kottke.org posts about music
Back in ~2008, right on the cusp of stardom, Lady Gaga did a crate-digging video in a London record shop and named Radiohead’s set at Bonnaroo 2006 as her favorite show she’s ever been to. A post-fame Gaga reaffirmed her choice in this 2018 Vogue interview. Many share her opinion. Here’s the official concert video of that Bonnaroo show so you can judge for yourself.
The setlist for the show:
There There
2+2=5
15 Step
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Exit Music (For a Film)
Kid A
Dollars & Cents
Videotape
No Surprises
Paranoid Android
The Gloaming
The National Anthem
Climbing Up The Walls
Nude
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
The Bends
Myxomatosis
How To Disappear Completely
You And Whose Army?
Pyramid Song
Like Spinning Plates
Fake Plastic Trees
Bodysnatchers
Lucky
Idioteque
Karma Police
House of Cards
Everything In Its Right Place
Even the band loved it:
The lore surrounding this show is well-documented: It was among the longest live sets the band has ever played, both by duration (two hours and twenty minutes) and number of songs (29). It featured early, alternate arrangements of six unreleased tracks that would go on to anchor ‘In Rainbows’ the following year. Thom Yorke said it was “his favourite gig for years and years and years.” Jonny Greenwood called it “the best festival experience I’ve ever had in America.”
I’ve mentioned this before but my favorite show was also Radiohead, in Oxford in 2001. It rained and they played Creep for the first time in three years; the crowd exploded.
During the pandemic, the band uploaded a number of full-length videos of their live shows to YouTube. Enjoy.
O Superman by artist Laurie Anderson from 1981. Some of the lyrics:
‘Cause when love is gone
There’s always justice
And when justice is gone
There’s always force
And when force is gone
There’s always Mom
Hi, Mom
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
In your automatic arms
Your electronic arms
In your arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
Your petrochemical arms
Your military arms
In your electronic arms
Ah, ah, ah, ah
60 Minutes did a profile of Anderson a few years ago and she explained the meaning of the song (to her):
This is a song about how basically technology cannot save you. It’s about a lot of things: justice, safety, power.
As a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin, this kind of music wasn’t available to me, so I only actually heard this for the first time fairly recently. So I thought I’d post it in case you hadn’t really heard it either — that and the message & meaning it carries is relevant these days.
I also liked this rendition of it, slowed down and reverbed. There are also several O Superman remixes on Soundcloud of varying quality.
I believe I have featured login.jp_ here before — they pair electronic music with different locations around Japan to highlight the Japanese experience. For their latest video, they had English DJ & producer Bonobo play some downtempo ambient electronica in a Shinjuku dyeing workshop.
Standing on a street corner in the middle of Shinjuku, Fujiya Senkobo has preserved one of these techniques, known as hikizome or brush dyeing, for over 70 years. Dyeing is a traditional local industry in Shinjuku dating back to the Taisho period, and about 40 dyeing workshops still exist in Shinjuku Ward today. Composing patterns in his mind and dyeing extended fabrics with a brush, Takatoshi Nakamura, the third generation owner, states that staying sharp and maintaining perfect physical health are essential in hikizome, where mistakes are simply not permitted.
Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway. He rode three different mountains and the result is this incredibly beautiful video, backed by a Max Cooper soundtrack. As one of the commenters notes, MacAskill makes a relatively heavy eMTB seem extraordinarily playful.
As a mountain biker myself, some of that looks insanely fun but the narrow steep stuff looks insanely insane. Makes me want an eMTB, which I suppose is the whole point of the video.
For the 93rd year in a row or something like that I didn’t check the math, Tycho has released his sunrise set from Burning Man. I am not a Burning Man person but I always enjoy this set.
See also a playlist of every 2026 Burning Man set on Soundcloud, currently 147 tracks and some 252 hours of music. (via @mikeakers.bsky.social)
Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around. (Not sure whether that’s an endorsement or not…I like the movie!) Anyhoo, if you get tired of the movie, you can watch Rocky sleep for 2+ hours with the PHM soundtrack playing in the background.
From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami.
‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s — a nameless, faceless somebody’s — dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest’ —Kafka On The Shore
The playlist features tracks by Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Dizzy, the Bill Evans Trio, Monk, Mingus, and Miles Davis. Some of the video’s comments:
I had just prepared a light meal and hit play on this playlist when the telephone began to ring.
about to make my morning matcha, a spring breeze is flowing through the open windows, the air smells of optimism
Early morning, sun shining to balcony, having espresso and writing.
