. “Dylan is rarely concerned about sounding polite, and he says things, but he sometimes makes them up. He also contradicts himself, answers questions with questions, rambles, gets hostile, goes laconic, and generally bewilders.”
Street hacks: how to survive a freestyle rap battle. “Have your first real battle against someone you at least somewhat dislike. If you can find someone who just gets you emotional or who angers you, it makes it easier to flow about them.” (thx, steve)
Video for Gnarls Barkley’s Smiley Faces, my favorite song of theirs. (Even though the mashup with the Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypontize might be better.)
Future Rock Hall is calculating current artists’ chances of getting into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame using your votes and a set of predictive criteria. According to the site, the Beastie Boys currently have an 82% chance for election to the Hall in 2007.
Here’s a video of Snoop Dogg listening to and singing along with a country-style cover of Gin and Juice by The Gourds.
New tagline for kottke.org: “bringing you the world’s finest treadmill music videos”.
How to DJ your first set without knowing how.
Update: For another take on how to DJ, see Vice’s Hey DJ, Fuck You! Anyone Can Rock the Party. (thx, dave)
10,000 computer-generated fake band names that sound real.
Profile of Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, aka half of Gnarls Barkley. “[Burton] wants to be the first modern rock ‘n’ roll auteur, mostly because he understands a critical truth about the creative process: good art can come from the minds of many, but great art usually comes from the mind of one.”
The American Masters episode on Woody Guthrie is worth a look.
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