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« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Wired’s “Rippy Awards”: Tired, Expired
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on January 28, 2009 by admin in Music
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009Wired.com has proven once again that having been very hip and cutting edge at one point doesn’t mean you’re very hip and cutting edge now. But I’ll give them an ‘A’ for conceptualization regarding their First Annual Rippy Music Awards. The piece suggests that someone should fill the gaping hole in music awards that programs [...]
Wired.com has proven once again that having been very hip and cutting edge at one point doesn’t mean you’re very hip and cutting edge now. But I’ll give them an ‘A’ for conceptualization regarding their First Annual Rippy Music Awards. The piece suggests that someone should fill the gaping hole in music awards that programs like the Grammy Awards fail to fill. Unfortunately, Wired also fails to do so in the piece linked to, but it’s nice to see that a major media outlet has at least mentioned the problem. This has been a disappointment for me for a while; the last time I actually watched the American Music Awards for instance, was when Jamiroquai
N.A.S.A. – The Spirit Of Apollo
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on January 18, 2009 by admin in Music
Sunday, January 18th, 2009Unless you’re paralyzed from the funk bone down, N.A.S.A. is going to take you to planet shake-your-booty. The video at left is for the song Money (featuring David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, & Z-Trip), from N.A.S.A.’s upcoming debut release Spirit of Apollo which hits the shelves February 17, 2009. N.A.S.A. stands for [...]
Unless you’re paralyzed from the funk bone down, N.A.S.A. is going to take you to planet shake-your-booty. The video at left is for the song Money (featuring David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, & Z-Trip), from N.A.S.A.’s upcoming debut release Spirit of Apollo
Best of Bootie 2008
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 11, 2009 by admin in Music
Sunday, January 11th, 2009You need no other mashup collection
With a title like Best of Bootie 2008, you might think I’m promoting some kind of rapper chick porn, but the fact is that after hours of (sometimes excruciating) listening, I can comfortably say that this is the absolute best selection of mashups (which we’ve previously discussed here) of 2008. There are a LOT of people doing mashups these days, and many of them, though conceptually clever, are almost unlistenable (like Eminelton, for instance), or in other cases they’ll be alright except for the fact that the “mashup artist” gets a little lazy with polishing up the final product to make sure that things are rhythmically tight and not harmonically incongruent. Not a problem with Best of Bootie’s selection – not only are all the tracks exceptionally well-remixed, they’ve even put them in a very listenable sequence. You could pretty much toss this on at any party and not have to think about it again. Some faves of mine include (all direct mp3 links): Overdub’s mix Come As The Starlight (Nirvana vs. The Supermen Lovers) manages to make Kurt Cobain sound like a motown classic; Totom’s track Every Kind Of Creep (Radiohead vs. Robert Palmer) turns “Creep” into the jazz song it always secretly was anyway, and DJ Y Alias JY’s Duffy Train Running (Duffy vs. Doobie Brothers) somehow actually makes both artists sound better. Here’s a little preview of “Come As The Starlight” for you:
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Pitchfork 50 Best Albums of 2008
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on December 26, 2008 by admin in Music
Friday, December 26th, 2008The Enhanced, Condensed Version
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As I said a few weeks ago, I’m helpless without Pitchfork Media’s Top 50 list. It has totally dictated my January listening habits for three years running. Well, the 2008 list is finally available, and as usual they’ve spread it across five web pages, which is a minor annoyance to me and a few other people I know. So, I’ve done you all a little favor, and summarized the list without reviews. I’ve also gone one step further and provided product and torrent search links for most of the list. I tend to torrent, review, then buy if I like it or delete if I don’t. Try to be cool and support the artists if you do the same. By the way, the The Pitchfork 500
Evelyn Glennie: If You Think You’ve Heard It All, Think Again
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 21, 2008 by admin in Music
Sunday, December 21st, 2008Dame Evelyn Glennie On Learning How To Listen
It would be impressive enough that percussionist Evelyn Glennie has worked with notable artists like Philip Glass, Bela Fleck, Ray Davies, Bjork, Fred Frith, Kodo, Bobby McFerrin, and Sting, but this is made a bit more impressive by the fact that she is “profoundly deaf”. Which is, by the way, a misleading term that she does her best to clarify here. In spite of her insistence that you disregard her “impairment” and instead focus on her musicianship, she does a great deal to help people reframe their rigid perceptions of what it means to hear and to listen in the first place. As part of her early musical training she learned to “hear” with her fingers, hands, and in fact, her entire body. And having turned a perceived adversity into an asset, she devotes considerable energy to motivational speaking, on top of performing 100+ times a year. The TED.com clip at left (view full size here) is a bit long for web viewing at over 30 minutes, but well worth a watch. Especially the piece she performs at the end, which powerfully shows the importance of dynamics in a piece of music. Although the piece is very harmonically simple, the dynamics of her playing nearly made me cry. But check her out for yourself, you can listen to a bunch of preview clips here