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The social networks of the rap music world “differ from all other human networks”. By and large, successful rap artists don’t collaborate/hang out with one another, as usually happens in other human social groups. (via cd)
iTunes Signature Maker analyzes your iTunes collection (in the browser via a Java applet) and creates a short sound collage of the music that you listen to most frequently or have rated highly. Here’s the signatute it created for me. (thx, paul)
How to make your best-of-the-year music list as hip as it can be. “Make sure to include an album that just came out. This will lead people to believe that you got an advanced copy months ago and had plenty of time to get into it.”
A “song quilt” for Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase album. “Listening to the recording, I ignored song titles; creating images that represent the intangible connection between what I was hearing and what I was ‘seeing’ in my head”. There was a design site that did something like this several years ago…one of the Swanky sites, I think. Ring a bell?
For The Life Aquatic soundtrack, Seu Jorge covered a few David Bowie songs in Portuguese. Now he’s released an entire album of them.
The top 40 bands in America (in 2005) according to a small group of music bloggers. Indie rock-heavy, if you like that sort of thing. Off to check out The National.
DMC, the latter half of Run-DMC, has abandoned his trademark (my) Adidas for Le Coq Sportif.
Ok, one last wrap-up post about Hong Kong and then we’re focusing on the matter at hand in Bangkok (short summary: having a great time so far here). So, three things I really liked about/in Hong Kong and then some miscellaneous stuff.
1. Octopus cards. I really can’t say enough about how cool these cards are. Wikipedia provides a quickie definition: “The Octopus card is a rechargeable contactless stored value smart card used for electronic payment in online or offline systems in Hong Kong.” It’s a pay-as-you go stored value card…you put $100 bucks on it and “recharge” the card when it’s empty (or when it’s even more than empty…as long as your balance is positive when you use it, you can go into a HK$35 deficit, which you pay when you recharge the card). You can use it on pratically any public transportation in the city: buses, trains, MTR, trams, ferries, etc. It works with vending machines, at 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and the supermarket. You don’t need to take it out of your wallet or purse to use it, just hold it near the sensor. Your card is not tied to your identity…there’s no PIN, you can pay cash, they don’t need to know your credit card number, SS#, or anything like that. They even make watches and mobile phones that have Octopus built it, so your phone (or watch) becomes your wallet. Mayor Bloomberg, if you’re listening, NYC needs this.
2. The on-train maps for the MTR. Here’s a (sort of blurry) photo (taken with my cameraphone):
The current stop blinks red — in this case, Tsim Sha Tsui (blinking not shown, obviously) — with the subsequent stops lit in red. If the next stop connects to another line, that line blinks as well. A small green arrow indicates which direction you’re traveling and there’s an indictor (not shown) which lights up either “exit this side” or “exit other side” depending which way the doors are going to open. Great design.
3. Muji! We located one in Langham Place (an uber-story mall) in Mong Kok (for reference, the store in Silvercord in TST listed on their site has closed). Muji is kind of hard to describe if you’ve never been to one of their stores before (and if you live in the US, you probably haven’t because they’re aren’t any, aside from a small outpost in the MoMA Store). Adam (see previous link) roughly translates the name as “No Brand, Good Product”, so you can see why I like it so much. They sell a wide variety of products (take a look at their Japanese-only online store for an idea of what they carry); at the Monk Kok store, they had snacks & drinks, some furniture (made out of sturdy cardboard), their signature pens and notebooks (a display of the former was completely surrounded by a moat of teenaged girls, so much so that I didn’t get a chance to test any of the super-thin pens), some clothes (including some great pants that they didn’t have in anything approaching my size), dishes, cosmetics, bath products, and containers of all shapes, sizes, and uses. I wanted one of everything, but settled for a couple of shirts (with absolutely no logos or markings, inside or out, to indictate that they are Muji products).
m1. Big Buddha, worth the trip. It’ll better when the tram from Tung Chung and back is built, although then you’ll miss the boat ride (fun) and the bus ride (harrowing at times).
m2. The Peak Tram. Touristy, but also worth the trip. The weird/ugly anvil-shaped building at the top is currently under construction, so the views will be much better when its finished. Go at night for the best view.
m3. The view from the waterfront in Kowloon of the Hong Kong skyline at night is one of the best in the world.
