kottke.org posts about Music
Which of the following works would you choose to be lost, if only three could be saved: Michelangelo’s Pieta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity? Not so sure I agree with the conclusion here…surely Einstein’s paper stands as a work unto itself, apart from the discovery it contains. Plus, maybe someone else (or a group of someone elses) wouldn’t have given us relativity as elegantly and usefully as Einstein did. (via 3qd)
Comparison of the iPhone with other smart phones…a nice companion piece to the comparison of my cardboard iPhone to various iPods, mobile phones, etc. So far, the market thinks that Apple’s got something good on their hands: Apple stock was up $7.10 today while RIMM (makers of Blackberry) dropped $11.16.
Apple’s new iPhone looks like a thing of beauty. Widescreen touch interface, no buttons, runs OS X, useful widgets, integrated email, Google Maps, Google/Yahoo search, visual voicemail (see who voicemail is from before you call), SMS, Wifi, etc. etc. Oh, and it plays music.
A lot of people are wondering just how big this thing is. Using the technical specs from apple.com, I grabbed some cardboard, scissors, and glue and made a scale model of the iPhone. Here it is:
My hands aren’t that big (I can barely palm a basketball on a good day), but it still seems to fit pretty well. How does it stack up against similar devices?
Here’s the iPhone vs. my current mobile phone, the Nokia 7610:
iPhone vs. a 5G iPod:
Thickness of the cardboard iPhone vs. the 5G iPod:
1G iPod shuffle, 3G iPod, 5G iPod and the iPhone:
iPhone vs. a TiVo remote and a Wii remote:
That’s all the gadgets I could find on a couple of hours notice.
I also dug up something I wrote a couple of years ago in the gigantic text file I keep on my Powerbook of ideas for kottke.org posts. 99% of the stuff in that file is completely dunderheaded, but I have to say I hit close to the mark on this one:
true convergence of phone + mp3 player will happen when someone solves this user experience puzzle: physically not enough room for two optimized interfaces (one for calls, one for music) on same small device. possible solution: no buttons, replace with touch screen that covers the whole front with one-touch switching between modes…
Once we’re able to get our hands on it and use the interface, the iPhone could turn out to be a disappointment, but they’re heading in the right direction at least. More thoughts soon.
(Like this story? Digg it.)
Last.fm keeps track of what music I like so I don’t have to. Here’s a list of my favorite artists from 2006, apparently:
1. Boards of Canada
2. Ladytron
3. Cloud Cult
4. Marumari
5. Gnarls Barkley
6. Metric
7. John Digweed (good coding/writing music)
8. Röyksopp
9. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
10. Alexandre Desplat (Syriana soundtrack, haven’t listened to this in six months)
11. Mogwai
12. Sigur Ros
13. Mint Royale (I didn’t even like this)
14. Daft Punk
15. The Smashing Pumpkins (golden oldies)
16. Fischerspooner
17. Coldplay
18. Broken Social Scene
19. Sound Advice (Gnarls/Biggie mashup)
20. Bloc Party
21. Ulrich Schnauss
22. Sasha (good coding/writing music)
23. Wolf Parade (didn’t like this either)
24. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
25. Arctic Monkeys (nor this)
Not sure this is such an accurate representation of the music that I enjoyed this year. And where’s CSS? I’ve been listening to them a ton in the last couple of weeks and they’re not even on the list. Upon closer inspection, it looks like last.fm doesn’t include the current month in their “rolling year charts”.
Last Saturday, Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg collaborated on a music video for a new holiday gift idea: Dick in the Box. If you haven’t seen the video yet, go now and then come back…it’s pretty funny and you won’t understand the rest of this if you haven’t seen it. So go!
You back? So, my favorite part of the song is the instructions and yesterday while we were alternating between watching the video like 50 times and assembling some IKEA furniture for the office, I had the obvious idea. Ikea instructions for making Dick in a Box:
More Dick in a Box: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead version, Line Rider version, some guy dancing in his living room with a box fastened to his crotch with a belt version, and a this is either brilliant or completely stupid (DURRR! DURRR!) video response.
Chan Marshall (AKA Cat Power) on the Richard Avedon photo of her in the New Yorker: “I was so drunk I could barely stand up. I couldn’t zip up my pants because my stomach was killing me. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t wearing underwear until the magazine came out.” (via conscientious)
Top 50 music videos of 2006. Includes inline video so you can watch them all. (via waxy)
Kevin Smith’s iTunes Celebrity Playlist got rejected by Apple because his comments were too long. “This is a great playlist. Too great, actually. We don’t have the space for comments that run that long.”
