Music

Music is a big part of me: Over the years, I’ve sung in choirs, played the violin (never terribly well) and can plunk tunes out on most other instruments, DJ’d alternative/goth/industrial/ebm/electronica clubs, and collected a whole lot of music.

Beastie Boys are the new Bon Jovi

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The New York Times reports on a new concert film from The Beastie Boys:

They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.

[…] While perusing the message boards on the site one day in mid-2004, Mr. Yauch came across a concert photo snapped by a fan with his cellphone and found himself taken with the shakiness and rawness of the image. “The energy of it looked cool, and I thought it would look interesting to document a whole concert,” Mr. Yauch said.

Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: ” ‘Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don’t stop till it’s over,’ ” recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. “Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted.”

The camera-toting fans took those instructions to heart. They shot the band, they shot the fans, they shot their fellow camera operators. Four even took their cameras along on their bathroom breaks.

Heh. Me being a child of the ’80’s, this sounded very familiar. In fact, it sounded almost exactly like what Bon Jovi did for their video for “Bad Medicine“:

For their “Bad Medicine” video the band invited fans to the video shoot, handed out additional video cameras for fans to keep, and collected the resulting footage at the end of the night, which was cut into additional footage shot by video director Wayne Isham.

Okay, sure, so the B-Boys did a full-length concert film and not just a five-minute music video, but still…. Everything old is new again.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi from the album New Jersey (1999, 5:16).

Apple Intel Ad Music: Moby

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The music in Apple’s clever Intel processor ad sounded really familiar, and after running it around in my head for a bit, I figured it out.

It’s Moby‘s ‘God Moving Over the Face of the Waters‘, which I have on the soundtrack to Heat (which, incidentally, is one of my favorite soundtrack albums, and a really good movie to boot).

Just in case anyone else is curious.

iTunes “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” by Moby from the album Heat (1995, 6:58).

Andy Rosen: Early punk photos

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Jim Kerr, Simple MindsI came across an article in today’s Seattle Times about Andy Rosen, who’d taken a lot of photographs of the early punk scene in London — and is just now starting to showcase a lot of never before seen photos on Flickr.

Rosen had a successful photography career from 1976 to 1984, completely embedding himself in the early punk-rock scene in London.

He began as the bands were starting up, and by the time the punk-rock scene exploded, he had a real in. He lived with some of the musicians and was friends with some people who became musicians.

But back then you needed money and more than a card reader to see your shots, so a lot of Rosen’s film never got processed. It got boxed up and stored at mum and dad’s. That includes all the photos he finally uncovered and developed last year, and sat on until now.

Dave Gahan, Depeche ModeThe collection he’s put up so far (and, apparently, he’s just getting started), is amazing. Simple Minds, Depeche Mode, Bauhaus, Siouxie Sioux, The Sex Pistols…tons of shots that have never been published before.

On top of that, he’s set up a weblog where he’s recounting some of the stories behind the photos — the photo shoots themselves, his relationships to the subjects, how he was able to get the shots he did. Tons of incredible documentation of the time and the musicians.

For instance, a very early performance by The Clash at a small Boxing Day 1979 gathering with about fifty family and friends in attendance:

Joe Strummer, The ClashAt the time the Clash were just another punk band – better than most but definately not the Rock Stars they were to become. Funny thing was I shot about 10 rolls of black and white and decided not to develop them. Money was tight in those days – so I would sometimes just not bother processing the film if I felt the band was not worthy of the expense. Looking back on it what an idiot I was. Years (two decades) later I stumbled on a whole bag of unprocesed film I had left In london at my mum and dads. There they were clearly labaled THE CLASH. I excitedly processed them and to my amazment I relaized I had captured a precious moment in Rock And Roll history – which might never have been seen. A band in all their innocent glory – playing to fifty people – moments before they were to etch themselves into punk history as one of the most prolific Punk Bands ever.

This is great, great stuff. Thanks for sharing all this, Andy!

Distorted Tunes Test

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According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders‘ Distorted Tunes Test…

You correctly identified 26 tunes (out of 26) on the Distorted Tunes Test. Congratulations! You have a fine sense of pitch.

I’d certainly hope so! Some of those samples were almost literally painful to listen to.

(Though I will admit that years of violin and voice training, being able to plunk melodies out on nearly any instrument I’m handed, and having a slightly musical family — we all sing, Kevin plays cello, upright bass and bass guitar; dad plays guitar, banjo, and some viola; mom plays violin, piano, and organ; at least half if not all four of my grandparents were music teachers at one time or another — might have some small thing to do with acing this test.)

(Maybe.)

(via Blankbaby)

iTunes “Dance to the Music” by Kickshaw from the album Superstar (1999, 4:04).

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).

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.

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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