Scatterbrain – Don’t Call Me Dude
Scatterbrain – Down With The Ship
Ludachrist – Green Eggs And Ham
S.O.D – Fuck The Middle East
Stars Wars Kid Meets S.O.D
S.O.D – March Of the S.O.D live
(now thats a song that should be in guitar hero…)
A Very Metal Charlie Brown Christmas
(did anyone else _hate_ the charlie brown specials as a kid?)
Conway Twitty and the Residents
Fred Frith and Eitetsu Hayashi. Pretty bad ass.
Link Wray – Rumble 1978
evelyn glennie and fred frith
Chris Cutler. Cutler was one of the cooler improv shows I’ve seen.
John Zorn – Bladerunner Project (w/ Lombardo Laswell Frith). Zorn deserves his Macarthur grant if for no other reason than thinking “Lets play weird improv music. And lets get the drummer from Slayer…”
Wandered over the Dresden Dolls show last night. Pretty entertaining.
I missed the opening band, aside from there somewhat anemic cover of “God Save The Queen”. I’m not exactly a punk rocker, and even less of a Sex Pistols fan, but somehow playing that to a crowd of mostly underaged spooky kids seemed a bit trite.
Dresden Dolls were interesting, though they seemed to be having a bit of an off night I’d guess. Lots of trainwrecks, forgotten lyrics and the like. It happens sometimes[1]. Oddly, this was the second show in a month I’ve seen at Lincoln Theater that involved lots of onstage “skits” and whatnot. The other one was Buckethead.
Ran into zombiepops, heatherivy, arriannaid, maegwynn, and badger was about somewhere.
[1] Best variation of this was Tomahawk/Mike Patton. After finishing a song, he announced to the crowd (paraphrase) “That fucking sucked. Our guitar player screwed it up. We’re doing it again”. And then played it again. Theres something very entertaining about hugely talented assholes.
Playing around with splicemusic.com. A website that involve some aspects of a social networking site and music collab/sharing sites like ccmixter. It’s all CC content, and they include a simple little flash based sequencer app for quickly building songs with the available samples.
An interesting idea, although the site still seems to be in beta. Some of the ui bits could use some work, but I like the idea of it if nothing else.
Went to a meetup for pandora last night with badger
See his notes for a more detailed overview of what was discussed.
It was an interesting talk, covering the origins of the company and the service and an overview of the tech and work behind the service.
One of the more interesting aspects was there tendency to avoid using collaborative filtering and other “social” forms for suggesting music. More than a few questions from an audience were variations of “why don’t you add collaborative filtering?” and I think the presenter offered a pretty good reasoning.
However, it sounds like pandora has more than a few vestigial dot-com tendencies, even though the presenter seemed to be intent on avoiding them. They are currently losing money, with a pretty good burn rate, and are mostly looking at ad revenue to solve the problem.
The service itself seems pretty expensive, as every new user adds significant bandwidth and licensing fees. I don’t really see them surviving for very long.
A few questions I didn’t asked but should of:
Would it be possible to include more freely distributed music (Creative Commons, etc) in an effort to lower licensing costs?
Do the song selection code take into account any sponsors or partners music? (aka, “Do you take payola?”)
Will there be any efforts to gather more demographic info to make advertisers happier?
Any plans to extend the concept beyond music? Visual Art? Movies? TV?
I hadn’t actually used pandora much after an initial experiment several months ago that didn’t work well (for the love of god, just because I like King Crimson doesn’t mean I want to hear E.L.P). But trying it out last night and today, and it’s been pretty remarkable so far.
Collaborations built from the ground up
Excellent article from the News And Observer about ways open source and free culture concepts can be applied outside of the software world.
Played a house show at Badgerhaus tonight.
Show went well. Not a bad crowd for a house show. This was my first show as Automatic Caution Show and my first solo performance.
Got fairly short notice for the show, so didn’t have a huge amount of time for the show. I decided to give it a shot with an idea thats been in my head for a while. Basically, solo semi improv heavy ambient/dub/industrial kind of thing. Think Scorn or Godflesh. It ended up being a bit more improvised than I originally intended, but thats okay.
I think it went pretty well. The concept mostly worked, but I could probably use some time to work on song structure, mostly to make better use of dynamics, something that I sort of overlooked a bit tonight. I could also maybe use some work on the guitar sounds, but given the volume constraints, it didn’t seem to bad. In a louder environment, a half stack cranked to 11 would be nice ;-> Seemed to get a nice response from some of the folks there.
The Subliminator was pretty awesome. He has a very unique setup. Basically two alesis AirSynths and two AirFX for the music, plus a vocal processor and a Boomerang looper pedal. Vocals were processed, and heavily looped, building up dense vocal interswirling lines. It’s a small setup that he makes very impressive use of.
Oh, and as the last post would indicate The Subliminator tours on a customized BMW 1100GS. So after the show we spent a few hours talking about music and motorcycles.
Automatic Caution Door will make it’s performance debut this friday at Badgerhaus opening up for The Subliminator.
Who is Automatic Caution Door? Well, that would be me. Doing “stuff”. I’m not entirely sure what that will be at the moment. But it’s safe to assume it will be partially, if not completely improvised.
I mean, er, come out and enjoy a carefully considered and painstakingly perfected masterpiece in it’s performance debut and retirement.
I spent a good chunk of this week helping teach a class on music and audio production for Red Hat High, a week long camp for rising 9th graders.
I was very nervous before the class started, as I assume we were under prepared and the students would have trouble with the tools. But that was not the case at all. A few minutes of instructions to get the basic, and they were off running.
The first day or two were mainly getting the students introduced to the tools (Audacity and Hydrogen).
Then after that, we were onto the projects. One of the parts of the camps was that the students are to present what they did over the week tomorrow to all their peers (and parents?). So each student was to prepare 2minutes of audio for the project. They could do pretty much whatever they wanted to. Some wrote pretty sophisticated song patterns in hydrogen, and overdub vocals or freely licensed loops with audacity. Some folks did interviews, or “talk shows”. Pretty high quality output for a week of only a few hours a day (9am-noon everyday).
It was interesting discussing some of the various issues related to copyright and reuse of music with the students, who generally don’t really have to think too much about this.
Spent a few hours today doing a collage/mix/remix of the students work for the presentation tomorrow. I think I managed to learn more than a few things about the tools this week.
We had a pretty good student/teacher ratio (15 students, and typically three teachers [myself, Greg DeKoenigsberg, and a few other folks]). But one things for sure, teach a class of 9th graders will wear you out.
Roundabout by a high school “showchoir”.
Avert your eyes.
I’m not sure what a “show choir” is, but I think it is safe to say they should be destroyed.
And just for kicks, high school band plays Genesis’s “Dance On A Volcano”. In comparison to the above, not bad.