Ten Years From Now: The CD Revival
Pitchfork’s Tom Ewing writes a convincing imagining of a future in which the compact disc makes a comeback as a music format. Much as is happening with tape cassette culture right now…
Back in London, wiping strawberry jam from a CD, Reece Maclay agrees. “All the music I’ve ever known I got free, and I didn’t know what owning or paying for music was all about– not that most CD labels charge anything but voluntary fees anyway. But all this isn’t just about trying to turn the clock back ’cause we liked mix CDs when we were kids. CDs started to die when people stopped wanting to pay for a product, and then social media and music streams came along and let people stop paying for it all legally, and the product vanished.…
James Brown’s Body Missing?
Apparently, James Brown’s numerous other children are claiming that this story is bogus. I’ll post updates as they come across the wire.
From NME.com:
James Brown’s body has been stolen, according to his reported love child LaRhonda Pettit.
The soul legend’s body was put in a crypt after his death on Christmas Day in 2006. Since then it has been kept at his daughter Deanna’s house in South Carolina while a public mausoleum was being prepared.
Pettit has now claimed the body has gone missing. Consequently, she says she is being denied the opportunity to carry out an autopsy to determine Brown’s true cause of death, reports the Daily Mirror.
“My daddy’s body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where,” Pettit explained.
She added: “I’m convinced his…
Electronic Musician HipGnosis Talks About Mind-Altering Music
Electronic musician HipGnosis talks about his techniqiues for making consciousness altering music. Via Technoccult:
I know you use binaural beats and other methods to enhance your music by making it consciousness altering. Can you describe some of the methods you use?
Well, much of my music is a sort of “hypersigil” imbued with specific frequencies designed to induce altered states. When combined with psychedelics, it can be intense. I have done much research on cymatics/sound healing/binaurual tones.
I started making acid house as the first electonic music i did, and binaurals were first introduced to that music. I am heavily influenced by Coil, who also did much work w/ frequencies to transmit information/altered states-specific qualities. Psychic TV is an early influence as well, which was less about traditional sound-mind altering, but more about raw…
Man or Astro-man? Reboots for 21st Century
Rejoice earthlings! If you have not received the transmission yet, MoAM is back from orbit.
via wired:
The sonic space cadets in Man or Astro-man? mashed surf, sci-fi, punk, samples and Tesla coils into a jagged rock juggernaut, touring nonstop in the ’90s before burning out at the dawn of the ’00s. But the Alabama-based band has rebooted for the ’10s, and returns to interface live with fans on a U.S. tour next month.
Contrary to unpopular opinion, the quartet wasn’t just waiting around for developments in nanoscience to help repair its worn-out biocircuitry (although the band members are totally fine with that idea).
Also, check out this great interview over at Chunklet.
Britain Uses Classical Music For Social Control
Authorities across Britain are introducing classical music in public places — not for citizens’ enjoyment, but as a social control device. The concept harkens back to scenes in A Clockwork Orange. From Reason:
In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace.
Across the UK, local councils and other public institutions now play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere…as a deterrent against bad behavior.
Tyne and Wear in the north of England was one of the first parts of the UK to weaponize classical music. In the early 2000s, the local railway company decided to do something about the “problem” of “youths hanging around” its train stations.
Was Jimi Hendrix’s Ambidexterity the Key to His Virtuosity?
Instead of “virtuosity” I would say “genius” … a very interesting article from Sean Michaels in the Guardian:
Was Jimi Hendrix’s ambidexterity the secret to his talent? This is the question explored in a new paper by psychologist Stephen Christman (via TwentyFourBit), who argues that Hendrix’s versatility informed not just his guitar-playing – but his lyrics too.
According to Christman, who is based at the University of Toledo, Hendrix was not strictly left-handed. Although he played his right-handed guitar upside down, and used his left hand to throw, comb his hair and hold cigarettes, Hendrix wrote, ate and held the telephone with his right hand. He was, Christman argues, “mixed-right-handed”. And this “mixed”-ness, signaling better interaction between the left and right hemispheres of the guitarist’s brain, suffused every part of his music.
