« Older Entries |

Thomas Dolby’s Oceanea & Eno’s Seven Sessions On A Milk Sea

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on November 29, 2010 by admin in Music

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Two pop legends succeed at being themselves musically, and even seem to sort of get the hang of that whole “internets” thingy, with lots of barnyard puppet sex and nocturnal urban hillbilly parkour. And the Dick Flash interview with Eno.

I have some compassion for the Thomas Dolby and Brian Eno fanboys of the world today. In fact, I might have to confess (as I did back in May with He Blinded Me With Silence) to being one of them. Both artists were a major influence on my early songwriting and recording work, and coincidentally, both announced special releases today. Brian Eno, with his “Seven Sessions On A Milk Sea”, and Dolby with “Oceanea”. Eno’s release is actually a series of videos of live sessions playing music from his release “Small Craft On A Milk Sea” (available for download on iTunes or as vinyl, CD, or download on Amazon). Dolby’s release is the second of three EP’s to be rolled out before his 2011 release A Map Of The Floating City, and is only available by going to his site and registering. So what’s a media overloaded pop sycophant to do? Well, download everything of course, and worry about grocery money later! I must confess that as much as I respect both artists, I find Eno’s marketing methods a little off-putting compared to Dolby’s. For me it’s interesting to be in the position of watching pop legends whose musical accomplishments I once aspired to duplicate now attempting to market their material in a rapidly evolving environment that I’m confident I understand better than they do. I’m quite happy with music they’re both producing; Dolby has shown that he still has some of that pop-smart Thomas Dolby-ness in him; his first two EP’s – “Amerikana” and “Oceanea” – reflect his quirky, catchy pop and sonically somber reflective sides respectively. And Eno has managed to imbue Small Craft On A Milk Sea with a nice balance of various aspects of the familiar Eno palette in a way that should please lifelong Enophiles like myself. But I have to tip my hat a bit to Dolby on the marketing. Ever since the announcement of Eno’s first release in five years, tidbits have been released exclusively here and there. I would receive e-mails announcing some news about the release, and as even this exclusive Wired piece points out – arrive at a page that didn’t even have a preview snippet. And while today’s announcement of Seven Sessions On A Milk Sea was originally intriguing, Eno’s site sends you to seven different other sites (including the Guardian and the New York Times, for instance) to watch a video of three guys bent over their gear “jamming”. And then you find that the embedded videos themselves are “Private” Vimeo clips that aren’t shareable. Way to use the video sharing service, marketing people! Dolby, on the other hand, announced a free song download early on, and then announced the two EP’s at a discounted price to subscribers with a painless payment and download process. And any videos he’s sharing are all on YouTube, and readily embeddable. I snagged all three Dolby releases right away, but in spite of originally being anxious to pick up Eno’s release, forgot all about it until another artist I admire (Christen Lien) mentioned it on Facebook and with a facepalm and a “DOH!” I finally bought it. Both artists are releasing a lot of “making of” clips; Dolby’s can be found on his YouTube page if you’re interested. Me, I’m more interested in the music or the music videos themselves. I”m pretty partial to Dolby’s “Toad Lickers”, featured below. Although he talks in the Toad Lickers Dissected video about how it was inspired by the toad smoking research of anthropologist Wade Davis in his book Shadows in the Sun, I personally hear it as a tale of deluded tea party rednecks taking over America. Clip below, but we don’t recommend watching it if you’re disturbed by barnyard puppet animal sex or nocturnal urban hillbilly parkour. Read the rest of this entry »

Tarot Cards Are Evil

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on October 14, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Or so a good friend told me recently.


This card pretty
much sums me up.

At least a friend surprised me recently by saying this when they noticed I had a deck of them. I didn’t know anything about this friend’s spiritual beliefs, so I was even more surprised when they described themselves as a “rational minded agnostic”. I asked them why they thought they were evil, and they said something to the effect of “silly fortune telling tools like that impede rationality“. Which underscored the fact that they had NO IDEA what Tarot cards are about, which is not surprising; the cards have a very murky history. Although the first documented mention of them is in 1367, The earliest documented use of them for divination wasn’t until 1781. Although many still use them in a predictive fashion, perhaps more people (like myself) use them as a reflective tool, to simply open up thoughts on a topic, much like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies or Marshall McLuhan’s obscure Distant Early Warning Deck. Although the evidence is anecdotal, I think it’s safe to say that the more “occult” impression that modern people have of Tarot cards is a result of the same crazy British aristocratic types that would hold seances, go to India to get their personal gurus, and allow weirdos like Aleister Crowley to hang out with them. All of which I believe was driven at least in part by a sort of quiet Anglo rebellion against the stifling rules of the more repressive forms of Christianianity of the era. A more modern use of the Tarot is probably descended from the influence of C.G. Jung, who suggested that the images on the cards were “distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation“. Over the years I’ve personally used a few “conventional” decks. I started with the Rider-Waite as a teen, which ultimately felt too 19th century and crusty. I moved to Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot in my morbid later teens. This deck ultimately comes across like a heavy metal band: it ends up being almost comical Read the rest of this entry »

Does Listening To Music Improve Productivity?

