99 Vivaldi mp3s for $2.99
Today only on Amazon: 99 Vivaldi masterpieces on mp3 for $2.99. (US only.) See also other great Amazon music deals.
Alternate post title: I’ve got 99 Vivaldis but a Bach ain’t one.
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kottke.org posts about music
Free Philip Glass mp3s
Amazon has a sampler album of music from Philip Glass available right now for free. Not sure how long that will last so snap it up. See also lots of inexpensive classical music on Amazon.
Update: Here’s a list of all the free mp3 albums on Amazon, 141 in all.
Star Guitar
Star Guitar music video. Music by The Chemical Brothers. Video directed by Michel Gondry.
The making of the Star Guitar music video.
Ever since this video blew my mind when I first watched it, I’ve wondered how it was made. Turns out Gondry tested the concept out on a sidewalk with oranges, shoes, videotapes, and drinking glasses. Alas, the making of doesn’t cover the three months of post production required by the finished product, although the video isn’t completely digital as you might expect:
The video is based on DV footage Gondry shot while on vacation in France. They shot the train ride 10 different times during the day to get different light gradients.
Still love that video.
Music videos of the decade
Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)
Alex Ross on the move
Alex Ross has moved his blog from The Rest is Noise to the New Yorker site. It’s now called Unquiet Thoughts.
Beyonce’s Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose
A good example of what Robin Sloan calls the production-as-performance video.
What I love about the approach is that it’s showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It’s entertaining, but it’s also an exercise in demystification — which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.
Carl Sagan Auto-Tune (feat. Stephen Hawking)
Maybe you’re tired of un-pop-music-like things being run through Auto-Tune, but I’m not quite there yet. This Auto-Tuned Carl Sagan mix is very nearly sublime.
Cool cats
Francis Wolff was an executive at Blue Note Records who also took tens of thousands of photos of the label’s musicians.
A selection of Wolff’s photos are available here and here.
Update: More photos.
Uberorgan
In 2001, Tim Hawkinson created Uberorgan for the gallery at MassMOCA.
Several bus-size biomorphic balloons, each with its horn tuned to a different note in the octave, make up a walk-in self-playing organ. A 200 foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encodes a musical score of old hymns, pop classics, and improvisational ditties. This score is deciphered by the organ’s brain - a bank of light sensitive switches - and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into non-repeating variations of the score.
Part sculpture, part giant musical instrument, Hawkinson’s installation was a loose interpretation of the human body’s organ systems. Uberorgan conducted itself for five minutes every hour, on the hour. The exhibition traveled from MassMOCA to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where it graced the museum’s entrance hall during the exhibit of Hawkinson’s work called Zoopsia, a name that means “visual hallucinations of animals.”
You can hear a minute long sample of the Uberorgan on the Getty Center website. To me it sounds like a duet between a three-year-old jamming out on a bass saxophone and an elephant in a good mood.
Update: Tim Hawkinson and the Uberorgan are featured the Art:21 episode,”Time.” Seeing and hearing the piece, even on the small screen, is impressive, and Hawkinson explains how he came about creating such a voluminous, volume-driven work of art. (thx, cliff)
The top 200 albums of the 2000s
Pitchfork continues their look back at the 2000s with the top 200 albums of the decade. Here are the top 20.
Thom Yorke has a new band
The Radiohead frontman is forming a new band “for fun”…members include long-time Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich and Flea.
In the past couple of weeks i’ve been getting a band together for fun to play the eraser stuff live and the new songs etc.. to see if it could work! here’s a photo.. its me, joey waronker, mauro refosco, flea and nigel godrich.
(via @linklog)
Remastered Beatles albums
Today’s the day: those meticulously remastered Beatles albums are available today. The Beatles version of Rock Band is out as well.
MP3 sound quality: good enough
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood doesn’t think that the supposed low sound quality of MP3s is something to get worked up about.
We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.
