In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a number of new things over there in the sidebar to look at. Horray. Though they’re mostly concerned with my media inputs for the year, they’ll also cover past and present output of writing and crap like that.
Archive for the ‘music’ Category
New Things
Thursday, January 17th, 2008pretty cool, maybe faked.
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008(Via Engadget)
I forgot how much cooler these are:
slide one twenty eight from tehn on Vimeo.
I need to get my trigger finger up here ASAP.
cleaning out firefox tabs:
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008I’ve really got to clean out my browser tabs. I have about 3 times more tabs open then normal because I keep meaning to link to things here and not getting around to it for one reason or another. Yesterday I finished a book and today I spent a long time watching the Macworld Keynote along with the rest of the internet.
mildly weird shit follows:
Letters in folds of skin made with clothespins: here.
(Via Coilhouse)
Art in a few easy steps: 1. tattoo pig 2. kill pig 3. skin pig 4. preserve pig’s skin 5. PROFIT?!?!: here.
(Via Coilhouse I think…)
Letters From Johns: here. An interesting, if unsurprising, site that collects anonymous accounts of men soliciting sex workers. The editor is hoping to also do “Letters from Hookers” but assumes a lack of submissions there means most of the women are too busy working to write emails.
(Via warrenellis.com)
A project by xkcd author to stop repeticious chat in his IRC channel by way of forcing every user to write a sentence unique to the history of the channel. here.
(Via xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe)
USB GPS receiver for 50 dollars here.
(via a search on Amazon)
And finally:
Dark Winter is a net.label dedicated to releasing dark ambient, atmospheric, and unconventional music from around the world. All Dark Winter releases are available for free download in 192kpbs MP3 format.
(Link to the label here)
I downloaded this:
Formication’s Agnosia which I’m really enjoying. Track 1 from that album:
I think it’s an interesting layered piece that changes slowly and subtlety throughout. Regardless of my badly articulated reasons for liking it, it’s appealing nonetheless.
HxC Robots
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008My third music purchase of the year is for meth-addicted robots. It is for androids on coke. It is for the grinders. It is called break-core. It straddles the line between electronic noise and techno as you know it. This is unlike anything you’ve heard before, it was for me. It’s in yur earz breaking yur brainz. Most people, 98% of people, will hate this. It seems to me to get at the heart of electronic music. It’s faster and more complicated than a person could possibly manipulate any sort of interface, it’s getting electronic music to a place where you’re sure that the computer is doing a lot of the work, which I think will become less of a stigma, do we slight Beethoven because he couldn’t play both the violin and piano simultaneously during a concerto performance? Hell, could Beethoven even play most of the instruments he composed for at the near-virtuoso level we come to expect from those tackling his work for performance now? What I’m trying to say is, we should think of electronic musicians more as composers than performers. I think how we categorize electronic music and musicians is still very much an open question, it’s not mainstream enough to garner the large scale attention of critics. If all Daft Punk did was hit a button and stand there in robot helmets for an hour does that make the music less valuable? If Daft Punk was at home in Paris and it was all just circuits and people to boot computers and hit a big green start button would there be less value in the music? Is a live concert really about people performing, always? What, qualitatively, do DJs add to a club set?
Without further ado I give you Track 6 “Not So Fast You’re Hurting Me” from I Broke My Robot’s Tomorrow Does Not Exist:
(I heard track two “Take Alphacalm As Directed” on WZBC (90.1, Newton, MA) yesterday and bought the album via iTunes)
mp3’s: Amazon’s Great Leaps Forward.
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008I’ve talked before about Amazon’s Mp3 service and how much I prefer it to iTunes for a large number of reasons that should be obvious to anyone reading this: Amazon is cheaper, easier, and DRM free. I can now add what (if not for Christmas) is a death blow to my use of the iTunes music store. I’ve gone looking for a number of albums on iTunes since I’ve been given 75 dollars in credits for Christmas from a couple of people. (Thanks to Uncle John and the Gillens.)
As a for-instance I wanted to buy Mastadon’s Leviathan and an album I read about in Spin Lights Go Out Over Kortedala by Jens Lekman. Both are on sale in the regular iTunes store for 9.99, which means they have DRM, something that I’ll not abide by as a consumer. (though now, enter the hypocrisy, I’m going to load my DRM free tunes onto an iPod running Windows Vista.) Both can be had for 8.99 from Amazon. I won’t link to the pages because it’s true and I’m tired. To put another nail in the iTunes coffin, the bestselling track by Lekman (as observed from the iTunes popularity bar and the bestselling ratings on Amazon) is .10 cents (~10%) cheaper on Amazon. Jens Lekman’s Postcard to Nina is an .89 cents DRM free MP3 on Amazon and a .99 cent DRM crippled .m4a from apple. All of this makes me really glad that I, the digital content consumer, have access to a larger number of choices in buying content and an (apparently) increasing control over that purchased media. Horray for Amazon, too bad this doesn’t make it any easier to spend the money on iTunes.
In another short amazon related note, I bought something from them the other day and decided I could better spend the 40 dollars so I steeled myself for the hell that is returns to a retailer. Amazon wins again, I printed 3 pages, 2 of which I needed and taped the box closed and can now drip the item off at the post office where it will be returned free from any charge to me. The ease of this experience so far furthers my clearly increasing loyalty to Amazon as my Internet retailer of preference. Lower prices still will drive me elsewhere, my fandom has not stripped me of sense as a consumer but my hyperbolic motto for buying things remains: “If I can’t get it on Amazon, I probably don’t need it, unless its food.”
guitar duet
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007strikes me as funny, those guys are having a really good time. somehow it seems 2nd in veiled homo-eroticism only to the banjo / guitar duel in Deliverance.
Still impressive regardless of my impressions. (Via Cynical C)
It’s not yet noon and I’m more than 50% done with this stupid paper, the last of the semster. All my other assignments, finals, and papers are handed in. By 4:30 I’ll be free and clear of my second to last semester as and undergraduate.
testing a new plugin
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007This song was stuck in my head for like 3 days. No other music could get in there. The song ruled utterly my mind for about twenty one hundredths of a fortnight.
I’ve got to fiddle with the player’s skin and not upload files at 320kb/s.