Category: Music

The Keyboard Museum site has plenty of cool stuff, but only today did I check out their page of Flash tutorials explaining how organs like the Hammond and the Rhodes get their particular sound. Joseph Rivers animations are something that could only exist on the web.

This so-called King of the Pirates is dedicated to collecting “a copy of every song every recorded.” But why? The answer will tickle you.

I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple’s iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it’s the journey not the destination.
What do you say to someone who has a digital music collection that exceeds 900,000 songs? This was the question I was pondering during my long drive to interview the man who claims he is on a quest to own a copy of ever song ever recorded. What do you say? I think the only way to begin such an interview would be to ask ‘why'”

UPDATE: As of 2005, MacNet seemed to have problems even printing the article and as of 2012 the whole site has vanished. So after the jump, I’m printing it for y’alls.

Read More

I’m absolutely stunned. I woke up to the sad news this morning that John Peel died while on holiday in Peru. Just like many of his fans will say, Peel introduced me to a whole new world of music when I was in my teens in the U.K. Without John Peel, I wouldn’t have known about The Fall, or The Smiths, or more obscure bands like Fats Comet, Scraping Foetus off the Wheel, Hypnotone, and (the record I’m still searching for) Colonel Kilgore’s Vietnamese Formation Surf Team.
But what made Peel’s show special to me was not so much the music, but his in between breaks patter. Unpolished but never at a loss for words, Peel was a friendly voice there to guide you through some of the noisy patches of alt-rock. Good at popping pretensions and self-deprecating to a fault, he didn’t try to hide mistakes–like playing a record at the wrong speed, or not knowing when a song would start (“This one fades up a bit” he’d say as the music faded up).
When I had a radio show for a brief period in college, Peel was the model, and his chatty, casual style, like a best friend who couldn’t wait to play you the new records he bought, was quite hard to pull off. You realised it came from years and years of work, total comfort at the DJ station, and a humility that kept his ego in check. For someone who broke nearly every major music genre of the past 30 years, he never wore it like a badge.
I remember his glee over certain records. One was “Sidewalkin'” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. He had just got the single and opened the show with it. He loved it so much, he said that he played it again almost immediately afterwards. Then two hours later he closed the show with it, just like a giddy teenager.
Though I found it hard to listen to him here in CA (even with streaming radio), he is still the yardstick I measure other radio shows by.
After Peel, what else is there?
Goodbye John, you will be sorely missed.

Directed by somebody or something called SSSR, this is just lovely, lovely stuff. Subtle – F.K.O (.mov file)

Following on from my earlier post about rare record dealers, here comes what looks like and interesting book on record collecting.

Paste Magazine :: Review :: Vinyl Junkies
Every guy with a record collection and a girlfriend should read Brett Milano?s Vinyl Junkies with her as relationship therapy. The book follows die-hard collectors from different walks of life?from R. Crumb?s country and blues 78s to several vinyl addicts in Milano?s native Boston, where he writes for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald. The book presents an engaging look at a diverse subculture?from the rabid nerd completists to the musicians and industry types you would expect to have a serious relationship with their records (including R.E.M.?s Peter Buck and Sonic Youth?s Thurston Moore). But Milano also writes about ?normal? people with jobs and relationships and whose fashion choices range outside jeans and obscure punk T-shirts.

Last night I went down to L.A. to see Puffy (known in the States as PuffyAmiYumi) play the House of Blues. My companion: the estimable Jonathan Crow, who says he remembers the day I first played him their debut single (the never-bettered “Ajia no Junshin”) in the car while driving around Tsuchiura. So, amazingly, it has come to this, eight years later. Tamio Okuda’s “idol” group kept on keeping on, and now is poised to go American pop-sub-culture mainstream with the premiere of their Cartoon Network show next month. They’ve scored a hit with the theme song to the Teen Titans cartoon, a level of American saturation most Japanese bands would only dream about.
It helps that they have good songwriters and producers (Tamio, Andy Sturmer, Velveteen), a crack back-up band (known as Dr. Strangelove, aka Tamio’s backing band), and they can actually sing in tune (in harmony), something not often called up in the ‘gambatte’ culture of Jpop.
This concert ended up costing a lot of money. Sure, tickets were $20, but after Ticketbastard service charges, that went up to $32. Then because it was at the House of Blues on Sunset (“located in a cool part of town with no parking”) we had to valet park, a whopping, criminal $15. Fortunately, the tour T-shirts blew and I felt no need to get one.
We waited in a line that stretched down Sunset, and got in just after Puffy had finished their second song. And we turned up on time, too!
Anyway, the band just focused on their most rockin’ numbers. “Jet Police” is a good ‘un, as is “Akai buranko”. In between patter was written up on crib sheets and they were cute in an exchange student way. I expect most new fans assume the two are in their 20s, whereas they’re crackin’ on into their 30s.
They encored with “Ajia no Junshin” which just capped off the night for me. Ahh, pop satisfaction. Who woulda thought I would have ever seen this live?
Because they are promoting their Cartoon Network show, they came back on after and taped a song for a New Year’s Eve concert for the network. We were asked to pretend it was now Dec. 31, 2004 and we counted down to one. A net full of balloons hanging above the crowd failed to break and instead, like a giant white sausage, floated down on to the crowd. It will be interesting to see how that gets edited…
UPDATE: If you’re curious about the “service charges,” here’s the breakdown, for the two tickets I bought:
FULL PRICE ADULT US $20.00 x 2
Total Building Facility Charge(s) US $2.00 x 2
Total Convenience Charge(s) US $7.70 x 2
Order Processing Charge(s) US $3.75
ticketFast Delivery US $2.50
TOTAL CHARGES US $65.65
I won’t even pretend to know what the difference is between the “convenience charge” and the “ticketFast” charge. You mean I should pay you money for the use of an online database and sending me a pdf file? It’s not like you even had to use ink to print it out. Nobody helped me, so who had to process this? My judgement? These are bullshit charges that Ticketbastard makes up.