Studying the day before the exam with a bittersweet optimism while playing this and holding on to my hopes
Canned cold beer, windows open on a warm summer night, just after finishing a simple dinner of rice and salmon and sitting next to my cat
See also Classical Music from Murakami Novels. Both of these are going straight into my Underscore collection.
On the fifth episode of her late 80s variety show Dolly, Dolly Parton was joined by Kermit the Frog for a lovely rendition of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 hit Everyday People.
You can also watch the clip on Instagram and Reddit. The full episode, which features special guest stars Delta Burke, Terence Trent D’Arby, and the Oak Ridge Boys (in addition to Jim Henson as Kermit), can be seen on YouTube (not very good quality unfortunately).
Holy moly, NPR’s Tiny Desk has been going for a long time. Weird Al Yankovic first stopped by the desk in 2010, so early that they didn’t even have it on YouTube until more recently. And the other day, they had him back for a second session!
Yankovic focused on originals the first time around, but for this show he brought parodies of Don McLean’s “American Pie” (“The Saga Begins,” from 1999’s Running with Scissors) and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” (“eBay,” from 2003’s Poodle Hat), as well as the Weezer pastiche “Skipper Dan,” from 2011’s Alpocalypse. And, for fans of the breathtakingly factual 2022 biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, he performs the film’s Emmy-losing closing-credits blues-rock jam “Now You Know.”
We only get so many gifts in this life, so let’s set an intention here and now to return “Weird Al” Yankovic to the Tiny Desk in the summer of 2042. But if he’s gonna come back and see us (or whoever’s buried us and moved on) at a sprightly 82, we’ll have to ask him to bring a string section, just to keep things fresh.
Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:
I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.
This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:
I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!
So, I’m not exactly sure what this is, but what it appears to be is a fan-assembled album of the recording sessions for Tron: Legacy by Daft Punk & Joseph Trapanese. 67 tracks in this YouTube playlist and 61 tracks from the Internet Archive (not sure of the overlap here…) Some of it sounds just like the 31 tracks from the “Complete Edition” of the soundtrack, some of it is alternate studio takes, and some of it is probably just random bits and bobs from the movie that didn’t make it onto the soundtrack.
Anyway, if you love this album as much as I do, I’ll leave you to explore.
Martin Timko (aka matogolf) cut this video of the best musical moments from Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert. He plays a number of pieces from various soundtracks, including Dunkirk, Gladiator, Interstellar, Dune, and The Dark Knight. Great to hear live performances of these iconic pieces.
Idris Elba, knight of the realm and forever Avon Barksdale’s right-hand man in my heart, has been a DJ since he was 14 years old. He recently DJed a house party for Black House Radio and it looks like everyone had a lot of fun.
You can also find this mix on Soundcloud, along with many more of Elba’s mixes.
Released a few days ago, this is the official video for Max Cooper’s Becoming, directed by Brandon Eversole. It’s mesmerizing, trippy, and a little bit glitchy. The video is also notable for being so wide that it breaks YouTube’s desktop layout — anything less than stretching my browser window to the edges of my screen and I can’t read the left-most text under the video.
Thomas Bangalter, one half of the legendary duo Daft Punk, played a 75-minute DJ set for The Lot Radio the other day. He played tracks by Boards of Canada, Burial, Sonic Youth, and even Daft Punk (full setlist). The set is also available on Soundcloud.
Bangalter also put recent rumors of a Daft Punk reunion to rest:
Was it scary to be that big? “It was almost performance art where you create these characters and blur the line between fiction and reality.” So it felt like fame was happening to the robots more than you? “I think so, yes.” If not wearing the helmets they would do interviews with their backs to the camera or, on one occasion, with bags over their heads. You can see why he and Homem-Christo, whom he calls “Guy-Man”, decided to wind up the band. “The history of music is made of fruitful partnerships and they usually last way shorter than the 28-year run that we had. It was great but staying in character and not spoiling it became very difficult.”
In March 1976, Talking Heads played a show at The Kitchen in NYC; you can watch the entire show recorded from two angles in this video. The band had formed the year before and was more than a year away from recording and releasing their debut album.
It’s a great insight as to what these early Talking Heads shows were like, and with it also being in color, being good quality, and having two angles for most of the show, this is a must-watch.
The band played for about 90 minutes (2 sets plus an encore), working through tracks like Psycho Killer, Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, and Love → Building On Fire. (via open culture)
Watch and listen to bardcore trio Courseval play a cover version of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, a track from Discovery. This is lovely. And a banger.
Courseval have covered other popular music in medieval style, including Rihanna’s Umbrella, Take On Me by A-Ha, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel, I knew I was going to love it. The description:
Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander.
