Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
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Some of these links have been sitting in my Gmail Notes a year now, and I’ve become sick of looking at them. A few of them I’d planned on leaving for when I had time to adequately address their theme and topic in a proper blog-post, but I’ve realised that’s not going to happen any time soon. So: Read the rest of this entry »
Came across a link to a song, “Goodbye Electronica” by Dave Graham, on the electronic music board xltronic tonight. Really, really enjoyed it – lovely guitar work, atmosphere and lyrics. He’s allowed me to share it with you here, saying it’s a “freebie”, so give it a listen and pass it on to anyone you think might enjoy it!
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You can download it locally here:
http://ventolin.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/GoodbyeElectronica.mp3
A friend who goes under the name Red Box Recorder did a live mix last Friday and I’ve decided to host it here for your enjoyment. It’s 22 minutes long and contains music from him, most of which I didn’t recognise. Give it a listen!
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You can stream it using the player above, or download it in its entirity here: http://ventolin.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/redboxrecorder-live.mp3
He’s currently on the Irish net-label Acroplane, where you can get his most recent album, Colour Codes, which comes with a PDF booklet of art by Max McLaughlin.
The Fleet Foxes play Sun Giant and Blue Ridge Mountains in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais, Paris. Recorded in May 2008.
Slightly dodgy camera-work (did the cameraman really need to stand so close to them?) made up for by the music itself.
Peter Ablinger, an Austrian composer currently residing in Berlin, has done something rather interesting: he made a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court, then invented a mechanical piano player capable of reading notes in a very high time resolution from a computer.
The computer performs a frequency analysis of the sound spectrum, aided by Ablinger himself, which is then fed into the piano player and out comes the child’s voice.
(Video in German with English subtitles)
While I wouldn’t have much hope for people trying to work out what the piano is “saying” without the aid of seeing the words as they’re heard, I think it’s a pretty interesting experiment. The auto-player in itself is something to be marvelled at. Neat!
Lily Allen has set up a blog for musicians opposed to peer-to-peer filesharing to contribute their thoughts to. I only made it through her most recent blog post tonight, but if that’s anything to go by, we’re in for some more quality stream-of-unconsciousness ramblings from her in the future:
Apparently there are a lot of younger people at the record labels who do understand digital and want to come up with new ways everyone can get to music, but everytime they try something new it fails to win through against the ‘free’ stuff available unlawfully from file-sharing. So the fact there’s nothing in place to stop file-sharing is actually preventing the industry develop new ways of getting music to people, as well as harming new artists. I ‘d also like to stress that the music business is not just made up of artists and record company execs,. ALOT of people seem to think that the record labels are to blame for this whole thing because they have been overcharging the consumer for too long, while this may be partly true, i wouldn’t want to be seen as supporting file sharing, even if it does mean reaching a bigger audience and earning money from ticket sales . People are losing their jobs as a result of illegal downloads. In the same way that all those people lost their jobs at car factories last year, because people stopped buying cars. The music industry is now facing destruction because people have stopped buying music. For every car sold in the UK , a small piece of that profit will go to the designers of the cars, there are thousands ands thousands of other people working in the motor industry that need to be paid too. If we stop paying for a product, the industry supporting that product falls apart, as we have seen over the past few years. i hope that made sense….
Sounds like a presentation a 15-year-old would make for an Economics class in high school. Instead of even paying a single thought to the incredible exposure peer-to-peer sharing has given emerging and underground artists in countries they would never have dreamed to have reached, she assails this practice as being the final nail in the coffin for such musicians.
Same story as always, then… But told by an incredibly inarticulate girl who produces utterly shit pop music and will no doubt further embarrass herself on the blog in the future. Stay tuned, innit?
(Speaking of the which, first person to code a Text-To-Mockney-Speech utility for the sole purpose of reciting the garbage on this blog wins a grand prize. Get working.)
Update: thanks to Hugh, I came across this post on Torrentfreak, which tells us that:
The debut post on the blog includes a criticism of 50 Cent, who just a couple of weeks ago had the temerity to suggest that piracy and file-sharing are all part of marketing music.
However, aside from the critique of Fiddy, the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.
“I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.
“The fact that she is trying to claim that such copying is bad, while doing it herself suggests something of a double standard, unfortunately. Also, for someone so concerned about the impact of ‘piracy’ I’m quite surprised that she neither credited nor linked to our post. Apparently, what she says and how she acts are somewhat different. Still, Lilly, glad we could help you make a point… even if it wasn’t the one you thought you were making,” Mike added.
A while ago, a friend posted a link to Girl Dance’s “Baby, Baby, Baby” on Facebook and it got me in a narky mood. I really didn’t like the video, which simply consists of women walking a kind of naked relay race while the lyrics of the song flash up, word by word, inside black strips censoring their nudity. The music is similarly vapid.
Tonight, however, I came across another music video that revolves around doing fun things with “censor strips”. I like it, it made me laugh, so here it is:
From BBC News:
John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono has been given a lifetime achievement honour at Mojo magazine’s awards in London.
Mojo chief editor Phil Alexander, who hosted the event, praised Ono, 76, as “a huge influence on modern music”.
Bollocks.
Cassetteboy’s gone to work on The Apprentice:
I’ve been working on this video for a couple of months, on and off. I watched 45 episodes of The Apprentice (most of them several times), and material from 43 of them made it into the final piece. Basically, it was a lot of work.
Watch it here:
If you enjoyed it, make sure you check out more of their work at their Youtube channel.
Littlepixel has created a lovely picture album on flickr of classic album covers, re-done in design and style as Penguin books. An example:

Click here for the full flickr album.