Preview Darkside Video Animation for BBC R2

The BBC are having a Dark Side of the Moon day on Monday. Nice trailer video for the Tom Stoppard play - although more than a shade of Elysium about it.

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Avatars That Are Harmonizing Musical Band Instruments

Bandbots - Second Life Musical Avatars from Chantal Harvey on Vimeo.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/02/bandbots.html

Love it - avatars shaped like musical instruments that make music and harmonise.

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Listen to Fish on Friday - Planet Rock

Listening to Fish on Friday on Planet Rock, hosted by Fish of Marillion fame. Great programme, great music, and a presenter who's not afraid to play entire album sides.

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Hype Machine and Seeqpod

Today's Blog Music / The Hype Machine - discover, listen and buy music discussed on the best mp3 blogs

and

http://www.seeqpod.com

Two different systems that scrape blogs and pick up related media files.

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Janice Long's R2 Show

0000 - 0300, but by the wonders of Listen Again I can listen to Janice Long's show as I work.

And of course it's like having our own local Moseley radio show, even the Bulls Head got a mention today as the show is recorded at the Mailbox in Birmingham and Janice lives near/in Moseley.

A worthy successor to Jane Gazzo as a DJ who is easy and fun to listen to, and who plays a good blend of the best modern music and 80s classics.

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0 Degrees of Separation Tour

 

Went to the most wonderful nu-folk gig at the Glee Club organised by the Contemporary Music Network. There were 4 bands/artists, Adem, Vetiver, Vashti Bunyan & band and Juana Molina.

Unlike most gigs which would put them on one after another here the 4 bands shared the stage for almost the whole time, helping out on each others songs. Superb. The only exception, but also wonderful, was Juana who played on her own, but used a sampler to build up each line of the song, playing against numerous loops of herself.

There's lot of music samples at the relevant sites, and someone has posted video of the gig to YouTube.

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Freak Zone Live

Off to the Freak Zone live tonight. Children of the Zone unite. Stuart Maconie's programme continues to be the best mucis show on the radio.

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Last.fm - on demand music radio

Last.fm's The Sundays virtual radio channel

Just like the virtual radio stations on MusicMatch, but a simpler client and less hassle. Just type in a band name and they play you music like that band. Type in The Sundays, and hey-presto an Annie Nightingale/ Jane Gazzo replacement. Much better than the new Dream Ticket.

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Wax Audio

Wax Audio | WAX AUDIO: MASHED MEDIA APPROPRIATED, RE-MIXED, SEXED UP & URANIUM ENRICHED

This is where the George Bush Imagine came from.

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Radio 1's Blue Room

Oh well, in the absence of Jane Gazzo looks like I'll have to hang out in Radio 1's The Blue Room.

Their George Bush version of Lennon's Imagine was wonderful!

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Jeff Waynes' War of the Worlds

Forget Tom Cruise, this is the real War of the Worlds. Got back into it when I recorded it onto MP3, and the film has just kept it front of mind. Might even get Joanna into it too.

Update 20/10: They're doing a live version at Symphony Hall next April, complete with Justin Hayward and video of Richard Burton. Must see!

Buy now from Amazon!

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Pink Floyd at Live 8

Got back from Deborah's concert in time to see Pink Floyd. Not a bad set at all, the body language was interesting though. Mason and Gilmour exchanging glances, neither looking at Waters, even when Gilmour and Waters were singing together, even when they sang:

We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have you found? The same old fears.

At the end it was Waters who appeared to be gathering the others in for the group hug.

As to the pieces, I suppose Breathe was the "dark side" cloud pleaser - prototypical Floyd, Money was always the favourite before The Wall, Wish You Were Here was as always "for Syd", and Comfortably Numb is again in the Top 3.

What I think was missed though was a chance to really to visuals that did the songs and the even justice. One thing that struck was how the lyrics did echo the cause, especially if they'd added something like Dogs. Money was just crying our for Debt images, Comfortably Numb (as at Aseriti) just summed up the worlds attitude, or at least of its leaders.

The track they really should have sung though was The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid). OK it's a Water's track so unlikely to be picked, but I'm sure its why Waters agreed to do the event. You can't write a song like that, and then turn down Live 8. And more than anything its sums up what an event signifies. Yes the lyrics then were very Cold War orientated, but the message is still there.