John Lennon Plays Dead in Beatles Last Photoshoot
Prophetic and creepy. See more photos at dailymail.co.uk
An apparently lifeless John Lennon lies on the ground, his fellow-Beatles by his side. The haunting picture was taken in 1968 – 12 years before Lennon was gunned down by a crazed fan, Mark Chapman, in New York City.
It was one of many images taken by society photographer Tom Murray during the Fab Four’s last official photoshoot in 1968, which lay forgotten in an envelope for decades.
It was among a number of photographs which were made public today after lying forgotten about for years.
‘From two rolls of film there are 23 surviving shots. The colours are astonishing and it’s basically because the original slides were kept in the dark in an envelope for so many years.’
AC/DC’s Brian Johnson: Bono Should Do Charity Work In Private
Brian Johnson is no Bon Scott, but he’s got balls. Kudos to this raunchy Australian for pointing out how pretentious and self-absorbed it is to give and not be silent.
From The Huffington Post:
AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson is taking on Bono and Bob Geldof for their public displays of charity work.
“When I was a working man I didn’t want to go to a concert for some bastard to talk down to me that I should be thinking of some kid in Africa,” he told Melbourne’s Herald Sun. “I’m sorry mate, do it yourself, spend some of your own money and get it done. It just makes me angry. I become all tyrannical.”
Johnson said that his own band prefers to make their charitable contributions in private.
“Do a charity gig, fair enough, but…
Fever Ray’s Disturbing Acceptance Speech
If you thought Lady Gaga was weird, check out what happens in Sweden. This is electro sensation Fever Ray, popular in indie music circles in the U.S., giving her acceptance speech after winning “best dance artist” at P3 Gold, a Swedish equivalent of the Grammys.
Red State Soundsystem’s Josh Ellis on DIY Music Production and more
Via Technoccult:
Multi-instrumentalist Joshua Ellis, who records under the name Red State Soundsystem, has just self-released his debut album Ghosts a Burning City. Ellis — whose music sounds like a cross between Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails — recorded, mixed, and mastered the album himself. I caught up with him via instant messenger to talk about his music and DIY music production. [...]
The most important things, I think, are these: a good audio interface with minimal noise and high-bitrate capabilities, and the best microphone preamp you can afford. With those things, you can afford to be a little lax on other stuff.
Also, the most important investment is time. Learn everything you can. Listen to your favorite albums, figure out what you like about the sound, try to figure out how…
Jay Reatard Dead At 29
Modern-day garage rock wunderkind Jay Reatard has just died in his sleep in his home at age 29.
An underground sensation and cult hero in Memphis since his teens, Reatard had just recently begun to get more mainstream attention, as evidenced by a lengthy and fairly silly profile in the New York Times this past summer.
He leaves behind a large body of recordings, as well as a reputation involving excessive drug use, stage antics and violence at shows, and feuds with other artists. If you haven’t heard his abrasive, punk-inspired music, now’s a good time to take a listen…he always lived up to his name.
The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion
Jaron Lanier performing at the Garden of Memory Solstice Concert June, 2009. Photo: Allan J. Cronin, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
By JOHN TIERNEY for the New York Times:
When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs?
In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts.
Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto…
Rock Concerts of the Future
Michael Garfield writes on h+ Magazine:
A technology reporter sees a day when the music industry abandons “leasing licenses on intellectual property” and earns its money from exotic technology-enhanced concert experiences.
Currently we have multi-camera concert streams and the ability to “telepresence” sounds (which may one day allow the blind to drive). But he visualizes live feeds from special eyeglasses provided to concertgoers — as well as footage piped directly to their eyeglasses. “Telepresencing technology and the raw hunger of fans for free and novel entertainment is in an arms race with corporate ingenuity’s efforts to commodify increasingly abstract souvenir experiences … In response to freely available live music, the industry must work harder to create points of artificial scarcity and more intimate/intricate pay-to-play options.”
