I found this on the very cool Retro Thing. When I heard about Radiohead’s remix contest for Nude I was excited. Then when I heard the track my enthusiasm waned a bit. Radiohead were having some fun with the song they selected. If Radiohead was a Shakespearean character the their fatal flaw would be being too clever. I am not discounting their musical talents somethings they have done musically and other wise have suffered a little form being a little to clever. At least I think so which is odd because that special British brand of cleverness I never can get enough of in the forms of comedy and literature. Still a great band. And how often do you get access to each track of a song by a great band. That was my attract to it rather than any contest. I bought the stems and plan to have go at it despite 6/8 time and 63 bpm. Normal remixes are made for the clubby dance numbers. Which seemed impossible if you were going to use most of the music made available to you. So, I though I will just make it in to something else unique and not dancy or hip-hoppy. Stretching the sounds to a normal tempo the sounded well stretched and found it pretty hard to work with do to the songs structure. I don’t claim to be a talented remixer. I was falling miserably when The Great Hard Drive Disaster of ‘08 hit. Then I learned things like the also very clever Apple doesn’t let you download purchased music again. So, I was doubly defeated.
I was glad to see someone succeed at doing something original and generally awesome. Just give the video a minute to get going and you will see Radiohead’s Nude created on old computer parts and gear. You have to love a dot matrix rhythm sections & unintended purposes.
I wonder what Watt would have though about the steam punk business going on now. They have done everything else why not a guitar. Though this does look like something that BC Rich would have sold in the 80’s. It might be the flying V. Maybe a little to Randy Rhodes for steam punk.
Robert Babicz gives this excellent talk on mastering and a few other things in the video. Plus shows off some cool gear.
Instructables has this cool hack to light up you keyboard. Good if are working in the dark and touch type as poorly as me it might be an idea.
Just a vid of the charming Drum Buddy that I ran into.
Mediacoder Audio Edition is a pretty cool little app. It will encode about any audio format and will run off a usb stick. It is going to go on my list of portable apps. From the site:
MediaCoder Audio Edition is an audio transcoding tool based on MediaCoder. It nicely integrates many audio codecs and tools into an all-in-one software. It decodes almost all popular formats of audio files as well as audio stream in video files and encodes them with all its supported (and even some not claimed supported) audio encoders. All the codecs are included in the standalone software. With CUE Sheet and DVD/VCD/CD support and many additional features, audio enthusiasts can convert all their favorite music freely to any format on-the-fly and in batch
Nick Cave wants to erect (no pun intended) a statue of himself nude on horse back in his hometown. It more of a blurb than an article but it does say he intends to raise money for it. Serious I like Nick cave Ship Song is one of my all time favorites but if you want to build a statue of yourself you could probably just pay for it yourself. Pay for it himself is not any ego maniacally than wanting to do it in the first place and with Cave’s long career that is doing especially well of late I am guessing he has the $60,000. Whats up with male Australian celebrities. They all seem to have issues Angry raving Mel Gibson. Heath Ledger, punch ‘em up Russel Crowe, death wish Steve Iriwn.
I ran in to this video that someone put to a Daniel Johnston song. Thought it fit really well. If you have never heard of Daniel Johnston you can find out about him in the fascinating documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. I am not a rapid fan as some people but it one of the best music documentaries ever made. Even in the crazy world of rock music Johnston is one of the strangest and remarkable character you can find. But if you forget the music angle it is still a damn good film.
Nine Inch Nails have released another album and it is free to download. The Slip is available in multiple formats MP3, FLAC, M4A & amazingly 24/96 wave. Better than CD quality is a surprise from any downloadable music especially a free one. It also comes with a pdf album art again. Nine Inch Nails used a Creative Commons License for the album. Once again I find this great news and think it is cool.
“thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one’s on me” -Trent Reznor
I love that. A very successful artist appreciating his fan base that allow him to do what he loves for a living and most likely living a pretty good life style. This is better than a lot of acts that try to milk it for every dollar.
Of course NIN are selling CD and Vinyl versions of the album that will be available in July. So, I imagine they will do alright financially they have a lot of very obsessive collector type fans. Do something good doesn’t always mean giving away the farm. Plus this is great free publicity in advance of their summer tour.
I am still waiting for my download link. So, I have yet to hear the album. I imagine their servers are getting pummeled again.
It is good that DRM is dying. The bad news is that the death throes will take some poor sucker’s music collections out. Thank Microsoft for doing something wrong even when they do something right. There are going to shut down the lisceneing severs trapping music on there current computers unable to be transfered. It not like Microsoft can afford to keep the servers up or anything. Not the end of the world but not cool.
My adblocker is not working so great lately. I read youtube comments by mistake. I got rickrolled(people still do that?) I get emails at work that have been forward 9 times before they get to me. All that forwarding so that a demotivational poster that I have seen 10,000 times already can add to the clutter of my inbox. I start thinking this Internet business is just a load of crap. The BS outweighs the benefit. We all probably feel like that from time to time.
Luckily, I found Resonance FM the other day and I like this Internet thing again. The cultural backwater I live in would never having anything like it. But I found it in cyberspace. Yea, Internet. To be fair I can’t imagine there are too many other radio stations like it anywhere. You could maybe find similar things elsewhere on the Internet but most likely not in one place.
The fact that it is actually going out of the airwaves makes it much cooler. There are other weird & wonderful web radio stations streaming strange bits to us across cyberspace but to have the weird & wonderful affirmed by bricks and mortar is makes me warm inside. It does a little to renew my faith in a world that seems all too homogenized and bland as a individually wrapped slice of American cheese all to often.
I found this craziness because on simonsound via musicthing mentioning The Tone Generation show. It is cool show and I am looking forward to listening to the next installment. But I liked other things even better. Listen live is great because you never know what it is going to be music, sound art or talk. I like some of the podcasts also. 8bit Adventures of a Bored Office Worker which seems to be a short lived podcast from last year but it might be the most necessary radio show ever(or course I have had the Zelda song stuck in my head of the last coupe decades.) Every station needs an 8-bit show.
Ah, crazy life. I can’t believe it was only yesterday. But it was yesterday I posted about the new Pitchfork.tv. Well, on it today is a video tour of Death by Audio’s pedal making empire.
Good viewing lovers of noisy music or noisy gadgets.
