Well I lagged on getting my Radiohead remix up in time for the first contest. So I’ve cheated and uploaded it to the new contest for Reckoner. I’ll eventually do a remix of the new one too but who knows if it’ll be in time for the current contest.
I’m really stoked about this mix. It took me a long time (I did _a lot_ of chopping and re-timed the entire piece) but it’s finally done and has gotten some very heartwarming feedback.
Nude (Dressed Up Mix) - Radiohead
(I need to find a fancy embed music player…)
For general caveat, see above. @chris23
The latest web2.0 gizmo, Plurk appears to be following Twitter’s lead in the instant-message-microblog-sms-pipe domain of social apps/services. My first impression? Meh. But again, see the caveat above re: Twitter. (BTW, Twitter is lit up with talk of Plurk right now… I just saw 135 “plurk” tweets come through in 5mins).
Some nice affordances, but the awkward UI and obvious youth branding kinda bug. The deal-breaker for me is the apparent lack of any sort of public UI. Plurk’s runtime layer is opaque at the moment, though this may be the plan given the teen gimmicks.
- UI is strangely awkward. Branding is trying to be cute but alt-y. Too much UI.
- Branding is also focusing on self-celebrity with a no-age twist: “It’s instant gratification, instant self-indulgence, instant celebrity, instantly YOU.”
- I like the scrubbing timeline concept but it seems to flow from right to left, instead of the standard right=now(er).
- Display of posts is not as linear as Twitter (eg it’s more difficult to at-a-glance see when posts have happened).
- Karma is credit for number of posts. More posts (>karma) gets you access to special emoticons and other TBD shwag.
- I like being able to open up a conversation from a post.
- Have already seen multiple tweets re-branding the word “plurk” with “puke”.
- Crawls the usual IM/email suspects for friends to invite.
- Friends & Fans
- “Supports” image/video posts by thumbnailing posted urls.
- Can include a basic set of emoticons >emotiYawns<, clearly targeting teh yout’s.
- No sign of public API (this will be the first and only-necessary nail in the Plurk coffin unless they spin it as a controlled safe-haven for kiddies).
This weekend’s Coachella music festival found ex-Floydist, Roger Waters, banging out a full Dark Side to the massive crowds. Of special note, and in classic fashion, a large pig was deployed condemning US warmongering and offering a not-so-subtle solution (click through link for vid):
But Waters’ biggest prop was an inflatable pig the size of a school bus that emerged while he played a version of “Pigs” from 1977’s capitalism critique, “Animals.”
The pig, which was led above the crowd from lines held on the ground, displayed the words “Don’t be led to the slaughter” and a cartoon of Uncle Sam wielding two bloody cleavers. The other side read “Fear builds walls.”
The underside of the pig simply read “Obama” with a checked ballot box alongside.
Just testing the new Real World Remixed embed player. This is the remix I did for Little Axe:
Continuously evolving the edge of electronic music, dance stalwarts Phil Smart, Jimmy Polar, Dave Basek and Ed Function keep putting out great music that sounds unlike anything you’ve heard. With the help of friends, they’ve put up a new Junkbeats site flush with wonderful tracks for stream or download purchase. Drop by and have a look and listen to what they’ve have been up to.
This is a really great resource that finally brings together a lot of Australian talent.
I’ve been rebuilding the playlists from my early days as a yout’ listening to KROQ in SoCal. Lot’s of great esoteric new wave classics that are now available online. It’s a really neat bit of time travel but it got me thinking: why doesn’t iTunes sell all of the old music videos as well? They have a lot of new ones but surely the canon is ripe for the pillaging. Maybe the Musik Biz could pull in a bit of spare change in the process and let people rebuild the entertainment archives of their formative years…
The Beatles remix I had up was broken. I’ve reposted the fixed file here:
Can’t You See (Demon Soul Mix)
I’ve recently finished a couple of remixes using some of the generously-offered vocal samples from MC Chris. MC is a nerdcore hero, was a writer for Sealab 2021 (one of my all-time favorite shows), voiced Hesh in Sealab, and voiced MC PeePants for Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He’s also smart enough to see the value of his music and understand that it’s a good thing that his fans want to remix his work.
Fette’s Vett (Imperial Mix)
Tractor Beam (Hard Phunk Mix)
All available over at N8UR… (I’ve also nudged the mixes on some of the other tracks I have up).
From another Wired piece posted today, David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians.
…We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.
…For existing and emerging artists — who read about the music business going down the drain — this is actually a great time, full of options and possibilities. The future of music as a career is wide open.
Some very interesting music industry notes today…
Boign Boing’s Cory Doctorow summarizes Madonna’s decision to leave Warner and sign on under concert promoter Live Nation for distribution. Read this carefully:
Notice that Madonna’s now being brought to you by a concert promoter that makes most of its money by getting bums in seats. Every time a Madonna song is copied, it increases the market for her concerts. Talk about a 21st Century business model.
Musicians and labels make the bulk of their money from concerts. Madonna’s angle acknowledges and leverages this fact to free up the diminishing value proposition of trying to protect her content. So the content actually becomes a form of viral advertising which does it’s job whether or not people pay for it.
And over at Wired there’s a cool interview/conversation between David Byrne and Thom Yorke, principally talking about Radiohead’s pay-what-will distribution model for In Rainbows. They discuss the real value of content, the inability of the music industry tolook beyond profits and understand what the listeners want, and the honest admission of Yorke that Radiohead is uniquely positioned to dictate the terms of their distribution.
Thom Yorke: Well, yeah. The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a shit, is the fact that we’ve gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place. It’s not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.
A lot of the music mashups out there are noisy, inelegant, and poorly encoded. Not so with Nemozob. I highly recommend checking out these tracks for your listening and culturally appropriative entertainment.
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