In my current employment, I’ve got the iTunes loaded up on the office PC (take that Windows Media Player) and uploaded my series of Squid Lord comps for something like three full days of music, should I choose to stay at work that long.
And while I like iTunes’ ability to crossfade tracks (gawrsh, it’s like a radio station in here!) its shuffle play leaves a lot to be desired. I’m curious about the algorithm (or whatever) used to determine what track comes up next, because certain tracks pop up all the time. SoundJam MP does this too (yes, I still use it at home).
However, shuffle play is a great little thing when the collection is large and varied. If post-modernism is all about recontextualizing, then shuffle play is the great recontextualizer. It gives the listener those brief seconds at the beginning of a song to re-hear something, to compare it with the song that came before. It can elevate tracks from albums that were obscured by “the single,” or connections between disparate genres can suddenly appear as if planned.

A slightly whiny essay in the Guardian by Jonathan Harris tells us that British rock is doomed! Doomed! I tell ye. For evidence he holds up Franz Ferdinand: “well-adjusted, polite, and politically inert.” They won the Mercury Prize the other day, and gave a thankful, modest acceptance speech, instead of, I guess, hurling the award at somebody. Harris’ main points seem to be that life under Blair and New Labour hasn’t been sufficiently horrible enough to produce the proper rage-filled conditions condusive to punk. You could ask that question of America too, as we’ve been far worse off under Bush, but where’s the music? Perhaps music as an outlet of outrage isn’t working anymore in a world of street protests, Internet, flash mobs, and MoveOn. Young musicians are more apt to blame their parents than society for their ills (hence the awful whinge-punk of Blink 182 and others).
Now, an artist like Elvis Costello always wrote about both, the external society and the internal hell of relationships, but he, like others, were able to understand that both were the same thing, essentially. “Emotional Fascism,” as Costello originally titled Armed Forces in 1979. So possibly one reason this isn’t happening anymore is that we can’t make the connection. The machine of society runs quietly in the background…

Virgin CDVX2325
1984 reissued 2001
Big Express was XTC’s second album after Partridge gave up touring, decamping to become studio band. This has always been one of my “second favorite” XTC albums, in that it never finds its way to the top spot. Highlights are the underrated “Wake Up”-a Moulding song that actually found itself released as a single to complete indifference. But I love the way the duelling stereo guitar intro fools my ear everytime, sounding like four-four, but turning out to be backbeat when the drums come in. It also has a great “Walrus”-like ending. Big Express also contains a suite of songs that look at life in England: “Red Brick Dream” “Washaway” and “The Everyday Story of Smalltown” which celebrate as much as they criticize village life. The remaster is sparkling, although the album has always sounded good, even on the cassette copy I had 10 years ago. My only complaint is that sticking so close to rendering the original album art has resulted in the lyric sheet being unreadable.
Pros: Terrific production, great playing, wonderful pop melodies
Cons: “Train Running Low on Soul Coal” goes on and on.

Thirsty Ear THI66036.2
1998
Found this Roger Eno album down at Pennywise Records in Pasadena. I’d never heard of it, but any Eno is okay with me, usually. Flatlands is Eno’s attempt to turn a string quartet into a sort of ambient synthesizer. Avoiding the sunny romanticism of “Between Tides” from some years back, the album is a sort of no-man’s land between synth-wash background music and chamber music that threatens to become melodic. It’s not a bad album, neither it is a good album. It just sort of exists and then it ends. I’ve put it on several times and tried to pay attention to it, but that feeling never lasts.
Pros: Pleasant, a nice melding of strings and ambient thought.
Cons: Too long without much variety.