POGO, the Australian musician responsible for the beautiful and ethereal movie-remixes, has posted a clever little how-to video that nicely illustrates the basic technical steps he uses to construct his sweet beats.
Tag: musicians
at the late night double feature picture show
the man with the antique trombone
Promotional photos for local musician/teacher/arranger/composer Jim Hopson.
using the yard as a natural backdrop
From a photshoot with Mishka for headshots, portfolio, and her media package. (My rates.)
just now in the hall: sudden alarm -> woman’s voice, startled, “fuck you” -> angry high heels
Mockingbirds mastered police sirens
and now the city is on edge.
Grinding their teeth at night, the people
send out their swollen moans to the powerlines.
Their dreams are troubled, a caravan of trolls
bedding down, picking their yellow teeth
with a white chip of bone.
The people are no less uneasy in the morning rain,
when no birds sing. When lumpy blue clouds
gather outside like flies’ eyes.
When a house is pounded by rain and for the first time they hear
how small it really is.
-Matthew Rohrer
The fire alarm testing men are in my building today, setting off pitch tones that sound precisely like clarinet. A perfect G. Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. It continually throws me from whatever I am doing, as I unconsciously flex my knowledge, remembering precisely how to match that note on the french horn. My coworker and I take up the keen, pretending to be conductors, tapping our screens, singing “me me me me” in wavering, high pitched fake voices. Oh orchestra, you never truly leave me.
Sitting nervously in a long black skirt, in the only white shirt I owned, back row, trading filthy jokes with the percussion, trying to keep the note while leaning forward to turn the next page, placidly counting bars, keeping the time with only one toe, 1-2-3-4 2-2-3-4 3-2-3-4 4-2-3-4, too short to quite see past the trombone.
(Still faultlessly memorized: all the fingering to The British Grenadiers).
It was an incomplete time for me. Feeling my instrument, this apparently difficult thing, was easy, a skill smooth and uncreased, but disliking who I played with and the musical choices made. Perhaps if I was with a different group, I would have taken to music more, but there are a lot of possibilities every day, and these few, taken as a group, to do with my instrument, are no more or no less than a vague irritation brought on by the hum, the pitch tone hum, of the sad, steady keen of the fire alarm.
via JWZ: You stay classy, Music Industry.
Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls says:
if you hadn’t noticed, all of the dresden dolls and amanda palmer official videos have been taken off youtube.
yes, folks…girl anachronism, coin-operated boy, shores of california, almost everything from who killed amanda palmer….pretty much the whole deal. all gone. go look for yourself. and you ask…wtf? this is why: nytimes, wired.
basically: "Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from YouTube, which is owned by Google. Warner Music’s videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening."
in other words, roadrunner is a subsidiary of warner and i’m stuck in hell with madonna and the other poor bastards, because warner wants more money. even worse, warner has almost no bargaining power…they’re not even in the top ten of labels who have huge artists with material streaming on youtube. they’re just starving for cash right now and they’re doing anything they can think of to come up with cash. it’s abSURD. they are looking for money in a totally backwards way.
money that, i should point out, i would NEVER see as an artist. if they got their way and youtube decided to give them a larger revenue share of the videos, it;s very unlikely it would ever make it’s way into the artists’ bank accounts.
damn, man. this shit is fucked UP.
Like a trendy Yat-Kha, Kongar-ol Ondar the Tuvan Singer
socalled live at the jcc
Josh is thrilled that I recorded his Vancouver gig, which makes me happy, and mitagates all possible feelings of uncertainty that I might have had in presenting it to you, my dear readers.
So, without further ado: My bootleg of SOCALLED Live at the JCC.
Socalled is liberally funky, flawlessly presenting a wicked klezmer fusion of extraordinary experiment, featuring intelligent jazz, sparkling piano, and witty hip-hop, mildly accented with a surprising dash of country. The musicianship displayed is blinding. All that and he’s charming.
My little recording doesn’t capture even a tenth of how impossibly good the music was, but it might give you enough of an idea to make sure you don’t miss the next chance you have to attend one of the concerts. I’d rather accidentally fall on a knife.
!! oh my holy yes Yes YES !!
SOCALLED
Direct from Montreal
Vancouver Premiere
The Chutzpah Festival says:
“It’s funny that rap brought Jewish kid Josh Dolgin (Socalled) to Jewish music. Searching for records to sample while studying at McGill, he stumbled across some old Jewish folk music. The result is his hybrid style of Jewish hip-hop and album titles like The Socalled Seder. Montreal-based Dolgin was born in Ottawa and raised in Chelsea, Quebec. He played the piano as a kid and the accordion in high school and was in all sorts of bands: salsa, gospel, rock, funk. Then he discovered hip-hop and MIDI, and the rest is history. He’s appeared on many albums as pianist, singer, arranger, rapper, writer, and producer. He also rocks with fellow klezmerhybrid musician David Krakauer in Klezmer Madness!, sings with Toronto’s Beyond the Pale, performs with Shtreiml in Montreal, and with LA-based the Aleph Project. Socalled performs and records with “a crew of mixed-up freaks and geniuses” from around the world, including Killah Priest, Susan Hoffman-Watts, Frank London and Irving Fields.
When: Sunday, February 24 at 9:00 pm
Where: Norman Rothstein Theatre, JCCGV
Tickets are $25 and can be purchased from Tickets Tonight.
a black and white picture day
Robert Moog, the gentle genius known to many as the
father of electronic music, died at his North Carolina
home yesterday. He was 71.
“One day after losing Bob Moog, the electronic music community has lost one of its greatest composers, musique concrete and found-sound composer Luc Ferrari. Ferrari not only was the founding director of an academy dedicated to musique concrete but continued to advance the notion of recorded sound as music with experiments like turning a recording of a Yugoslav village into music. The fact that we now find such innovations old-hat is partly due to the influence he had.” link
Moog link.
… and from zombies, we get: