Posts tagged music
Girl Talk in a Box lets you interact with your music. While a song is playing, you can take control, speeding it up, slowing it down, skipping beats and so on.
The video for Frightened Rabbit’s “Today’s Cross,” which is apparently a b-side for their recent single “The Woodpile,” though the song isn’t on Rdio or iTunes. The new album, Pedestrian Verse, is out now.
A techno nerd reviews a Pauly D “DJ set” in Australia. It’s about what I expected.
9:37pm – Pauly attempts to scratch for the first (of many) times. Someplace, somewhere, DJ Shadow shudders and doesn’t know why.
The Beatles: Unplugged is a collection of acoustic demos for the White Album. A fun listen if you’re a fan of the album. [via]
Boil the Frog makes playlists that take you from one artist to another unrelated artist through a “seamless” playlist. To test I had it construct a playlist from DJ Shadow to to Johnny Cash in 22 tracks. Dopeness. [via]
Sasha Frere-Jones’s year in music.
It was once common for members of bands that did not exclusively play dance music to dance as they played. Then, bands went through a weird period where visible physical behavior became a sign of crass and down-market intentions. Not cool, apparently. Propulsive music was matched by hopping and mild shaking, in the best cases. In the last few years, though, moving convincingly in time to your own music has become kosher again.
Pitchfork‘s best 50 albums and 100 tracks of 2012.
Related: Vice evaluates the Pitchfork list.
Reading Pitchfork is like watching your Granddad try to open a CD and it’s taking forever because his old hands don’t work, and he doesn’t know the trick where you take it off the hinges, and anyway it’s a CD with stuff on it you could get online using your phone in less time than it’s taking him to open just the first layer of shrink wrap, and you want to tell him this, but by God he can do it himself because despite your bloodsucking wishes he’s not dead yet.
➜ The Grey Album remastered
John Stewart has remastered The Grey Album, which is as great as ever (or technically greater now, I guess) to listen to. [via]
Return of the rave
GQ‘s look at Electric Daisy and the return of the rave.
Rave culture assumed the quaintness of a curious historical trend. Neon orange parachute pants went the way of white bell-bottoms, and the music went back to Europe, where it belonged. American teens discovered emo, wore more eyeliner. A decade passed. Now, somehow, rave culture has come back, and its appeal appears to be more mass than the rave kids of the ’90s could have hallucinated—or, for some of them, desired.
➜ What is a song supposed to do?
Beck introduces his new album (which is just sheet music and not actually an album) for the New Yorker.
You could say that things like karaoke or band-replicating video games have filled that vacuum, but home music was different in its demands—a fundamentally more individual expression. Learning to play a song is its own category of experience; recorded music made much of that participation unnecessary. More recently, digital developments have made songs even less substantial-seeming than they were when they came on vinyl or CD. Access to music has changed the perception of it. Songs have lost their cachet; they compete with so much other noise now that they can become more exaggerated in an attempt to capture attention. The question of what a song is supposed to do, and how its purpose has altered, has begun to seem worth asking.