This conversation with Greenwood is part of a new series by Sasha Frere-Jones’ on the sound quality of recorded music.
The solution to the soprano problem
The soprano problem is the mispronunciation of lyrics by sopranos at the high end of their range. In order to make themselves heard in opera houses, sopranos need their voices to resonate, which they only do when making certain sounds.
Jane Eaglen, a critically acclaimed soprano who has performed Wagner’s works in opera houses worldwide, explains that sopranos must try to find a balance between power and clarity. “It’s really about how you modify the vowels at the top of the voice so that the words are still understandable but so that you are also making the best sound that you can make,” she says.
A pair of scientists have found that the meticulous Richard Wagner may have been aware of this problem and wrote the soprano parts in his operas to minimize the mispronunciations.
Pitchfork’s songs of the decade
As part of their review of the music of the 2000s, Pitchfork listed the top 500 tracks of the past decade. Here are the top 10:
10. Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
9. Animal Collective, “My Girls”
8. Radiohead, “Idioteque”
7. Missy Elliott, “Get Ur Freak On”
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
5. Daft Punk, “One More Time”
4. Beyonce [ft. Jay-Z], “Crazy in Love”
3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy], “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”
2. LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
1. OutKast, “B.O.B.”
Be sure to click through for the extensive explanations. It would easy to nitpick specific selections, but that’s a pretty good top 10.
Gorilla vs. Bear also shared their top songs and albums of the decade.
No more Radiohead albums?
Thom Yorke says that there will be no more Radiohead albums.
“None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again,” he said. “Not straight off … It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.”
No!! (via @davidfg)
Eight hours of Bach for three bucks
Amazon’s mp3 store has another one of those deals today where you can get hours and hours of classical musics for pennies a song: 99 Bach masterpieces (8+ hours!) for $2.99. Even though Bach’s works preceded copyright protection, this is a good example of how our culture benefits from sensible copyright term limits: eight hours of some of the finest music ever composed for about the price of a Happy Meal. More good classical music mp3 deals here.
Guitar Hero 5 playlist
Amazon has a mp3 listing of all the songs that will be included in the upcoming Guitar Hero 5. Lots of great stuff in there.
Cory Arcangel’s atonal YouTube cat video mashup
Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 is a set of pieces written for the piano by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, some of the first western music to written in an atonal style. Cory Arcangel took a bunch of YouTube videos of cats playing the piano and fused them together into a performance of op. 11.
This project fuses a few different things I have been interested in lately, mainly “cats”, copy & paste net junk, and youtube’s tendency in the past few years to host videos that are as good and many times similar to my favorite video artworks. I think all this is somehow related.
Cory’s no-bullshit statements about his art are just as entertaining as the work itself:
So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos…
You can catch Cory’s project in-person at Team Gallery in NYC and at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria.
Cheap Trick on 8-track
Cheap Trick’s new album, The Latest, is due out this month and is available on 8-track.
Your move, Meat Loaf. (via things magazines, which is still rocking the web equivalent of the 8-track, the .htm file extension)
LP by Discovery
I’m sure the nearest college student can tell you what “an electro-pop project from members of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot” means, but I can tell you that I’m really enjoying this album by Discovery (on sale at Amazon for $3.99 today only). I almost want to say that it reminds me of The Postal Service except 1) that would be wrong and 2) someone could get themselves slapped around for saying something like that.
Music Catch 2
Catch musical notes as they fly by to the rhythm of a classical soundtrack. I enjoyed this game way more than I thought I would…it’s likely my love of games where you tidy up. (thx, dylan)
Bach Bach Revolution
Two women play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on a giant piano at FAO Schwarz.
If that’s too much for you, just start with chopsticks or caper around like an idiot and knock over toddlers. (via cyn-c)
Danger Mouse’s new album: a blank CD-R
Due to a dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse will release his next album (a collaboration with Sparklehorse) as a blank CD-R, on which the buyer can then burn the album downloaded from the file-sharing network of their choice.