And from the website:
Caught In Joy (Karol Pokojowczyk) is a multi-instrumentalist based in Florida, passionately dedicated to live composing, hardware synthesizers, and tape recording - a completely independent music project. I strive to create four albums and visual performances every month, entirely by myself.
I started my professional life as a software engineer and later became a serial entrepreneur, with a few successes along the way. After more than 30 years of working, I saved enough to fund my dream: building a home studio where I could finally focus fully on music.
In the past three years, he’s released 80+ albums and other performances, which are available for purchase on BandCamp. I’ve only had time to listen to bits and pieces of a few albums & videos, but I know a bunch of them are going into my Underscore collection very soon.1 (via johnny decimal)
I reported last week that signs of activity have been detected from Boards of Canada in the form of mysterious VHS tapes sent out to fans. Yesterday, the group’s record label posted a bunch of photos of posters hung up in cities around the world (NYC, Tokyo, LA) that match BoC’s style. First new album since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest? Let’s hope so!
For decades, a guy named Aadam Jacobs has been recording live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 feature the likes of Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, The Cure, Phish, Fugazi, and so many more. With the help of archivists, the entire collection is making its way onto The Internet Archive.
The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.
There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish were thrilled to discover that a previously uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists who are unlikely to be known to even fans with the most obscure tastes.
All of it is slowly becoming available for streaming and free download at the nonprofit online repository Internet Archive, including that nascent Nirvana show recording, with the audio from Jacobs’ cassette recorder cleaned up.
Some of the shows, like this pre-Dave Grohl one from Nirvana, were recorded before the bands hit it big. It’s wild to hear their performance of About a Girl get about three claps from the audience.
Almost three years ago exactly, Fred Again rolled into the NPR studios and did a Tiny Desk Concert.
When Fred again.. first proposed a Tiny Desk concert, it wasn’t immediately clear how he was going to make it work — not because he lacked creativity, but because translating purely electronic music at the Desk is a daunting task for anyone. How would an artist, whose performances take the form of DJ sets in front of massive audiences, curate an intimate and unique experience? But what the British songwriter and producer came up with is a reminder of what a Tiny Desk is at its best: an opportunity for artists to challenge themselves in such a way that it almost feels like they’re making new music, all while sticking to what feels true to them. For Fred again.. that meant re-learning the marimba, playing the vibraphone, singing at the piano and looping sounds and beats — all at the same time.
From a livestream recorded many years ago, this is Radiohead covering Joy Division’s Ceremony. The song was originally written by Joy Division but the version most people know is New Order’s — it was their first single. From Wikipedia:
“Ceremony” was one of the last Joy Division songs to be composed, with lyrics written by Ian Curtis. According to guitarist Bernard Sumner, the group wrote the song a few weeks before Ian Curtis died “to try and heal him through music” and keep him “involved in the band and involved in music and remind him of what … a great future he had”. Sumner concluded, “Unfortunately, it didn’t work”.
Just three versions of Joy Division performing the song exist, including one on the group’s compilation album Still.
Max Cooper’s music videos are always worth a look. This one, directed by Katia Schutz, is for a song called Pattern Index from his forthcoming album (Feeling Is Structure, May 8).
Cooper describes Feeling Is Structure as an “audiovisual album”, which I take to mean that each song will have an associated video released with it. A second video, Ebb and Flow, is already out too:
I thought the official video of Berghain by Rosalía (feat. Björk & Yves Tumor) was great — “I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral?” — and this recent live performance from the Brit Awards takes the song to the next level. I loved it. (via kenzie)
This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.
See also Dwells’ mashup of Everything In Its Right Place and N95.
For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
Would you like to watch a puppet DJ a chill set of French house music in a cool workplace meeting space? Trick question because of course you would. This went right into my Underscore collection. (via undermanager)
Ok, you know this is going to be a good one: De La Soul plays a Tiny Desk Concert.
The humor of De La Soul has always been one of its calling cards. When DJ Maseo tells the Tiny Desk crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a new group called De La Soul,” he means it as a joke. But, in so many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: the duties have been reassessed, the focus has shifted and the newness of The Plugs is laid plain here at the Tiny Desk.
Here’s the setlist:
YUHDONTSTOP
Will Be
Much More
Stakes is High
Sunny Storms
Different World
Breakadawn
Pony Ride
A Quick 16 for Mama
Me Myself and I
Feel free to dance at your desk or in your kitchen or wherever you’re listening.
Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.
For a show on Hulu called Tell Me Lies, synth-pop band Chvrches covered Such Great Heights by The Postal Service. Lovely.
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