Beatles infographics
The most interesting of several infographics related to The Beatles is the first one depicting the declining rate of collaboration within the band gleaned from songwriting credit data.
(thx, bryan)
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
kottke.org posts about Music
World-changing music
To ponder over the weekend: twenty pieces of music that changed the world. #11 on the list is Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. (via @bobulate)
Two-Headed Boy
Video of Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel singing Two-Headed Boy at the Knitting Factory in NYC on March 7, 1998.
Intensity.
Lady Gaga + typeface = awesome
Jesus, this is nerdy (and hilarious): a Lady Gaga parody about a typeface.
(via @caterina)
OK Go, WTF
A delightfully low-tech but colorful music video from OK Go. Looks like it was shot it one take.
You may remember OK Go from their famous treadmill video. (thx, mike)
Update: Here’s how they made the video. (thx, everyone)
Video mixtape
Somehow Ricardo Autobahn has constructed a coherent mix-video song from all sorts of movie and TV clips. It’s just flat-out awesome; watch it:
See also Christian Marclay. (via fimoculous)
The Hood Internet Mixtape Vol Four
Just out. Haven’t listened yet (downloading now) but if the last three are any indication, this is gonna be a great Monday for listenin’. Sample tracks:
5. Lil Wayne (feat. Babyface) vs Royksopp - Comfortable Up Here
15. Michael Jackson vs Ratatat - Billie “Wildcat” Jean
19. R. Kelly (feat. Keri Hilson) vs Sally Shapiro - Number One Christmas
31. Ghostface Killah vs Beirut - Save Me Concubine
99 Vivaldi mp3s for $2.99
Today only on Amazon: 99 Vivaldi masterpieces on mp3 for $2.99. (US only.) See also other great Amazon music deals.
Alternate post title: I’ve got 99 Vivaldis but a Bach ain’t one.
Free Philip Glass mp3s
Amazon has a sampler album of music from Philip Glass available right now for free. Not sure how long that will last so snap it up. See also lots of inexpensive classical music on Amazon.
Update: Here’s a list of all the free mp3 albums on Amazon, 141 in all.
Star Guitar
Star Guitar music video. Music by The Chemical Brothers. Video directed by Michel Gondry.
The making of the Star Guitar music video.
Ever since this video blew my mind when I first watched it, I’ve wondered how it was made. Turns out Gondry tested the concept out on a sidewalk with oranges, shoes, videotapes, and drinking glasses. Alas, the making of doesn’t cover the three months of post production required by the finished product, although the video isn’t completely digital as you might expect:
The video is based on DV footage Gondry shot while on vacation in France. They shot the train ride 10 different times during the day to get different light gradients.
Still love that video.
Music videos of the decade
Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)
Alex Ross on the move
Alex Ross has moved his blog from The Rest is Noise to the New Yorker site. It’s now called Unquiet Thoughts.
Beyonce’s Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose
A good example of what Robin Sloan calls the production-as-performance video.
What I love about the approach is that it’s showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It’s entertaining, but it’s also an exercise in demystification — which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.
Carl Sagan Auto-Tune (feat. Stephen Hawking)
Maybe you’re tired of un-pop-music-like things being run through Auto-Tune, but I’m not quite there yet. This Auto-Tuned Carl Sagan mix is very nearly sublime.
Cool cats
Francis Wolff was an executive at Blue Note Records who also took tens of thousands of photos of the label’s musicians.
A selection of Wolff’s photos are available here and here.
Update: More photos.
Uberorgan
In 2001, Tim Hawkinson created Uberorgan for the gallery at MassMOCA.
Several bus-size biomorphic balloons, each with its horn tuned to a different note in the octave, make up a walk-in self-playing organ. A 200 foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encodes a musical score of old hymns, pop classics, and improvisational ditties. This score is deciphered by the organ’s brain - a bank of light sensitive switches - and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into non-repeating variations of the score.
Part sculpture, part giant musical instrument, Hawkinson’s installation was a loose interpretation of the human body’s organ systems. Uberorgan conducted itself for five minutes every hour, on the hour. The exhibition traveled from MassMOCA to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where it graced the museum’s entrance hall during the exhibit of Hawkinson’s work called Zoopsia, a name that means “visual hallucinations of animals.”
