Music

Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.

iTMS Affiliation is a pain in the butt

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First, the good: I’ve gone through, bug-checked, and slightly tweaked the code for automatically linking to the iTMS in ecto to ensure that it works and performs searches as it should (something I’d been meaning to do for a bit now, as that page seems to be referenced fairly often by people working on that particular issue).

Then, the bad: while I love the idea of iTMS affiliation — and if I got more traffic, it might even bring me more than a few pennies here and there — I’ve got to agree with Scot Hacker that the whole shebang is really a pain to deal with. While I haven’t had to fight with the POST/GET issues that Scot is, some of his issues sounded very familiar to me…

It turns out that a lot of the links provided through the LinkShare back-end (Apple partners with LinkShare for the affiliates program; you have to use their back-end to generate your custom links) simply don’t work. See the six (currently static) album covers in the left column of the site? Only two of them actually take you to that album in iTMS. The other four take you to the iTMS homepage. All six links were pasted directly out of the LinkShare link maker, and should work as-is. This problem is totally unrelated to the POST problem — they’re just dishing up broken links to affiliates, period.

[…] I was expecting to find some kind of ad rotation mechanism for affiliates. See those static Stevie Wonder banners at the top of all the lyrics pages? I should be able to drop in a block of code and have those rotated out automatically from iTMS. Instead, the only option is for me to return to LinkShare every few days and grab some new static code. …why should this be so difficult?

[…] I’m trying to sell music for Apple here. You’d think they’d welcome all the help they can get. This whole process has been incredibly frustrating. Maybe I’ve drunk too much of the Apple Kool-Aid, but I really expect better from them.

iTunes “Insane in the Brain (Hot Tracks)” by Cypress Hill from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 5:18).

Marie Antoinette

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How very odd this is — odd, though, in a way that gives me a grin. The first trailer for Marie Antoinette, a new film by Sofia Coppola (from whom Lost in Translation came to the screen). It’s a period piece starting Kirsten Dunst (yum!) as the ill-fated queen…and the trailer is all set to New Order‘s “Age of Consent“.

Odd…but I think I like it.

(via Pop Astronaut)

Update: I keep seeing places linking to this (interruptorjones, kottke, and others) describing the soundtrack as ‘indie rock’. Since when is New Order — especially New Order circa 1983, when ‘Power, Corruption and Lies‘ was released — ‘indie rock’ instead of ‘new wave’ or ‘new romantic’? Bad enough that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the various genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres that have been concocted for today’s music world, but retrofitting today’s labels to music that’s 23 years old just makes it even more confusing.

iTunes Signature Maker

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Cool toy if you use iTunes to listen to your music: the iTunes Signature Maker.

People often ask me what music I listen to, and I find it difficult to describe my enormous music collection in just a few sentences. So I created iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) to answer in sound a question I cannot answer in words. iTSM analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent it.

iTSM selects a small number of your “favorite” tracks based on some simple selection criteria, such as the number of times you have played them or the rating you have assigned them. Then it analyzes the audio content of these files, combining a small bit of each of them to create the signature.

Here’s my first one (464 Kb .mp3, 23 seconds).

And with slightly different settings, one more (1.2 Mb .mp3, 64 seconds).

Here’s the analysis that iTSM provides — if you know the songs and listen fast enough, you can hear them all in this order.

(via Kottke)

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Top Artists according to last.fm

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From Adriaan:

last.fm has nice charting tools, mapping out your listening trends. From data collected over the past year, this list appears to show my top artists.

Here’s my top eleven (rather than ten, simply because these are also all the artists with more than 50 plays):

My top artists

The only slight surprise is that Pink Floyd is that high in the list. Not that I’m not a fan, but I’m not a huge fan…I do, however, have a lot of PF in my collection (thanks to picking up a box set some time ago), so their songs percolate through the random playlists fairly regularly.

Make it stop!

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Apparently, sound carries through the ventilation ducts in our apartment building.

The downstairs neighbor — on the other side of the building — has had “All I Want For Christmas is You” from the Love Actually soundtrack playing on repeat…

For.

Six.

Hours.

It’s most clear in our bathroom, but it can be heard throughout our apartment. I’m actually lucky that I had a three-hour training meeting tonight…Prairie’s actually been here all evening (hiding in the bedroom with all the connecting doors closed and watching TV has been saving her sanity).

I just called the landlords and let them know. “Oh, you’re kidding!” Heh. Our best guess (I tried knocking on their door) is that they’re not home, and left a clock radio alarm on or something.

Whatever it was, it looks like the landlords just got in — it finally stopped.

Six.

Hours.

Bless our landlords, for they make Christmas stop.

Jason Webley Fall 2005 Show

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So last night was Jason Webley‘s fall concert for the year. This makes the fourth consecutive fall concert that Prairie and I have been able to attend together, and all in all, it was a good show — not the best that Prairie and I have been to, but overall still quite enjoyable.

We showed up downtown about quarter after seven, after a bit of confused driving around. While I’ve been to the Catwalk a few times before, this was the first time that I’d driven there, and the subsequent loss of direction was compounded by I-5 being insanely backed up when we left the apartment, so we’d taken Aurora in and ended up cruising through the World’s Scariest Tunnel™ and then finding ourselves on the Alaskan Way Viaduct before we finally found an exit and got into downtown Seattle. In any case, we did eventually find both downtown Seattle and the club (though I felt quite the idiot in the end) and grabbed a place in line.

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Toccata and Fugue in D Minor…not Bach?

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Here’s something interesting I hadn’t run across before — apparently there are strong arguments that Bach’s famous organ piece “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” not only wasn’t originally written for organ…but likely wasn’t even written by Bach at all.