m4. Speaking of, Hong Kong is a night-time city. All the buildings are lit up, there’s a nightly light show at 8pm (think Laser Floyd without the music), and buildings that appear monolithic in the daytime transform at night, either by disappearing into the darkness while leaving a graceful trace of their outline or acting as huge screens for projected light shows. Reminded me of Vegas in this respect.
m5. We had tea in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel (go for the view, it’s incredible) and the live band played the theme song from The Lord of the Rings. I tried to get a recording of it with my phone (iPod was back in our hotel room), but it didn’t turn out so well. Very weird; we were cracking up and expecting the theme from Superman or even 3’s Company to follow.
m6. Oh, I’m sure there’s more, so I’ll add it here as I think of stuff.
The readers of DJ Magazine picks the top 100 DJs for 2005. Top honors go to Paul van Dyk.
Tom Coates fills us in on the Annotatable Audio project he worked on at the BBC. Basically, you select a timed section of an audio file (music, newscast, etc.) and then you write a little something about it, Wikipedia-style.
Beloved DJ John Peel kept a special record box of 142 singles…here’s the list of what was in the box.
What the fizzle? While I was apparently living in a cave, Broken Social Scene came out with a new album. What’s the skinny? Is it any good? You Forgot It In People was one of my favorite albums of the past two years.
PDF (2.3 Mb) of nifty infoviz graphs that show different improvisation styles for jazz greats Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane. More here. Reminds me a little of Tufte’s sparklines.
This Bird Has Flown is a tribute album of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul on the 40th anniversary of its release. Includes covers by Ted Leo, The Fiery Furnaces, and Sufjan Stevens.
An index of mp3s of old TV theme songs. Would-be DJs take note: a friend of mine was DJing a party back in college and he threw on the Knight Rider theme song and people went bonkers. (via rw)
Update: Sound America also has an extensive collection of TV themes in WAV format. (thx josh)
Neil is compiling a list of notable musicians who blog…help him out in the comments. So far, he’s got Franz, Radiohead, Shatner (!), Ted Leo, M Doughty, etc.
Franz Ferdinand** has a blog and you don’t probably do too.
** The band, not the archduke.
Interview with Boards of Canada on the eve of the release of their new album, The Campfire Headphase. Their Geogaddi is one of my favorite albums of the last 20 years. (thx, lots of people)
Ahhhhhh!!!! Why didn’t anyone #$%(#&ing tell me that Boards of Canada is releasing a new album next month? My excitement for this, it could cut glass, it could!
Hot indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (who I like quite alot) has sold 17,000 copies of their self-released debut. The band sends out the CDs to customers themselves and makes $8/disc (compared to $1/disc for major label groups). Their CD is available here and you can listen to some samples before buying (1, 2, 3).
Music video for Breathe Me by Sia, that song at the end of the last episode of Six Feet Under.
Cool video by the British group Hexstatic for a song called Distorted Minds. It’s almost audiovisual hypertext.
Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) has a new book out about remix culture called Rhythm Science. More on the book at MIT Press and it’s available at Amazon.
Heading out to CMJ this week in NYC? Coolfer has some thoughts on which groups might make a big splash among the glut of live music that CMJ brings to the already-oversupplied city.
Sigur Ros played New York’s Beacon Theatre last night, and it was one of the oddest rock and roll shows I’ve been to. Not that I’ve been to a lot of shows, but still. It was like going to the symphony…everyone sat quietly in their seats, clapped politely at the conclusion of songs, and since the music was so quiet at times, people were shushed for talking too loudly (after awhile, most of the audience got clued in that you couldn’t just yak during the whole thing like at normal concerts). And then there was the 30 seconds of complete silence when the band paused in the middle of a song — not a peep from the audience — and then kept right on playing. Great show though…the visuals for the last two songs (final song + encore) were especially impressive. Makes me remember how much I like Sigur Ros. Even though I’ve heard their older albums a thousand times, I don’t get sick of them. I’m looking forward to listening to the new album on the train ride to Boston today.
Here’s some Flickr photos of the show…probably a mixture of stuff from last night’s show and the previous night’s.
Among classical music composers, the “curse of the ninth” is a fear of ninth symphonies because many prominant composers have died after completing them. (via 92y)
WolframTones lets you generate and download ringtones based on patterns created by cellular automata systems. Anything’s better than the Crazy Frog, yeah?
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