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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?
The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme. If you’re a Mac nerd, you’ll love this because it’s pretty damn funny and if you’re not, you probably won’t get it.
Apple introduces the iPod nano, which, wow, it’s like a baby iPod. So cute.
As technology plunges ever forward (or as we perceive it doing so), it’s not often that we stop to take a look back at how people thought the future was going to unfold before them. Peter Edidin of the NY Times recently did so, reviewing prognostications about radio, films, and television. It’s fun to read the ones where people thought the new technology was going to complete overtake and eliminate an older technology (which does happen, but not as often as people expect). Bruce Bliven on radio in 1922:
There will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly worldwide concerts; when all universities will be combined into one super-institution, conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloose; when, instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bedtime story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world…
D. W. Griffith, the great filmmaker of the early era, had this to say of film in 1915:
The time will come, and in less than 10 years, when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again. Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance. There will be long rows of boxes of pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to “read up” on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.
But it’s also fun to see when people got it right, more or less. In 1936, J.C. Furnas had this to say of television:
It is my hope, and I see no reason why it should not be realized, to be able to go to an ordinary movie theater when some great national event is taking place across the country and see on the screen the sharp image of the action reproduced - at the same instant it occurs. This waiting for the newsreels to come out is a bit tiresome for the 20th century. Some time later I hope to be able to take my inaugurals, prize fights and football games at home. I expect to do it satisfactorily and cheaply. Only under those conditions can a television get into my house.
Under that set of criteria, it probably took awhile for a TV set to enter the Furnas household, but by the time NBC started broadcasting sporting events in the mid-1940s, they probably had one.
Plastic recently considered the question of perfect albums, those where every song is great and you never want to skip over them. Philip compiled a list of the responses; Radiohead’s OK Computer and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue came out on top.
Bob Moog, electronic music pioneer, died yesterday aged 71.
Radiohead has a weblog, although it just got going and Thom’s the only person who’s posted to it so far.
Billboard is now tracking the top-selling ringtones. The list seems to track pretty close to the top singles list. Well, except for the Super Mario Bros theme song ringtone. (via rw)
Grant McCracken offers an alternate theory for why crime fell in the 90s: rap music replaced violence among urban youths as a way to gain esteem. Compare with Levitt and Gladwell.
Goin’ Dot Com! - The Musical. Back in the day, some friends of mine and I used to joke about doing “Dot Com, the Musical”. I believe someone even wrote a song.
Sasha Frere-Jones on Diplo and Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta, who is a Brazilian funk DJ.
The Hyperreal home page has lots of information about rave music, rave culture, and drugs.
Announcing the world’s smallest mp3 player: the iPod Flea. Love the Flea collar.
Video Games Live is presenting a series of concerts featuring music from video games. Last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic played in front of around 10,000 people.
Icelandic band Sigur Ros has a Flickr account that they’re updating while on tour.
Have you ever wondered how actors seem to play the piano so well in movies?.
Spin magazine’s recent list of the best albums from the last twenty years (as well as MSNBC’s alternate list) got me thinking about what my favorites list from that era might look like. Since I’m not Spin and my musical opinion doesn’t carry any weight, I felt free to list what I like, influenced me, continue to find enjoyable, and will still listen to in the future instead of what’s actually good…whatever good means.
In rough chronological order and briefly annotated:
Conclusions: I seem to like all sorts of music, but the common thread is the mainstream-ness of these albums; they’re typically the most popular examples of a particular genre, style, or time period. Gangsta rap wasn’t that mainstream at the time, but The Chronic went multi-platinum. Nevermind was grunge for the mainstream, and The Downward Spiral was one of the few industrial albums to make it big. The same for Rave ‘Til Dawn, Daft Punk, DJ Shadow, Smashing Pumpkins, and Sigur Ros, if to a lesser extent.
The illegality of “Rio funk” music has driven it deep into the slums of Rio De Janeiro, controlled by the drug lords. “Funk songs used to pay homage to those who had died, but now it is fashionable to name-check those still alive. Juca is often asked by drug soldiers to write lyrics that include their names.”
Podcast subscriptions through iTunes top 1 million in the first 48 hours. Also, “podcasting is like cappuccino”…read on for the punchline.
All of Franz Ferdinand’s albums will not have names and will only be differentiated by color. Their second album — the black, red, and green one — will be out in September.
Apple has merged their iPod and iPod Photo lines. All iPods will now have color screens.
Final four Beethoven symphonies in mp3 format available for download on the BBC site this week.
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