Apparently there is a new (and exceedingly posthumous) Klaus Nomi album; there are three way-out mp3s from it on this site. Today’s Village Voice published a little oral history of the East Village legend. There is also this incredible performance on YouTube—which, oddly, is of quite nearly exactly the music (or at least the harmonic progressions) from Michael Nyman’s “Memorial” from “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover”… which came out in 1989, though it was apparently first performed in 1985; Nomi died in 1983. Update: Ah ha! Rumors on the internet say the tune is based on Purcell.
Sad news. Guitar Hero 3 and I have broken up. Sure, we might hook up occasionally when I’m lonely at night, but our relationship is effectively over. I can play every song1 without effort on Easy mode but can barely make it through any on Medium after dozens of tries. So so lame. I’ve hit the wall and my pinky is to blame…the damn thing just won’t work properly and I’m unwilling to try playing with just three fingers (a la Clapton) because that seems like a dead end once Mr. Orange Button comes into play.
But the real reason is that because I don’t have a natural talent for the game, the only way to get better is through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Deliberate practice…sounds like fun! Yeah, no. No doubt I could master the game with enough focused effort, but when games stop being fun and become deliberate, that’s where I get off. Back to the surprising depth of Desktop TD.
[1] When relationships end, that’s when the lies start. The one song I still can’t play all the way through is Slayer’s Raining Blood. That damn song is just random notes as far I can can tell. ↩
Leung began his career as a part of hammer & tongs, the creative team behind many influential music videos as well as the movies Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, on which he acted as 2nd unit director and title sequence director, and the upcoming Son of Rambow, which he edited. (via antville)
Tucked in among The Kinks, The Velvet Underground and Belle & Sebastian, the track behind the animated opening title sequence for the new movie Juno is All I Want is You by the children’s folk musician Barry Louis Polisar. It’s as inspired a choice for this enjoyable little movie as PT Anderson’s inclusion on the Punch Drunk Love soundtrack of He Needs Me (iTunes link), Olive Oyl’s love song from Robert Altman’s 1980 adaptation of Popeye.
Polisar was a favorite of mine as a kid. In particular, the 1978 album Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls was my undisputed favorite record. Featuring the classics Don’t Put Your Finger Up Your Nose and Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan, the album has never gone out of print. Give the tracks a listen on iTunes and if you have kids, this will give them lots of laughs and teach them to rebell against their parents.
Activision is working with Nintendo on re-mastering the Guitar Hero III discs for the Wii, which have been mistakenly encoded to reproduce music in mono rather than in stereo. Once the re-mastering has been done, early next year, the company will swap out current Guitar Hero III discs for free.
I honestly hadn’t noticed the mono issue, but I’m still waiting for my replacement ‘Pet Sounds’ to ship.
Influenced by his idol, Elvis Presley and the 1950s rock revolution, he rose to stardom as the main figure of the 60s musical movement known as Jovem Guarda (Young guard, in opposition to the ‘old guard’ of Brazilian music), which was the first manifestation of the Brazilian pop rock movement.
Epic Records/Legacy Recordings is releasing a 25th Anniversary Special Edition of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” with bonus tracks including remixes by Akon, will.i.am, and Kanye West.
The latest installment of Super Mario has received plenty of notice for its revolutionary style of gameplay. But just as striking is the intricacy of its sound design. One convention of the game is a Pull Star, a floating anchor that Mario can grab with some sort of magical, musical force which, when activated emits a creepy, almost theremin-like wail, wavering just a bit before solemnly sliding down in pitch. This sound is one of those elemental formulas for touching an emotional soft spot. The other day I was playing a level with a series of Pull Stars in succession and my girlfriend implored me to stop, as it was making her sad, and not only because I’m a grown man playing a child’s video game. Here is an example of the Wailing Pull Star (and a taste of the very Vangelis-like score scattered throughout the game).
Also: via Boing Boing Gadgets, footage from a live orchestra scoring session for the game. Mario’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto sits aside and supervises.