Now the satellite's confused
'Cos on Saturday night
The airwaves were full of compassion and light
And his silicon heart warmed
To the sight of a billion candles burning
Oo, oo, oo, the tide is turning
Oo, oo, oo, the tide is turning
The tide is turning Billy

I'm not saying that the battle is won
But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun
Wrested technology's sword from the hand of the
War Lords
Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning

Certainly enough to make me click through to Make Poverty History and sign up.

I'm also working my way through "The End of Poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs, certainly the closest thing yet for a poverty elimination plan.

Get the Pink Floyd at Live8 video.

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La Bouche

Doesn't anybody remember La Bouche? Not the German funk group but the English dance/performance group formed by Philip Chambon and Andy Arthurs in the mid/late 80s. Having moved on to MP3'ing my tapes I've found both the Yet Another Crisis and the "The Attractions of Living in a Bungalow" albums, plus of course the "Chasing the Mirage". If it wasn't for a supurious hit on some holiday site this La Bouche would be a Googlewhack. Anybody know what ever become of them, or have similar fond memories of them? One of their best visual piece was a breakfast table scene, two members eating cornflakes and the only sounds coming as each member hit a Simmonds SDS-8 electronic drum pad kit to generate the snap, crackle and pop! (and yes I know I'm mixing my cereal metaphors!)

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Millennium Motific

Rooting around in the deopths of some of my old web pages I found the old sound files for Millennium Motific, an audio project I was working on in 1999. What it does is compress 1000 years of music into 200 seconds, that's 20 seconds a century, 2 seconds a decade. So that means a LOT of plainchant at the beginning, and a real jumble of stuff at the end! The files are Real Audio so take a listen. I even did a powerpoint version that went through a millennium's worth of painting in time to the music. And then of course there was the virtual reality version which still to my mind out dome'd the Dome.

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Optophonic Lunaphone

Went to the MAC on Sunday night to see/hear the Optophonic Lunaphone, a project/performance by Brian Duffy - the man also behind the Modified Toy Orchestra and the ZX Spectrum Orchestra.

Brian had 8 or so 4-6" telescopes in the outdoor arena. Each had a light intensity to voltage convertor fitted, the idea being that a stars twinkle would produce a low frequency signal that could be fed into an analogue synthesiser (like my old Pro-One) to module a sound by frequency or amplitude. During the performance each telescope could be steered onto a different star in turn, or onto the moon, or the performers could manually obstruct the light to cause a variation.

Great in theory, but of course this being an English sumer there were few stars to be seen, and the moon was birght when up, but regularly obscured.

The start was delayed and delayed hoping for better weather, but in the end Brian wisely just went for it, and everybody was rooting for him. In the end I think the performance had next to no stellar input, lots of manually "twinkle", but Brian produced some really good white noise sculpted sounds that had everybody enthralled. The moon and the sky added to the atmosphere, if not the sounds. All in all a success, and well worth trying again.

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Bobby Bird and the Higher Intelligence Agency

While doing the research for the Birmingham Post article below I was trying to find the name of a wonderful ambient installation in Cannon Hill park in the late 90s. In my web search I stumbled upon Bobby Bird and the HIA - he and his friends put the Cannon Hill event on - it was called 7/8ths of a second after the time it takes time to travel across the park.

HIA did an album called Birmingham Frequencies. Intrigued by tracks named from the places around me in Moseley I bought the CD. It's wonderful. If you like ambient buy it. The Cannon Hill Park track in particular is wonderful. He also did a CD called SHADO - guess that goes on my wants list.

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Reichs Three Tales

Bought Steve Reichs Three Tales while I was at the CBI conference at Birmingham's ICC today. The first two movements, Hindenburg and Bikini (Atoll) we pretty uninspiring, but the third. Dolly, is excellent. It starts with Dolly the (cloned) Sheep and then gos on to explore the whole post-human issue, with stuff about the Turing test, robotics, Dawkins on Genetics etc. Interviewees include; Dr. James D. Watson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky, Steven Pinker, Sherry Turkle, Bill Joy, Jaron Lanier and Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz among others. The album is provided in both CD and DVD formats with video by Beryl Korot. Must run it on a big screen some time - maybe at one of our innovation lunches.

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