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on September 24, 2009 by admin in Music

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Well, not if you’re a terrorist and someone’s playing Metallica and The Barney Song 24 hours a day.


Apparently Chatter Blocker Also Makes You
Spontaneously Levitate In Your Cubicle

I got into a conversation yesterday with some of my smarty-pants friends about whether or not music in the workplace improves performance. The answer we arrived at, after a lot of pseudo-science was tossed around? Yes. If listening to music improves your performance. Although playing Metallica and Sesame Street music at high volume 24 hours a day will reliably make just about anybody insane, and playing music and feeding beer to cows will cause them to produce more milk*, most things about the experience of music are extremely subjective, and hard to research because of “self-reporting bias”. A classic example is that although mp3′s intrinsically suck as an audio format, they are actually preferred by many of today’s listeners. So if music doesn’t drive you crazy while you work, go for it. Apparently the Mozart Effect has some scientific basis. If you’re looking for some interesting alternatives, this LifeHacker article offers up some ideas. It’s where I found the Buddha Machine Wall, which I listened to while I typed all of this, and it’s also where I discovered Chatter Blocker, which, while an interesting piece of software, would probably be more useful for creating walla for your next movie than improving your productivity. By selecting the “Cypress Goats” and “Male/Female Chatter” settings, I was totally convinced I was at a Turkish Bazaar haggling over the price of my wife-to-be, rather than sitting at the computer. LifeHacker also mentions ambient music like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. I’m personally pretty partial to this kind of stuff. In fact, I create it myself. Check some of my ambient stuff here (especially calming are “On The Eve” and “Redshore”). People compare it to Stars of the Lid, but in fact that should be the other way around. My stuff is older than their stuff, and both owe a lot to Fripp & Eno’s Evening Star, if anything, nanny nanny. So put on some jams and get back to work now. No-one’s paying you to read stupid web sites, okay? Read the rest of this entry »

What Do Monkees And Gorillaz Have In Common?

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on April 21, 2009 by admin in Music

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

They’d both go ape over the new Gorillaz documentary Bananaz

I’m sure there’s some deeper significance to the fact that in grade school, one of my favorite bands was the Monkees, and that many years later, one of my favorite bands was Gorillaz. One thing is for certain: I didn’t grow up much in the interim. During the little growing up I did do, I was exposed to a lot of live music and production (my mom managed a music store, and had a lot of connections at live venues). From an early age, I had plans to be a failed pop star who would later have a successful career as a producer. I had some definite success with the former, the results aren’t fully in on the latter. In any case, as a result I’ve never been a big fan of conventional pop music acts; some of my favorite artists over the years were production teams or their projects. Zang Tumb Tuum, Chemical Brothers, Brian Eno, and Thomas Dolby would be a few examples. Which is part of why I’ll never forget seeing the first Gorillaz video. I loved it from a creative point of view, but was almost ecstatic when I later found out that the cartoon characters were the band. Which should make the new “behind the music” documentary Bananaz that much more amusing. It’s going to be released on DVD in June 2009, and the trailer is featured at left, but you can view the whole thing on line now at Babelgum, Oo-oo!

Read the rest of this entry »

Brazilian Girls & David Byrne – I’m Losing Myself

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 24, 2009 by admin in Music

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Or are they losing some listeners?

While I’m enthused about the new single by David Byrne and Brazilian Girls that’s being released exclusively on iTunes today, I’m a little bit frustrated by it’s exclusivity (more on that in a minute). I’ve been a fan of Brazilian Girls since their first release in 2005; their unique amalgam of Latin dance music, hip club stylings, and jazz influences is irresistible, and singer Sabina Sciubba’s poly-lingual antics keep the tunes interesting on repeated listening. It was always a joy at parties when people failed to realize they were headnod-dancing to a tune in which the refrain was “Pussy Pussy Pussy Marijuana”. And David Byrne? Well, as the main mastermind and vocalist of Talking Heads and occasional collaborator with Brian Eno, like him or not, he holds a pretty unique place in contemporary pop. The new tune is pretty fun, it’s an English-language remix of Brazilian Girls’ 2008 tune Losing Myself that’s been David Byrne-ified so it sounds a little like Talking Heads’ old classic “Life During Wartime”. So here’s my frustration: The new single is being released exclusively on iTunes. I am not (and may never be) an iTunes user, thanks to their shoddy history of DRM issues and insistence that you install a 70MB piece of software before they “allow” you to give them money for the music they’re selling. On top of that, the exclusive preview being offered was via the once-hip (but now a little self-indulgent and steampunk-prone) BoingBoing.net, which linked to a file that was in .wax format. It might as well be in .WTF format, as far as most people are concerned; the linked file might play in Windows Media Player , but most people have told me they couldn’t get it to play at all. I personally found a workaround using the Firefox plugin “FlashGot”. But enough bellyaching, check out the tune, if you can, and here’s the label’s press release. By the way: if you like David Byrne, you might also want to check out the tune Money from the recent release by N.A.S.A.

« Older Entries |