You can hear a minute long sample of the Uberorgan on the Getty Center website. To me it sounds like a duet between a three-year-old jamming out on a bass saxophone and an elephant in a good mood.
Update: Tim Hawkinson and the Uberorgan are featured the Art:21 episode,”Time.” Seeing and hearing the piece, even on the small screen, is impressive, and Hawkinson explains how he came about creating such a voluminous, volume-driven work of art. (thx, cliff)
The top 200 albums of the 2000s
Pitchfork continues their look back at the 2000s with the top 200 albums of the decade. Here are the top 20.
Thom Yorke has a new band
The Radiohead frontman is forming a new band “for fun”…members include long-time Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich and Flea.
In the past couple of weeks i’ve been getting a band together for fun to play the eraser stuff live and the new songs etc.. to see if it could work! here’s a photo.. its me, joey waronker, mauro refosco, flea and nigel godrich.
(via @linklog)
Remastered Beatles albums
Today’s the day: those meticulously remastered Beatles albums are available today. The Beatles version of Rock Band is out as well.
MP3 sound quality: good enough
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood doesn’t think that the supposed low sound quality of MP3s is something to get worked up about.
We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.
This conversation with Greenwood is part of a new series by Sasha Frere-Jones’ on the sound quality of recorded music.
The solution to the soprano problem
The soprano problem is the mispronunciation of lyrics by sopranos at the high end of their range. In order to make themselves heard in opera houses, sopranos need their voices to resonate, which they only do when making certain sounds.
Jane Eaglen, a critically acclaimed soprano who has performed Wagner’s works in opera houses worldwide, explains that sopranos must try to find a balance between power and clarity. “It’s really about how you modify the vowels at the top of the voice so that the words are still understandable but so that you are also making the best sound that you can make,” she says.
A pair of scientists have found that the meticulous Richard Wagner may have been aware of this problem and wrote the soprano parts in his operas to minimize the mispronunciations.
Pitchfork’s songs of the decade
As part of their review of the music of the 2000s, Pitchfork listed the top 500 tracks of the past decade. Here are the top 10:
10. Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
9. Animal Collective, “My Girls”
8. Radiohead, “Idioteque”
7. Missy Elliott, “Get Ur Freak On”
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
5. Daft Punk, “One More Time”
4. Beyonce [ft. Jay-Z], “Crazy in Love”
3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy], “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”
2. LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
1. OutKast, “B.O.B.”
Be sure to click through for the extensive explanations. It would easy to nitpick specific selections, but that’s a pretty good top 10.
Gorilla vs. Bear also shared their top songs and albums of the decade.
No more Radiohead albums?
Thom Yorke says that there will be no more Radiohead albums.
“None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again,” he said. “Not straight off … It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.”
No!! (via @davidfg)
Eight hours of Bach for three bucks
Amazon’s mp3 store has another one of those deals today where you can get hours and hours of classical musics for pennies a song: 99 Bach masterpieces (8+ hours!) for $2.99. Even though Bach’s works preceded copyright protection, this is a good example of how our culture benefits from sensible copyright term limits: eight hours of some of the finest music ever composed for about the price of a Happy Meal. More good classical music mp3 deals here.
Guitar Hero 5 playlist
Amazon has a mp3 listing of all the songs that will be included in the upcoming Guitar Hero 5. Lots of great stuff in there.
Cory Arcangel’s atonal YouTube cat video mashup
Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 is a set of pieces written for the piano by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, some of the first western music to written in an atonal style. Cory Arcangel took a bunch of YouTube videos of cats playing the piano and fused them together into a performance of op. 11.
This project fuses a few different things I have been interested in lately, mainly “cats”, copy & paste net junk, and youtube’s tendency in the past few years to host videos that are as good and many times similar to my favorite video artworks. I think all this is somehow related.
Cory’s no-bullshit statements about his art are just as entertaining as the work itself:
So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos…
You can catch Cory’s project in-person at Team Gallery in NYC and at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria.
Stay Connected