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You may remember Martin Klimas from his photos of shattering figurines (which I love).
His latest project involves arranging paint just above massive speakers, turning the sound up, and photographing the results. This is Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians”:
I wonder what dubstep looks like? (via @pomeranian99)
An internet sleuth used the lyrics of Ice Cube’s It Was a Good Day to figure out when his exceptional day occurred.
CLUE 3: “The Lakers beat the Super Sonics”
Dates between Yo MTV Raps air date AUGUST 6 1988 and the release of the single FEBRUARY 23 1993 where the Lakers beat the Super Sonics…
Update: Someone fact-checked the original calculation and found it wanting. (thx, trevor)
Adele’s Rolling in the Deep has been covered thousands of times on YouTube…here’s 70 of those performances cut together into one seamless song.
(via ★davidfg)
The Fournitures Generales Pour Le Piano is a shop in Paris that sells parts for piano repair. The owner runs the shop himself, sells fewer and fewer parts each year, and dreams of building a one-string instrument which sounds like a piano, lute, and harp all at the same time.
See also the decline in piano quality over the last 100 years. (thx, judy)
On the Clipart covers blog, you’ll find noted album covers redone with clip art and Comic Sans.
(via @aaroncoleman0)
In a piece for Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen argues that for the first time in recent history, American pop culture (fashion, art, music, design, entertainment) hasn’t changed dramatically in the past 20 years.
Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past — the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s — looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.
Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972-giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps-with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins-again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising — all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.
This video, which takes its audio from a 2007 interview, takes a crack at defining it.
So, a dubstep or grime is kinda like this ultra slow, ultra dirty spawn of hip hop, but it’s almost at a breakbeat speed, but it’s at a halftime breakbeat speed. So it feels, like, abnormally slow, and just gives this really heavy feel.
Since the evolution of music has slowed since, say, the early 1980s, I thought it would be a long time before a popular genre of music came along that seemed, to my old ears, to be noisy garbage…but then dubstep came along. Industrial, happy hardcore, metal, punk, glitch, and even drum & bass I can appreciate, but dubstep makes me want to yell at children to get off lawns. And I actually like that door stopper noise!
You’ve probably seen the NY Times correction that everyone’s talking about. Ok, not everyone, just everyone who works in media. Anyway, here it is:
An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.
Here is said article. Jim Romenesko talked to Amy Harmon, the reporter who wrote the article, and uncovered this magical tidbit:
I was accompanying Kirsten to school, taking notes on my laptop as she drove. She was listening to music on her iPod known to Pony fans as “dubtrot,” — a take-off on “dubstep,” get it? — in which fans remix songs and dialogue from the show with electronic dance music.
Dubtrot! And leave it Urban Dictionary to gild the lily.
Dubstep music relating to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Often created by bronies, dubtrot can include dubstep remixes of songs from the show and original pieces created as homage or in reference to the show.
Bronies! Defined as:
The term used to describe the fan community(usually of the older group, males and females) of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
Anyway, would you like to listen to some dubtrot? Of course you would: Rainbowstep, Rainbow Dubtrot, and fluttershymix.
Been grooving on Pretty Lights lately. I recommend downloading one of several EPs from his site (for free + suggested donation) or getting disc two of Filling Up the City Skies.
And if you were a Chicago Bulls fan in the 90s, don’t miss his remix of the Bulls intro music in the Unreleased 2010 Remixes collection (find it on the downloads page).
One of my favorite things on the internet is footage of old styles of dancing set to contemporary music. Like this:
See also Daft Punk Charleston and Russian dancing (w/ Run DMC). (via ★dunstan)
Woo, a new compilation from The Hood Internet just “dropped”. I am picking it up right now. (Am I doing this right? Yo?) Anyway, free music that’s good! Clicky clicky.
Trent Reznor’s and Atticus Ross’ soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in the can and will be released in one week. For now, you can pre-order the soundtrack or download a free six-song sampler. Reznor and Ross won an Oscar for their The Social Network soundtrack.
Every song by The Beatles played simultaneously. The start times are staggered so that every song ends at the same time.
As a commenter notes, “Gets very complicated in the end. So did the Beatles.” (via waxy)
Moby has a web site where filmmakers can download his music for use in non-profit projects. Cool!
this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short. to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password. you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short. the music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short.
Something to keep in mind when you’re tempted to slap a Sigur Ros song on your viral video. (via ken murphy)
Drinkify matches up the music you’re listening to with a suggested drink. According to the site, Daft Punk pairs best with 6 oz. Bombay Sapphire Gin served neat, Philip Glass should be accompanied by a bottle of red wine, The Clash goes with 1 oz. cocaine + 1 oz. grenadine served in a highball, and you can probably guess what you drink while listening to Snoop Dogg:
(via coudal)
Michael J. Fox recently took the stage at his annual benefit for Parkinson’s disease and played a familiar favorite: Johnny B. Goode. Marvin, get on the phone to your cousin!
And if that’s not Mike Fox awesomeness for one day, here he is on a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
If you like M83 and have listened to their new album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, you’ll probably love this M83 backup singer audition video.
