Not such a cheery, lighthearted song, but definitely catchy enough to stick with you like the humidity. Most familiar is the Bananarama version, but then Ace of Base recorded it too.
When it only gets down to the low 80s at night, getting a small child to sleep can be quite the challenge. Putting yourself to sleep can be even harder.
Instead of sheep (nooooooo not all that wool) you could count all the versions of Summertime.
One of these mornings
You’re gonna rise up singing
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the skies.
‘Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci
And lots of wavy hair like Liberace.’
Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI will split the $100 million that Kazaa will cough up in an out-of-court settlement.
Written by Screamin Jay Hawkins, who eventually performed it while wearing a black cape after rising out of a coffin onstage. His crazed singing style influenced Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Nick Cave and Marilyn Manson.
The lyrics are very simple, and the version I’ve listened to most is Nina Simone’s.
What song rhymes ‘Pagliacci’ with ‘Liberace’?
a) Mr. Wonderful
b) Mr. Sandman
c) Who’s Liberace?
d) Mr. Lucky
If you don’t know Liberace, you should look him up.
Answer to the quiz tomorrow. Unless it gets past 100° again, in which case I will not be present.
Still lugging those heavy cases of vinyl around to all your gigs? Or maybe you have a collection that you’d like to move to your iPod, but can’t be bothered with the fuss.
The USB Turntable makes it easy. It will set you back about $220, and is currently out of stock, but Firebox says it’ll be back next week.
Songs about dogs, cats and the occasional pig, dead or alive, recommendations from The Observer.
Lyrics to an old, old song that might not make it to modern playlists.
The $2,000 Transporter targets those who choose lossless formats (wav or flac) for encoding their music. These digital files, stored on a computer, can be streamed over a wi-fi network to the device, which connects to the user’s receiver and speakers.
Don’t you know me, I’m your native son.
Written by Steve Goodman, The City of New Orleans has a way of sticking in your head. According to this, the song inspired the name of the ABC news show.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father’s magic carpet made of steam.
Was it a an actual house of gambling? A brothel perhaps named for a famous madam? Or a prison or slave pen?
Did Bob Dylan steal a folksinger’s arrangement of it? Who all has covered it? How is it different when a woman sings it?
And all this time, I thought it was ‘She sewed those new blue jeans.’
In 2000 and 2001, Biosphere created a sound installation for the Northern Lights festival at Kulturhuset along with English sound sculptor Jony Easterby.
The installation was called Fluxgate. The basic premise of the installation was that visitors were to throw snowballs at various target areas on the sculpture. The accuracy of the throws combined with current astronomical data on the aurora were then used to generate different sounds.
There’s a 20-30 minute recording of Fluxgate in action on Biosphere’s site here. Other free MP3s of his can be downloaded here. As the page states, if you enjoy the music and are feeling generous, you can donate to his paypal account (details of which are on the page).
I picked Clubsessel’s self-titled album late last year but haven’t given it a close listen until now. It’s pretty good. Darker, subdued deeper techno, although more toward the IDM and downtempo spectrum of things as opposed to straight-up dancefloor material. It’s also pretty minimal, but not clipped, glitchy and cut-up like the kind of stuff Mille Plateaux is known for.
Anyway, Clubsessel is more popularly known as misc., under which alias they’ve recorded a butt-ton of stuff on Sender, and I pretty much can’t stand most of it. They’ve also recorded as Niederflur on M_nus, with some very … well, minimal work suited to that label’s aesthetic.
You could say that Clubsessel is the IDM/Downtempo component of the Niederflur alias.
Oh and in other news Richie Hawtin’s disappeared so far up his own anus that you can’t even refer to his label as Minus anymore, it’s M_nus. Christ.
One of my sons has hooked up his giant speakers to the ancient house stereo system. The tracks are much more sinister with a good bass.
Getting closer to 90°, predicted to get to 102°.
The answer to yesterday’s quiz is DragonSlayer.
From all the miserable and unrelenting heat of this sweltering July. Stephen Holden of the NYT suggests the collaboration from two giants - Frank Sinatra and Jobim, some Sade, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, and film music from In the Line of Fire, Lolita, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Talk to Her and The Wings of the Dove.
