About the most amazing (recorded) performance I’ve seen and heard in a while: Jamie Lidell performing live [Quicktime, BIG!] found via the USC IMD blog.
Category: Music
Lazyweb: Last.fm to Bleep
Last.fm is fantastic* for discovering new music**. Bleep is great for buying new music.
They must be joined!
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* a post is brewing on what was IMHO lost in their redesign.
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** looks like there is going to be an annual day celebrating what used to be the very best way to discover new music: John Peel.
Hard to beat
It’s taken a while this year for there to be a ‘sound of the summer’, but for me it’s got to be Hard-Fi’s “Hard to Beat”: poppy, danceable, tough, rough and sweet – with an obligatory reference to ‘rocking the city‘:
Can you feel it?
Rocking the city,
Ah yeah,
Straight out of nowhere-ness,
Like a fist,
Can’t resist you, oh no
Winner.
The music of “The Power of Nightmares”
Found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/nightmares, and cut/pasted here for my future reference more than anything else:
John Carpenter – The theme from The Prince of Darkness – the 1987 movie. Plus the repetitive piano bit from Halloween in the haunted house.
Brian Eno – From Another Green World – Big Ship – and In Dark Trees
Charles Ives – Symphony number two – 5th movement. Putnam’s Camp from Three Places in New England. Plus a bit from Central Park in the Dark
Ennio Morricone – Theme from the 1970 film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion And a Morricone piece from the 1980 Pontecorvo film Ogro
Shostakovich – Lyric waltz from the Ballet Suite No 1 and a bit from The Young Lady and the Hooligan
John Barry – The Ipcress File
Soundtrack to The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea – Paul Sawtell and Jerry Goldsmith
Colours by Donovan
Baby It’s Cold Outside – the 1949 version by Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting
The best noises come from Skinned – which is a whole lot of samples from the archives of the band Skinny Puppy
Also, all three episodes in streaming realplayer format can be found here – found via Arthur magazine, which also links from its blog, Magpie, a Village Voice piece by the author of the films, Adam Curtis.
Architecture is frozen speed metal
Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker on ringtones:
‘An architect in her mid-thirties said, âI spent three days of
productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed
metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my
personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live
with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this
phoneâs gonna go offâwhat are they going to hear?â’
I think I must know this person.
[via the excellent 3 Quarks Daily]
Secular saint of the future
Tron (I kid you not) theatre company are staging a play about Delia Derbyshire [official site, Wikipedia] the co-composer / performer of the Dr. Who theme, amongst her other pioneering works at the Radiophonic Workshop [BBC, Wikipedia]
In their words:
“But there is much more to Delia’s story then one totemic piece of music. Through Delia, her creativity and personal life, the show will explore the imaginative landscape of post-war Britain, the advent of the space race and of psychedelia, the impact of mass broadcast media and of new technology on the creation of music, and above all what it was that made so many people in the 1960s look to the future for their inspiration”
Don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of my buttons pushed. I doubt they will tour Helsinki, however.
I love the picture of her* (above) that they have used for the promotional material for the play. Defiant stare, hugging the tech of her trade. A devotional image for disciples of futures past.
Our lady Delia of the tape-loop.
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* I assume, perhaps it’s the actress that plays her in the production
Takeover, Two
“Beep-beep, beep-beep, YEAH!” BBC Radio1 is having another day of techno-assisted musical democracy -the 10hr takeover; and they’ve published a friendly guide to the tech involved here, featuring helpful illustrations like that above.
For a more in-depth look, Matt Biddulph wrote up his and others work on the takeover-tech back when they launched it.
Checking the tracklisting is, again, revealing of a nation’s psyche – the good (Superstition, Stevie Wonder), the bad (We built this city, Starship), the ugly (Ace of Spades, Motorhead {not the antimega remix}) and the just plain wigged-out (Dangermouse theme…)
Great to see the nation’s favourite audioscrobbling the nation… Well done the R&Mi squad!!! And look… you can join them!!!
Petafloptimism 