I literally LOL’d when he started singing. (via stellar)
Saw Koyaanisqatsi last night (with great seats), accompanied by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble…Glass played one of the emsemble’s two keyboards. It was really fantastic.
KOYAANISQATSI, [Godfrey] Reggio’s debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning “life out of balance.” Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds — urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass.
The entire film is available on both YouTube and Hulu.
Dancing skills + sword fighting skills + old lady sitting motionless in a chair skills + huge boom box skills + dog almost gets beheaded skills + it gets magical around 52 seconds =
(via @thanland)
From Beth Maher, a Flash video game featuring rapper Kreayshawn (Gucci Gucci). And it uses Silkscreen! (via clusterflock)
There is a sense amongst my generation that Michael Winslow’s best performing days are behind him. (You’ll remember Winslow as Officer Sound Effects from Police Academy.) After all, we live in the age of the beatboxing flautist. You might change your tune after watching Winslow do Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. The first 28 seconds are like, oh, I’ve heard this before yawn zzzzzzzzzz WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!
And then it goes bananas right around 1:30. This is a must-see. (via @beep)
Premiering on HBO this week, a Martin Scorsese documentary on George Harrison, everyone’s favorite Beatle who wasn’t John or Paul.
Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese traces Harrison’s live from his musical beginnings in Liverpool though his life as a musician, a seeker, a philanthropist and a filmmaker, weaving together interviews with Harrison and his closest friends, performances, home movies and photographs. Much of the material in the film has never been seen or heard before. The result is a rare glimpse into the mind and soul of one of the most talented artists of his generation and a profoundly intimate and affecting work of cinema.
A piano technician reports that the best pianos were built around 1900 and we’ll never again see their like…the quality of today’s pianos just doesn’t measure up.
The finest pianos in the world were built about a hundred years ago. Due to evolution in engineering, exhaustion of raw materials, and flagging business standards, we will never see their like again. Some people may build very good pianos; new forms of the instrument may exceed (in narrow ways) the magnificent machines built a few decades either side of the year 1900. But, from a musical perspective, there will never be a “better” piano than the typical concert grand of a century ago.
(via @kdawson)
YouTube has 45 minutes of previously unreleased footage of a Halloween concert Nirvana played in 1991 at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.
The DVD contains the full performance (there’s also a Blu-ray version out in a few months). I think this might be one of my answers to “what would you do if you had a time machine?”… (via devour)
Update: The video seems to be down right now…not sure if it’ll be back or not. Sorry…
I am reminded this morning of that rarest of birds, the lyrics site that doesn’t suck: Rap Genius. RG breaks down rap songs line-by-line and not only explains all the references but attempts to “critique rap as poetry”. Here’s Gotta Have It from Watch the Throne.
(Ain’t that just like D. Wade? Wait)
Jay may be saying that Kanye and he are like LeBron and D-Wade. 1a and 1b. Great at what they do, hated because they brag about how good they are as a unit (and just because they ARE good). I guess that means Memphis Bleek is Jason Williams
The “wait” part may have been Jay giving pause to the LeBron/Wade reference after their epic fail during the 2011 NBA Finals. Jay is more likely to jab at LeBron now, because he was unhappy with the way his friend mishandled his “Decision” to go to Miami. He left Jay, a minority owner of the New Jersey Nets, in the dark with the rest of the NBA when he chose to take his talents to South Beach.
The other day while listening to Watch the Throne I wondered if someone had made a supercut of all of Kanye’s “HUH”s, “HANH”s, and “UHH”s…and of course someone has.
HENH??!
The New York Philharmonic, joined by Philip Glass himself, will perform the score for Koyaanisqatsi while the film is projected on a screen above the stage.
Lose yourself in Philip Glass’s powerful music for the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi: A Life Out Of Balance, performed live by the Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, as the landmark film is projected on a huge screen above the Avery Fisher Hall stage.
There will be two performances, Nov 2 and Nov 3 at 7:30pm at Avery Fisher Hall. There are still tons of great seats available, but get ‘em while you can. Excited!
Loving this new Trillwave 2 mix from The Hood Internet.
If you like that, here’s the first Trillwave mix.
Watch the sheet music go by as Miles Davis and his bandmates play So What.
See also Confirmation by Charlie Parker and Giant Steps by John Coltrane.
Ghostface Killah from the Wu-Tang Clan reviewed Jay-Z and Kanye’s album, Watch the Throne…and it is hilarious.
2. Lift Off (ft. Beyonce) - I almost aint wanna even comment on this shit son…. I dont even kno what to say bout it yo. This shit sounds like the anthem the fairies in Ferngully would use to go to war against evil humans to or some shit b. This shit is like Shia LeBeouf in song form yo. Lissenin to this shit is like havin ya ears penetrated by a million microscopic dicks namsayin. Shit sounds like n***as doin aerobics on a magical cloud of daisies. How many meadows did Kanye cartwheel across before he decided to make this beat? Seriously yo….
Seriously.
Update: The review was not written by Ghostface but it is still hilarious. (thx, all)
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