The clues lie in the music. For one, Bach’s manuscript copy of the Toccata — the handwritten original — is lost, if it ever existed. That means attribution can’t be certain; it’s akin to trying a murder case without a dead body.

Like a good mystery, the sources are questionable, too. The earliest copy of the Toccata was done by a man with a reputation of passing off spurious works under Bach’s name.

However, the biggest questions arise when the Toccata is examined stylistically.

“It is a little worrying when literally the first and last notes of a piece of music raise doubts,” writes Peter Williams in a seminal article about the Toccata in the journal Early Music in 1981.

Neat stuff. Part of what caught my eye was this passage:

Scholars now think the Toccata was originally a violin piece Bach transcribed.

“If you know the piece you can just see it was written for the violin,” says Don Franklin, a Pitt musicologist specializing in the composer. “It has idiomatic figuration for the violin [and] the initial statement of the fugue subject can easily be played on the D string, crossing over to touch the G string.”

The opening of the Toccata, too, is violin-like, offering “the solo violin an opportunity to drop down through its four strings,” writes Williams. And there are other nuances that add up to an organ piece covering up its origins.

One of my favorite versions of the piece is by Vanessa-Mae off her fourth album, “The Violin Player“. While decidedly not a traditional interpretation (Bach’s original manuscripts are notably devoid of notations for samples and drum machines), it is incredibly well done, and one of the first times I’d heard the piece as a solo violin performance.

Jason Webley this Saturday!

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This Saturday! Yay!

Hello tomatoes!

Halloween has passed, but don’t put away your disguises, your devilish laughs, or that glimmer of mischief in your eyes.

Bring them to the Catwalk in Pioneer Square this Saturday night!

Here is all the info:

Saturday, November 5th
Jason Webley
with Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band
The Catwalk
172 S Washington St
8 pm – All Ages – $10
(Bar available with ID)
Tickets available at the door
This is my big show, the last one of the year. I will be playing with a band and performing some things that I have never performed before and some things I will never perform again.

There will be free carnival games, and other fun.

Bring a costume,
Bring a tomato,
Bring your headbands form last year’s show,
Bring a friend,
Bring a stranger,
Hope to see you on Saturday!

Wheeeee!
-Jason

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Voltaire at the Vogue

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Voltaire’s show Wednesday night was great, as I’d hoped.

xementio picked me up around 8pm, we drove down to Capitol Hill, found a place to park, and spent a few minutes wandering along Broadway. Since she’s new to town, I got to show her a bit more of Broadway and introduce her to some of the stores along the strip, though it was late enough in the evening that there wasn’t really much time for shopping.

Danielle, The Vogue, Seattle, WAWe headed up towards the_vogue around nine, and the place was already full enough that we weren’t able to find a table. Oops! Silly me, thinking that the “doors open at 9pm” bit on the flyer meant that the doors wouldn’t open until 9pm. ;) Still, no biggie, we just found a spot on the floor to say hi to people (I saw Ellen and…gak…her husband, whose name I will remember someday, back by the bar; we chatted with Tricia for a while; and I saw anzu for a moment before losing her in the crowd), wait and watch people dance.

And wait. And wait.

The one downside to the evening was that while everybody (including the staff at the Vogue, apparently) was expecting the show to start between 10 and 10:30pm, Voltaire got caught up in selling CDs, comics, other sundries, and talking to people, and didn’t actually take the stage until about 11:15pm.

Still, once he made it onto the stage, the show was well worth the wait.

Voltaire, The Vogue, Seattle, WA

He used the same low-key setup as he did last year, no backing band, just him and a guitar. As with last year, one of his first songs was a tongue-in-cheek cover of Rammstein’s “Du Haßt Mich”, and then on to other songs. Lots of fun between-song banter and storytelling also.

Songs I remember from the playlist: The Vampire Club, Ex-Lover’s Lover, When You’re Evil, Goodnight Demonslayer, plus one from a New Wave style band that he’s getting started with called One Semester Lesbian, Fully Functional from his Star Trek tribute/parody album, and a hilariously raunchy (to the point of being obscene) country-style ballad set in the cantina on Tatooine from Star Wars.

Voltaire at the VogueIn addition to the photos I took over the course of the night, I also took a few minutes of video a few times during the night, and have put together a nine-minute sampler of bits and pieces of the show. Linked to the right is a low-resolution version (QT .mov, 9Mb), here’s a high-rez version (QT .mov, 37.5Mb) for those who have the bandwidth. Be warned — not everything in the video is exactly “family friendly”, though it is quite funny.

The show ended a little after 12:15, and as Danielle had had to bail out a bit earlier, I booked down the hill into downtown to catch a bus home. While I missed the 12:20am bus, there was one last run at 1:20am, so after kicking back with this weeks Stranger and Seattle Weekly for a while, I finally made it home and crawled into bed about 1:45am.

So, a long night, but a lot of fun, and worth the late bedtime.

The Vampire Club

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Since I only had one album by Voltaire (The Devil’s Bris), I decided to see if the iTMS had any available, as they’ve been doing a rather remarkable job of expanding their underground/goth/industrial/anything non-mainstream collections. It turns out they had two others in addition to The Devil’s Bris: Boo Hoo and Then And Again, both of which I snagged.

Some of the songs I’d heard already, either at the_vogue (Future Ex-Girlfriend, Caught A Light Sneeze) or at his show last year (Goodnight Demonslayer, a beautiful lullaby to his son). Others I hadn’t heard yet, including a new favorite: The Vampire Club.

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