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[ Add A Comment ]Posted on March 9, 2011 by admin in Music
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
The delightfully strange intersection of crime and ambient music.
Have you been lamenting that there’s no way to combine your favorite police scanner channel with some nice ambient music? Of course you haven’t. But you would have been, if you had known in advance just how cool it would sound. In any case, this problem you didn’t even know you had has been solved with the brilliant website mashup You Are Listening To Los Angeles, which is simply a picture of Los Angeles, and the simultaneous streams of ambient music from SoundCloud.com and police radio chatter from Los Angeles. On the surface, this may not sound terribly appealing, but it is in fact amazingly pleasant to listen to. Especially if – like me – you enjoy the brilliant audio work in movies like THX 1138
or Blade Runner
, or if you’ve ever enjoyed music by the likes of Bill Nelson
or Byrne & Eno. There’s something about the filtering of certain kinds of radio transmissions, combined with their blips and static cutoffs, that make them quite musical. And when layered randomly with certain ambient music, you suddenly have an ever-evolving, and strangely soothing background music. I’ve been listening to it randomly while I work, and eventually got curious about how well it would work with different sources, so I tried some of my own ambient music (embedded below, or you can buy it here) combined with various emergency scanner streams from RadioReference.com. And it seems to work well with just about any stream you pick, provided the music is genuinely “ambient” enough. I chose my tune On The Eve from a benefit CD I did back in 2003, and it worked pretty well with the Chicago Police stream. But who knows if it ever will again. Which is sort of the beauty of this. You Are Listening To Los Angeles was created by Eric Eberhardt , and as of this writing the site says he’ll be adding feeds from other cities soon. If you’re reading Eric, feel free to include the tune below… Read the rest of this entry »
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on March 6, 2011 by admin in Music
Sunday, March 6th, 2011
If The Living Sisters’ voices sound familiar, it may be because one third of them are provided by Inara George of The Bird and the Bee.
I’ve said this before, but I wish I had more time to listen to all the amazing new indy music that’s been flooding the market the last few years. Then it wouldn’t take a torrent of links flooding the web talking about a new Michael Gondry music video (see below) to get me to notice a cool band like The Living Sisters
. I hadn’t heard of them until yesterday, but like most anyone with ears would be, I was immediately struck by their uniquely witty harmonies. They sort of reminded me of The Roches
(who, unlike The Living Sisters, are sisters), not because of their sound, but because of the quirky vibe. And The Living Sisters’ voicing sounded familiar too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then it hit me. Well, it didn’t actually hit me – I had to read this LA Weekly piece from last year to learn – that the reason that something about the voices sounded so familiar was because exactly one third of them were being provided by Inara George of The Bird and The Bee, who we touched on a few weeks ago. I guess on top of needing to listen to more stuff, I should follow up better on the stuff I already am listening to as well. So I don’t have much more to say about The Living Sisters, because until I finish downloading the album Love To Live
from Amazon in a few minutes, I’ve only heard previews and watched some YouTube clips. I included a live one below, which proves pretty effectively that Inara George doesn’t need the autotune that seems so pervasive in The Bird and the Bee recordings. These ladies have amazing voices. Or maybe an amazing voice; at times the similarity of their timbre makes them sound like one person singing along with a Theremin…
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[ Add A Comment ]Posted on February 28, 2011 by admin in Music
Monday, February 28th, 2011
Not so Goo Goo over the latest Ga Ga? We have some alternative moves for you.
Check out those implants. No, not THOSE
implants, the ones in her cheeks and shoulders. |
I was really looking forward to Lady Gaga’s new video for the song Born This Way
. And then, well, I saw it. I guess it’s pretty hard to follow up videos featuring your crucifix-clad vagina and jail time with Beyoncé. After a while, even sparkly unicorns in triangles, skullface dancers, uterine galaxies, and zippered nipples don’t have the impact they once did. On the bright side, we have a new word. “Zipple”. Say it. It’s fun. Zipple! But does this sound like criticism? It’s really not. It’s just mild disappointment. When an artist has millions of dollars to spend, and nearly unlimited resources at their disposal, you just expect more. Sort of like the movie Avatar. Come to think of it, Lady Gaga does look kind of like a Na’vi with those cheekbone implants in the video. Anyway, we said we had some alternatives to the new Lady Gaga video, and we do. If you’re looking for videos with cool music and skullfaced dancers, look no further than this dubstep-driven dance clip (also below) by French dance crew La Preuve par 4. Even Lady GaGa’s font of inspiration Madonna was willing to acknowledge her debt to dance moves from the club and the street, so why not go closer to the source? The music is more interesting, the moves are more compelling, and the whole thing costs us all a lot less. More vids below. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on February 20, 2011 by admin in Music
Sunday, February 20th, 2011
It’s a fine line between nonsense and gibberish, especially when you insist on Mondegreening everything songwriters are saying. And mispelling “Lambs eat oats” doesn’t count either.
Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah is not actual gibberish; Jet
Screamer provides a translation right in the song. |
One of my favorite pop songs ever was Kidney Bingos
by Wire (video below). In spite of the fact that it consists entirely of nonsensical lines like “Natural splits sunburn jets, price marks smart bets” and has the refrain “Money spines paper lung, Kidney bingos organ fun”, it somehow manages to express a bittersweet sense of reflection and ambiguous hope. For me, nothing will kill a great pop song faster than bad lyrics, which is probably why I used to be so partial to French rap like MC Solaar and Assassin, or Arabic Hip Hop that I discovered via collections like like Rough Guide to Arabesque
or Arabic Groove
. Not only do the guttural qualities of the respective languages suit the style better than English, but for all I know, the artists are complaining about the foie gras at the local cafe, and not murder, race, and gender prejudice. My disinterest in the precise meanings of pop songs has served me well; frankly, I think many would agree that 90% of pop song lyrics are moderately incomprehensible on the first listen, and when we finally spend the time and energy to decipher the meaning, we’re likely to regret the effort. I think this principle was well understood through the 60′s and 70′s; I’d argue in fact that nearly the entire Beatles catalogue is comprised of songs with nonsense lyrics. But recently I ran across a tune I’d never heard before that sent me on a little mission, and forced me to rethink the whole meaning of “nonsense” when it comes to pop song lyrics. The song was “Prisencolinensinainciusol” (video below), released in 1972 by Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano. It’s a weird and hooky amalgam of big band and hambone-tinged rock ‘n’ roll, and although you at first get the impression he’s singing in some Slavic dialect or something, it turns out the lyrics are 100% gibberish. In any case, it got me wondering: how many pop songs with nonsense lyrics had become actual hits? And that’s where my search ran into trouble. One of the first tunes to spring to mind in this niche might be Harry Nilsson’s Lime In The Coconut
, but you don’t have to look too hard to find people who will vigorously argue that it DOES mean something, and that you’re just too stupid to have bothered to understand it. This is true with lots of artists – Steely Dan, REM, or Nirvana are familiar culprits – often you just have to know a tiny piece of back-story, and all the meaning falls into place. And two other things compound the problem. One is the tendency to Mondegreen, so that we end up wondering what happened to Olive, the Other Reindeer
, or wondering why Jimi Hendrix politely asks “excuse me, while I kiss this guy”. The other is that simply adding a bunch of gibberish syllables to an otherwise meaningful lyric does not technically make it a “nonsense lyric”. The Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is a fine example of this. Aside from the fact that they used the word “bra” a good thirty years before the first frat boy or beach bum, the nonsense refrain hardly detracts from the obvious fact that life goes on in spite of Molly and Desmond’s frustrations. And in spite of the prevalence of lalas, oh-oo-whoas, and dip dips in Doo Wop, almost all the songs are clearly about broken hearts. And Oo Ee Oo Ah Ah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang
? Well, there IS an explanatory verse that makes it clear that it’s a spell provided by a witch doctor, right? So after a fairly exhaustive search, below are the only songs I could find that are truly absolute gibberish, with a few honorable mentions. Because nonsense is easy to come by, but genuine gibberish is an art. Feel free to share any omissions in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 11, 2011 by admin in Music
Friday, February 11th, 2011
The video for “Eye Of The Storm”, from Ben Lovett’s upcoming release “Highway Collection” is an eerily gorgeous mini-masterpiece of pop music video.
[CORRECTION: As a commenter pointed out, I mixed up some Ben Lovetts here. The Ben Lovett responsible for this video is NOT the Ben Lovett that's in the band Mumford & Sons] I’ve shared my thoughts before on the tragic early demise of the things that MTV could have been. The possibilities for short film (which I also talk about a lot) and pop music are mind-boggingly under-explored. But at least a couple of times a year, a mini-masterpiece of the medium comes along. And I think it would be safe to describe the video for Ben Lovett’s song Eye of the Storm (from his upcoming release “Highway Collection”) as just that – a mini-masterpiece. I don’t care much about Steampunk, and I’d never even heard of Ben Lovett before, but this music video is eerily gorgeous, as is the song. So beyond letting you know that Lovett is a member of Mumford & Sons, who were spawned by the same West London folk scene that brought us Noah and the Whale (who also have a fantastic music video), and to tell you that the video was produced by SoapBox Films with key effects and animation created by OddBall Animation I think I’ll just shut up now and let you watch the darn thing. Video below.
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