‘White Christmas’ Songwriter Actually Hated Christmas
The following article is an excerpt of “The Music’s Debt to Nonbelievers” by Dan Barker, one of 41 articles in the Disinformation anthology, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick. For more on Dan Barker, check out the Freedom From Religion Foundation (ffrf.org).
———————————————————————————–
Irving Berlin (1888–1989)
How many patriotic Americans know that “God Bless America” was written by a man who did not believe in God? Or that it was intended as an anti-war anthem?
Irving Berlin is by any measure the greatest composer of popular American music, with hundreds of enduring hits, such as “White Christmas,” “Anything You Can Do,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “I Love a Piano,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Marie,” “Play a Simple Melody,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and “Easter Parade.”
Born in 1888 into a Russian-Jewish family who came to New York City in 1893 to escape religious persecution, he quickly shed his religious roots and fell in love with America. “Patriotism was Irving Berlin’s true religion,” notes biographer Laurence Bergreen.
“Though he is not a religious person,” his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett writes in her family memoir, “doesn’t even keep up appearances of being an observant Jew, he does not forget who his people are.” Irving and his nominally Catholic wife, Ellin, were married in an unannounced secular ceremony at the Municipal Building, not a church or synagogue.
Thank You, Professor, That Was Putrid
Ben Ratliff focuses on Black Metal for the New York Times:
The bald, beefy moderator, Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, approached the podium in darkness. “It is my revolting pleasure,” he susurrated, pulling on his long goatee, “to introduce Professor Erik Butler, who will present his paper ‘The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances.’ ”
And Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of…
Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” Was The Best Song Of The Decade
Rolling Stone Magazine is making all kinds of end of decade lists. Now that albums are a thing of the past, the only one that really counts is best song … so was Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” really the best since the last millennium?
Here’s the top 10:
6 | The White Stripes — “Seven Nation Army”
10 | Eminem — “Stan”
[see the full list in Rolling Stone]
The Blood and the Stones
From The Star:
Four months after the love-in of Woodstock, the Stones played a fateful, fatal concert on Dec. 6, 1969 – and its stain on rock ‘n’ roll has lingered ever sinc.
Altamont, it could only happen to the Stones, man. Let’s face it. It wouldn’t happen to the Bee Gees and it wouldn’t happen to Crosby, Stills and Nash. –Keith Richards, 1971
In the middle of the night before the `free’ Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco, Keith Richards drove to the last-minute site with the filmmaking team of Albert and David Maysles. The car passed a group of kids ripping apart a fence just for the hell of it.
Richards stared.
“The first act of violence,” he quipped.
On the DVD commentary he recorded for the 2000 release of the definitive…
10 Albums Which Defined the Dotcom Era
A former DJ identifies the 10 albums “that defined the dotcom era”.
“When that wave of prosperity which brought us there – for a happy, shiny moment – rolled back violently, these kids found out even drugs wouldn’t help.” But remembering the 90s as “the time of Napster’s infinite-mp3-download-orgy,” Steve Robles asks whether there could be a nostalgia craze for music from the era. “Someone sold a lot of kids on the idea that the Brave New World had been reached,” he points out, also arguing that there’s now a subsequent bleakness “which continues to this day.”
And he lists the albums which historians will remember as defining the decade – while simultaneously noting that 10 years from now, no one will even be using the word ‘album’!”
The Ten Most Amazing Things From the New Lady Gaga Music Video
A fun list inspired by the best music video for years, by James Brady Ryan in Nerve.com:
Guys, I don’t even know. Can you really “list” something that clearly comes from beyond the borders of our dimension, and may not even adhere to the concepts of mathematics as we know them? YES!
So, the video for Lady Gaga’s new single, “Bad Romance,” is out. (Working title: “Bad Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”) You can watch it here, and then, once the screaming is done, you can join me for a list of the best/scariest moments from the video itself.
10. Hello Gaga:
Fun fact: this is how Lady Gaga actually sees other people.