David echoes my reaction to seeing a Zune in person for the first time this weekend: “I just saw a Zune, and guess what? Its a piece of shit.” I usually give people a hard time for making snap judgments about technology that takes time to get to know (comments like “this interface sucks” after 20 seconds of use make my eyes go rolling), but the Zune…it’s like the story of the Getty’s Greek kouros that Gladwell tells in Blink: one look and you know it’s wrong. Andre has been trying a Zune out for the last couple of weeks and doesn’t mind it even though he’s giving up on it.
Are you ready? I said, ARE YOU READY? End-of-the-year list season has begun!! Woo! Let’s get it started with Information Leafblower’s list of the top 40 bands in America as chosen by a bunch of music bloggers. Lots of guitar music that the indie rock kids like so much.
Human beatbox Lasse Gjertsen has taken his skills to the next level. His new video, Amateur, is a clever bit of video sampling: Gjertsen builds an entire song out of tiny video soundbytes of him playing the drums and piano. It’s hard to explain, just watch the damn thing. Cameron says the video “feels like what DJ Shadow would produce if he made videos”.
Merlin Mann recently wrote two posts about managing your music library using iTunes Smart Playlists. His suggestions for making music-only playlists (for those that have a lot of podcasts & audiobooks in their libraries) and the “sure you really like that?” playlist are especially helpful. One of my recent favorite Smart Playlists is helpful for discovering good stuff that I haven’t listened to in awhile:
The Last Skipped bit is in there because while listening to this playlist, I found myself skipping stuff I didn’t want to hear and that rule gets it out there so that it doesn’t come up again. An item on my Smart Playlist wishlist is the ability to measure popularity acceleration (basically, something like “gimme the most played over the last week”), but there’s no way (that I can find) to ask iTunes how many times a song has been played in the last x days.
Several more Smart Playlist suggestions are available at smartplaylists.com and Andy Budd.
Commerical for a game called Gears of War featuring a cover of Tears for Fears’ Mad World by Gary Jules (which you might remember from Donnie Darko). The ultraviolence and poignance is an interesting juxtaposition.
Update: Greg Allen uncovers the original music video for the aforementioned Mad World cover, directed by Michel Gondry.
Update: So, the long GoW video posted above was created by a fan using the original version (also at YouTube) directed by Joseph Kosinski (David Fincher consulted on it as well, I guess). (thx, chris)
Pixies fans, this is the news you’re all been waiting for: new album in 2007. (via plastcibag)
A couple from Ireland (by way of Mexico), Rodrigo and Gabriela totally blew the audience away here at PopTech with their thrash metal-influenced Latin percussive acoustic guitar. I know that’s not much to go on, but trust me on this one. Check out some of their stuff on YouTube and then buy their new CD. (Best part of their set: they threw in a little Enter Sandman by Metallica, which went over the head of everyone in the audience over 35, i.e. almost everyone.)
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich’s piece showed him that:
1. You don’t need much.
2. The composer’s role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener’s brain.
I’d never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I’d seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel’s show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich’s concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses’ track Sweet Child O’Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song’s music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He’s veered away from video games, but Cory’s new work is looking really interesting these days.
The Wordless Music Series is an attempt to bring together classical music and more contemporary music, the differences between which “are an artificial construction in need of dismantling”. The next concert is on 11/15/2006 in NYC and tickets are priced for young concertgoers in mind.
Top 100 most popular classical music pieces, featuring stuff like Beethoven’s 5th, Pomp and Circumstance, and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
The soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette contains tracks by Aphex Twin, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Squarepusher, and The Strokes. Boy, people are either going to love or hate this movie.
Ben Folds cover of Such Great Heights by The Postal Service using found percussion instruments (like a champagne glass and a plastic mail bin). (thx, james)
Stylus magazine has a list of their top 100 favorite videos, complete with embedded YouTube clips of the videos themselves for your instant gratification. Ok, now let’s fight about what was excluded and how wrong that is… (via paul)
A list of the 50 worst things ever to happen to music, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (#50) to Suge Knight (#2)…I won’t spoil #1.
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