I attended the Unholy Alliance Tour yesterday in San Jose at the HP Pavillion, the first of many concerts this summer that I will be attending. The line-up was Slayer, Lamb of God, Mastodon, Children of Bodom, and Thine Eyes Bleed. I missed Thine Eyes Bleed due to traffic and parking, but I didn’t really mind. For some reason Slayer concerts always seem to start on time, and this always surprises me (maybe that is just because all my other concerts are at The Pound, which is notorious for late starts). So here are my thoughts on the rest of the bands:
Children of Bodom was the first band I saw play. I don’t really like their style of music, but they seemed to have quite a few hardcore fans at the show, and it’s always cool when talented bands from Europe make their way over to play here. They had one song in the middle that was pretty good, the rest I thought were just OK, but the crowd was pretty into them.
Mastodon came on next, and they were pretty entertaining. Apparently they don’t tune their guitars very low, but somehow they manage to get a very bassy, extremely HEAVY sound. Their drumming was alot more interesting than Children of Bodom’s, and although I wasn’t really familiar with their material at all, they put on a crushingly good live show. I was right next to the pit and people were going nuts; at one point a guy with blood running down his face pushed his way out of the pit and through the crowd, so I guess the moshing got pretty violent. Also from my vantage point one of the guitarists looked alot like Will Ferrell, so that was somewhat amusing.
Next up was Lamb of God. Again I wasn’t familiar with their stuff, but pretty much the entire rest of the crowd was I guess, and so the floor was packed full when they started playing. Their style didn’t keep my attention as well as Mastodon, and I eventually got bored and wandered out to concessions to grab a snack (and get ripped off). For some reason the event staff wasn’t letting people back onto the floor, I guess it was crowded to the point of being dangerous or something, so I ended up missing the remainder of Lamb of God’s set, which didn’t really bother me that much.
I managed to get back down to the floor in time for Slayer, and was pretty close to the stage when they started. As soon as they started playing, people began pushing from all directions and everyone was mashed shoulder-to-shoulder for the first couple songs, and going crazy headbanging etc. One thing about Slayer shows - there are alot more big sweaty shirtless guys in the audience than at most shows I go to, and so it was hard not to get other peoples’ sweat rubbed all over you during Slayer’s set. After a few songs things calmed down, and the audience didn’t go nuts again until Slayer played some classics like Raining Blood. Saw a guy with his nose bleeding wandering away from the floor. Slayer put on an entertaining show as usual, but I think I somewhat spoiled it for myself by reading some reviews of the show online that included the setlist and descriptions of some of the theatrics. I will have to remember not to do that next time…
What was Slayer’s original name?
a) Godslayer
b) Monsterslayer
c) Dragonslayer
d) Soothslayer
Answer tomorrow.
Just what crime did Richards commit in Arkansas back in ‘75 that he would receive a pardon for now?
July is proving to be extremely, awfully, terrifically uncomfortable for many of us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t feel pretty good despite all that sweatiness, clamminess and general ickiness.
Who Do You Love - Bo Diddley
I Feel Good - James Brown
Feeling Good - Michael Buble
C’est la Vie - Robbie Nevil
Oh Yeah - Yello
Late in the Evening - Paul Simon
Turn Me On (Low Tide Remix) - Kevin Lyttle
It’s Raining Men - The Weather Girls
Heaven’s What I Feel - Gloria Estefan
I’m On Fire - Bruce Springsteen
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper
What’s New Pussycat - Tom Jones
The Independent takes a look at Mercora, last.fm, MyStrands, Pandora and others.
Helicopter crews hum Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries as a journalist remembers the soundtracks to stints in Sierra Leone, Tikrit, Baghdad, Falluja and Kandahar.
Over a hundred years of guitar designs, ranging from an 1898 Gibson to a harp guitar to a teardrop. From the Smithsonian.
Mostly hits from the 60s and 70s with the Stones, the Beatles, Aretha and the Eagles.
At one time, it was fashionable to castrate young boys in order to keep their voices at the desired high pitch. At maturity, this voice was produced by the lungs of an adult male, making it invaluable in royal courts and churches.
The body of the most famous castrato, Farinello, will be exhumed by Italian scientists, who hope the answers to his remarkable voice lie in his DNA and bones.
If your iPod has a dock connector, Blinkit turns it into a blinking flashlight.
If only this were available when I used to take night walks. But turning an iPod into a safety device is a nifty idea.
If the post title starts that awful song looping in your head, please put on something else. And fast.
From Inside Bay Area: includes Ella, Frank, Beyonce, Bananarama, Alice Cooper and Jack Johnson.
