Life. Liberty. And the Pursuit of Media

filmosophy:

Ooh La La - The Faces

In honor of all things Rushmore - including Erica’s wonderful essay on it earlier today - here’s the song that plays over the pitch perfect final scene of that film.

The folks over at Filmosophy just did an entire week dedicated to the movies of Wes Anderson. This song, along with “These Days” in Royal Tenenbaum’s, are such phenomenal uses of pop songs in movies I just had to re-post it (i’m only like a week or so late). Also, go see Fantastic Mr Fox! It is delightful!

Broken Social Scene - All My Friends (KCRW Radio Session)

postpunk:

Paul Lansky - mild und leise

On “Idioteque”:

The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise, on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A.  (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive. mild und leise was composed in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer.   I used the Music360 computer language written by Barry Vercoe.  This IBM mainframe was, as far as I know, the only computer on the Princeton University campus at the time.  It had about  one megabyte of memory, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in addition to requiring a staff to run it around the clock).  At that point we were actually using punch cards to communicate with the machine, and writing the output to a 1600 BPI digital tape which we then had to carry over to a lab in the basement of the engineering quadrangle in order to listen to it.  Here is a photo of me in the lab a few years later.  The piece came out on a Columbia/Odyssey LP in 1975 or so as a result of a contest run by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). It was called Electronic Music Winners (I’ve occasionally seen it for sale on Ebay), and Jonny Greenwood came across it in a used record shop when the band was on tour in the United States recently  I think it sold about 7000 copies, which is a lot for a classical recording.  (Kid A will sell that in the first 10 seconds of its release!)

Later:

What’s especially cute, and also occured to Jonny Greenwood, is that I was about his current age, when I wrote the piece—sort of a musical time warp.

The sampled part occurs in the first minute.

The sample appears and disappears so quickly, it’s this super familiar touch point amongst all these unfamiliar computer sounds.

I saw this originally via Screw Rock ‘n’ Roll

Public Enemy vs HEALTH vs Nosaj Thing - Bring The Tabloid Sores - THE HOOD INTERNET

Latest Hood Internet Mixtape dropped last Monday. As expected it rules. Go download it here

wellrespected:

El Perro del Mar - “Heavenly Arms”

The Blue Mask is slowly working its way to the top of my list of favorite Lou Reed records, above even Transformer and Street Hassle. The closing number on that record, “Heavenly Arms,” is this gloriously written love song that calls on a deep well of musicality and scale that’s kind of unusual for Lou. But, because it is Lou, and because ex-Voidoid Bob Quine is on the guitar, it’s also gloriously ragged and unkempt. You know how boys do. But in the hands of Sarah Assbring, alias El Perro del Mar, it’s impossible for me to imagine that a group of dirty boys ever sullied this track. It’s transformed into something so rhythmically clean and supple, with vocals so soft and airy you just want to close your eyes and sink into them. I didn’t allow myself much of any space in my concert review of El Perro del Mar/PB&J to talk about her performance, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s her set that’s going to stick with me. It was short, yes, but it was captivatingly precise and emotionally flawless, and for 30 minutes my heart was hers.

I was bummed to miss this show the other night sounds like El Perro del Mar was as stunning as expected.

Lake - Oh the Places We’ll Go

I saw Lake at Schubas almost a month ago and have been sitting on a half finished review since then. Hopefully I’ll get around to finishing it this weekend and i can post it sometime early next week. Till then here is a great song from their previous record!

MySpace

hellonewworld:

Phantogram: Mouthful Of Diamonds

Mum - Sing Along

I went to the Mum show last Wednesday night at Logan Square Auditorium. An alternate title to any Mum show could be “Icelandic people are adorable!” Right of the bat their performance elicited a question from me. Namely, when did they stop being a melodic post rock band with vocals and become some kind of polyphonic spree-esque life affirming love fest?

The answer is probably something like “2004, duh” and i just haven’t been paying close enough attention. What i saw on Weds had more in common with a Jam Band show then something of the “indie” oeuvre. At the fore front two women and a man. They provided the soaring vocals, Melodica playing (like a shit ton of Melodica), ukuleles, and random noisy sounds courtesy of twisted knobs. These were anchored by a keyboard player (also with easy access to knobs), drummer, bassist and guitarist. The two female lead singers were really the core of the show both musically and visually. Musically because so much hinged on their vocal interplay with each other. Visually because unless one was sitting down to play the cello they seemed to have the whole hand moving while crooning thing down.

The show felt a little too blatantly earnest for a Logan Square crowd, too much unveiled emotion, too much bleeding heart positivity. Yet, when the show was done folks were going nuts, so maybe that was just me projecting my own feelings on a fashionable Wednesday night crowd in a hip neighborhood. Either way I enjoyed the show. Now that I don’t subscribe to the “good vibes” school of music very often anymore I rarely get such concentrated blasts of blatant positive energy. The song posted above made me beam as they closed out the show. The encore itself was an older song i recognized. It was dark, brooding, culminated in an epic noisy freak out, and still managed to be brimming with positivity. After all was said and done i probably would’ve enjoyed a set of their older stuff. Still, this kind of blatant h.u.m.a.n. celebration always has a place in my heart.

Myspace

(More than worthy of mention was opener Sin Fang Bous. I bought his $18 album on the spot. $18 seems steep, but I guess it is expensive to bring things over from Iceland. I’ll write about him sometime next week. Till then check him out here)