Also also: I noticed that the menu for selecting levels to play is a musical instrument in its own right, allowing the player to create melody with chord changes and everything. It’s a subtle touch.
Been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately…I just played it for the first time recently so of course I’m looking around the web for advice, hacks, YouTube videos, etc. Nothing like a little web research to reinforce how little you know.
Anyhoo, I found this video of a 8-yo kid shredding it up on Guitar Hero 2…he missed only three notes on an expert level song and wasn’t even looking at the screen some of the time. Little blighter. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go have a few alcoholic drinks, smoke some cigarettes, rent a car, and join the Army…let’s see him do all that! (P.S. I wrote a hit play!)
Guitar Hero offers a connection to all this, but departs from it in an obvious way: You’re not actually playing the guitar. No matter how good you may get at Guitar Hero, if you decide to take up the real instrument at some point, you’ll be starting from scratch.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a rock star and there’s no way I can pick up a guitar right now and play it, but the pretend version of the whole rock n’ roll thing that Guitar Hero provides is pretty powerful, at least for this impressionable newbie. Playing Guitar Hero and believing you’re a rock star might be like eating apple pie on the internet, but if you don’t know the difference in the first place, does it matter?
Japanese researchers have developed “melody roads” that play tunes when you drive on them. You could use this technique for traffic calming…i.e. the road plays music only when you’re driving the speed limit and hope that there’s no second-order melody that plays at two times the speed limit to entice highway hackers to speed for forbidden tunes.
Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and the author of a new book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, “a history of the twentieth century through its music”. My interest in music skews toward the contemporary popular, so I recently took the opportunity to ask Ross a few questions about classical music from the novice-but-interested music listener’s perspective.
Jason Kottke: I’ve enjoyed classical music whenever I’ve heard it, but I don’t know too much about it. Where might I begin to explore further?
Alex Ross: My big thing is that classical music doesn’t really exist. When you have a repertory that goes from Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval chant to Vivaldi’s bustling Baroque concertos to Wagner’s five-hour music dramas to John Cage’s chance-produced electronic noise to Steve Reich’s West African-influenced “Drumming,” you’re not talking about a single sound. Whatever variety of noise you desire, we’ve got it at the classical emporium. I’d suggest plunging it at various ends of the spectrum - some Vivaldi or Bach, the Beethoven “Eroica” or some other big-shouldered nineteenth-century classic, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (which foreshadows so much pop music to come), and Reich or Philip Glass. The idea is to get a feeling for what composers were trying to express at any given time, and, of course, deciding whether you want to follow them. There’s no correct path through the labyrinth.
Kottke: I just received a copy of your book in the mail, and it’s got a “Suggested Listening” section following the endnotes with 10 recommended recordings and 20 more if you make it through those. How did you go about choosing those? Narrowing the 20th century musical landscape down to 30 recordings…that’s pretty cheeky.
Ross: It’s very hard, not to mention cheeky, picking recommended recordings, because so often it’s a matter of personal taste, both in terms of what works really “matter” and also in terms of which recordings are best. The almighty “Rite of Spring” has received any number of brilliant recordings over the years. Having picked one of Stravinsky’s own versions - he had such a great feeling for rhythm as a conductor - I immediately wondered whether I should have chosen the recent Esa-Pekka Salonen/LA Philharmonic version on DG, which is in gleaming modern sound and is as rock-solid as any “Rite” of modern times. So it’s subjective and leads to endless argument. But I was simply recommending a bunch of starting points, not the be-all end-all ultimate Top 10 of all time. I favored recordings that were cheap, that covered a lot of ground in 60 or 70 minutes. People can listen to excerpts on iTunes and Amazon and see if they really want to plunk down the cash. One thing’s for sure: you do need to own the “Rite,” no matter what kind of music you love. It’s the original sexy.