Not your usual sweet route to dreamland, lyrics here.
The reasons why you sound so terrific all by yourself in there with the water, the soap, the shampoo and some reverb.
The essentials include a stereo system capable of painful loudness, good food, good drink, good smokes, deaf neighbors, and a bunch of music-loving guys with excellent music choices.
After a lot of googling/discogging/last.fm’ing, I trainspotted an interesting track I heard earlier today:
Schneider TM vs. KPT.Michi.Gan - The Light 3000
It’s a synthpop cover of The Smith’s “The Light That Never Goes Out”. It’s somewhat of a poignant rendition, and isn’t cheesy at all. Check the link for a 30-second sample.
From the likes of Aguilera, Yorke and Madonna, recommendations from New York magazine.
Music producer Dallas Austin, who has worked with Gwen Stefani, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Pink, among others, was convicted of cocaine possession in Dubai. It took the efforts of several top names in the music world and one well-placed politician (also a singer) to get him out of the country.
Couple of updates on what Monolake’s been up to:
-He’s got a new single coming out this month (page has samples). Sounds okay, need a longer listen.
-He made a couple of random generative ambient tracks via Ableton and posted exceprts for download (one is 15 minutes, the other 60). Cool background music, and worth checking out. A remix he recently did for Depeche Mode and a live set from last year are also available for download on the same page.
Finally found the version I hear in my head - not the Eddie Cochran but the Brian Setzer from the La Bamba soundtrack.
Includes tracks from Serena Maneesh, Young People and Grizzly Bear.
Faber tells of his experience collaborating with Eno on the soundtrack to a reading of his story set in a subpolar environment.
That is, if you can afford the 100,000 pound price tag for the guitar on which Paul learned his first chords.
The youthful drunks set up their beer crates and ball game near the band, which was performing for 300 elderly couples. When the conductor was hit by a ball, the concert-goers were incensed. The band began to play the theme from The Great Escape. Almost as one, 20 audience members, former soldiers many of them, some using walkers, some carrying sticks, got up and marched toward the drunken group.
Even though they outnumbered the veterans by 10, the drunks ran for their lives.
While messing around on last.fm, I learned of a horrifying European character called Crazy Frog. People in the US don’t seem to be too familiar with Crazy Frog, but apparently there is a song by Crazy Frog which people generally agree is one of the most irritating songs ever made by man. A search for ‘crazy frog’ on YouTube will get you a taste of what this sounds like.
From last.fm:
The success of this album along with the “Axel F” single has irritated and baffled many critics and musicians. This is mostly due to the Frog’s constant chart domination despite the hatred of so many, and the frustration of legitimate musicians selling well below him.
Anyway, through Crazy Frog I discovered many of the more negative tags on last.fm, such as “the worst thing ever to happen to music” (Crazy Frog is by far the top artist), “kill me now,” and “rapes my ears”. I made sure to tag my musical nemesis Kelly Clarkson with all these tags.
For some 300 years, music composed by Bolivian indigenous people and Jesuit priests from Europe has been lying forgotten in old churches. Performance of this music has sparked an emotional response in local audiences.
Florilegium, a UK baroque ensemble, recorded a CD last year using native singers.
Let the Good Times Roll, because July 5 is a tough day to get back to work. But the leftovers (barbecued chicken, hasselback potatoes and chocolate cake) make an excellent lunch.
A Washington Post review of the recently released album.
I couldn’t help but recall the lyrics to Poor Butterfly after seeing the Butterfly Zone at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF.
In today’s jaded media, nothing seems to shock for long. But back in 1966, when the Beatles depicted themselves as butchers with raw meat and the aforementioned babies (plastic) on an album cover, few were amused, and many were appalled.
The offending photograph will go on display next week at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
It’s available for download, along with previous releases, at Kyoto’s site.
For those that are not familiar with the phenomenon, there are numerous labels which forgo the actual releasing of music on physical media. These netlabels allow free downloads of their music, which is often released under a creative commons license or something similar. For more information about this phenomenon, the curious reader can consult the generous collection of such labels hosted by the folks at archive.org.
So far as the release goes, however, it’s nothing special. Standard digi-dub, enough to please the ear for a few moments but with nothing superlative or consequential. This one is maybe marginally better than the usual fare of the label. Those who come to a similar conclusion might want to check out some slightly better labels in the same vein, like instabil or groovear.