Please note: Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to include music on the CD without fear of legal entanglement. Therefore, he has included a blank CD-R as an artifact to use however you see fit.
99 classical mp3s for $8
Whoa, 99 “essential” classical music songs on mp3 for only $7.99 at Amazon. “Album Savings: $80.12 compared to buying all songs.” (thx, martin)
Update: Here’s another good deal: all 9 of Beethoven’s symphonies for $7.99. (thx, egghat)
Update: And another: 48 classical guitar mp3s for $0.99. (thx, mona)
Update: And still more good deals: 99 songs by Mozart for $8, 99 relaxing songs for $8, and 99 Beethoven pieces for $8.
Update: Five Hours of Classical Favorites for $4.
Update: Five Hours of Classical Adagios for $8 and 50 Essential Classical Film Moments for $8. If you bought everything in this post, you’d have more than two days of music for less than $60.
Update: Cripes, 160 Chopin tunes for $5.
Dixie Upright and his friends
The pace of baseball is such that one wonders about all the baseball players whose last names are adjectives.
Woody Rich, Pop Rising. Harry Sage. Several Savages. Mac Scarce. Bill Sharp. Bill, Chris, Dave, and Rick Short. Many Smalls. One Smart guy (JD). Three Starks. Adam Stern. Of course, there’s Doug Strange (and Alan and Pat, too). Jamal and Joe Strong. Even a guy named Sturdy, literally: Guy Sturdy. DIck Such. Bill Swift, x2.
Update: See also musicians whose names are sentences. (thx, colter)
Auto-Tune
The voice modulation technology isn’t just for pop songs anymore. Check out Blake tries to talk to Jack about the homepage:
Babies crying in Auto-Tune is pretty hilarious: Baby T-Pain 1, Baby T-Pain 2.
But Auto-Tuning the News takes the prize.
Pay particular attention to Katie Couric at 1:20. Awesome. (thx, matt)
Update: Whoa, Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech run through Auto-Tune. (thx, matthew)
Update: Winston Churchill + Auto-Tune = [you don’t need me to tell you the answer to this].
Media packaging mashups
Recently a number of efforts have been made at re-imagining the packaging for movies, books, video games, and other media, mostly mashups and in the illustration style of typical of Saul Bass’ movie posters or Penguin Classics book covers. I’ve collected several examples below.
Olly Moss made Penguin-like book covers for video games like Ocarina of Time and Half-Life.
M. S. Corley made Penguin-like versions of the Harry Potter books.
In his I Can Read Movies series, spacesick imagines Penguin-like book covers for movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Sixteen Candles, and Back to the Future.
Forrest Lucero designed Penguin-like book covers for songs from The Postal Service and Daft Punk.
Olly Moss also did simple red/white/black posters for some of his favorite movies, including Die Hard and The Deer Hunter.
A bunch of people on Flickr imagined Nintendo DS tie-in games for movies like Andy Warhol’s Empire, Eyes Wide Shut, and 8 1/2. They also did some for TV shows, magazines, web sites, and all sorts of other media.
The folks on the NeoGAF message board made Criterion Collection-style box art for video games like Super Mario Galaxy, Black and White, and Super Mario 64.
Nikolay Saveliev made simple two-color album covers for the likes of Kanye West, Jessica Simpson, and Franz Ferdinand.
Update: Modernist editions of classic album covers. (thx, zach)
Update: Logan Walters is redoing Wu-Tang Clan album covers.
Update: Classic albums reimagined as Pelican books.
Update: Simple Star Wars posters.
Update: Brandon Schaefer did some simple Blu-ray sleeve for movies, very much in the style of Olly Moss. Exergian did some posters for TV shows; the one for Weeds is particularly nice.
Update: Books as web services.
Update: Panic made some Atari 2600-themed packaging for their software. (thx, daniel)
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