Kottke: Related to the first question, when I go to Amazon and search for “Beethoven”, there are over 10,000 results just in the classical music category. There are even more results for Bach. Are there significant differences between all the different versions of their music? How does the bewildered beginner pick the “right” version of Bach’s works to listen to? Should you look for brand names (e.g. Yo-Yo Ma), only buy music recorded by major symphonies or put out by certain record labels, or just get whatever is cheapest?
Ross: It’s definitely overwhelming - a serious glut. I’ve been reviewing for fifteen years and in the last year or two I seem to be getting twice as many CDs as ever - not to mention all the MP3s that composers and ensembles have put up on the Internet. There are definitely some significant differences among recordings. You have a lot of expert but boring renditions and then you have the ones that touch perfection or posses exceptional emotional power. Listen to Lorrane Hunt Lieberson singing the Bach cantatas and everyone else will sound a little wan. Certain people are always reliable - Yo-Yo Ma is ever eloquent, Mitsuko Uchida is a great pianist, Claudio Abbado makes one great or near-great orchestral recording after another. You can tell from Amazon reviews when a recording has really knocked people sideways. But live concerts are always better! I’m sometimes more moved by a not great but heartfelt live performance than by a world-class recording. In the hall you feel the weight of the cellos, the resonances of tones in space, the response of the crowd, all those intangibles. Tickets are less expensive than you may think. Particularly if you’re a student, you can get amazing deals - $12 tickets for the New York Philharmonic, for example.
Kottke: One of the things I’ve noticed about classical music recordings is how reasonably priced they are, particularly the pre-20th century music. Have you read any of Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen? In it, he suggests that to get the most value out of your music buying dollar, you should pay more attention to music that hasn’t been recently released, the idea being that there are more gems to be found in the last 200 years of music than in this week’s Billboard lists. I have a feeling you might agree with that view.
Ross: That’s an interesting theory. If you buy Maria Callas’s recording of “Tosca,” chances are it’s probably still going to deliver the goods twenty years from now, if CDs or MP3s still exist then. Fergie is maybe a riskier long-term bet. Also interesting is Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept, which suggests that there’s more hidden commercial power in these thousands upon thousands of classical recordings than anyone suspected, even if they sell only a few times a year. The Naxos label says it gets 30-40% of total digital sales from albums that are downloaded 4 times a month or less. In any case, there’s now a huge catalogue of classical CDs that go for $10 or less. The Tashi recording of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” one of my top 10 picks, goes for $8 on Amazon. The Amazon download site was for a while offering Wagner’s entire sixteen-hour “Ring” cycle for $13.98. This turned out to be a clerical error, but enough classical-heads converged on the bargain that for a day or two Richard Wagner was the #1 downloaded artist on Amazon, beating out Kanye West. That amused me. Watch out for these classical guys - they start slow but beat you in the end.
Kottke: Let’s say you’re still around 80 years from now, writing a sequel to The Rest is Noise about music from 1980 to 2080. What contemporary music (circa 1980-2007) will still be important and relevant in 2080?
Ross: That’s a tough question! Critics often turn out to be very wrong about what’s truly important in their own time. George Bernard Shaw, for example, considered Hermann Goetz a great composer, a worthy successor to Beethoven. Though is “wrong” the right word? If Shaw had deep feelings about that music, he was, within his personal frame of reference, absolutely right. In classical music we maybe focus too much on the idea that the opinion of posterity is the only one that matters. In any case, here are twelve works that I believe will still matter to me, at least, if by some medical miracle I’m still around in 2080:
Steve Reich, Different Trains
John Adams, Nixon in China
Kaija Saariaho, L’Amour de loin
Sofia Gubaidulina, Offertorium
Gérard Grisey, Les Espaces acoustiques
Arvo Pärt, Da pacem domine
Louis Andriessen, De Stijl
Thomas Ades, Asyla
Georg Friedrich Haas, in vain
Michael Gordon, Decasia
Magnus Lindberg, Kraft
Osvaldo Golijov, St. Mark Passion
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