Yo La Tengo previewed a track off their upcoming album, Fade, on YouTube. The track in the video above is Ohm and features a tree from Overlook Park in Portland, Oregon that is also on the album’s cover. Fade will be released in January.
Tag: music
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Giant Steps Visualized by Michal Levy
You know that sudden panic when something you used to count on is no longer there at the end of a trusty purple link? Like forgotten memories, as the web gets older, the synapses that link to dusty old internet memes crumble and fade. Link rot sucks
I recently went looking for an old .swf file that I used to show my son when he was a baby. The animation below is over 10 years old so that dates him but back in the day, this 4mb file enjoyed millions of views. I almost didn’t find the file so I took the time to download it so that I could archive it on my public Dropbox account for others to enjoy.
If you want to read more about this visualization and how it was made, there is a short write up on Michal’s site who built this for her BFA degree, “I worked on this film from morning to night, doing only this, for 4 months,” says Levy. Yes, times have changed since 2001.
For a more recent work, see her latest work, One from 2010 as well as a recent video interview with her at the DLD conference in Tel Aviv.
UPDATE: Five years later and now Adobe Flash files are no longer supported in browsers. I converted the .swf file into a .flv file and uploaded it to YouTube. Progress!
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Flaming Lips makes the upsell into an art form
I’ve written about the innovative use of the premium upsell as something instructive for anyone selling premium content. I just learned about the Flaming Lips Gummy Bear skull which they released earlier this year which has turned the whole premium upsell thing into an art form. I love it!
Embedded inside a 7-pound gummy bear skull is a USB stick with a unique set of songs from the Lips. The catch is you need to eat your way into the skull to “extract the music. As front man Wayne Coyne says, “You’re gonna eat it, you’re going get a stomach ache…but you’re gonna love it!”
And here is a clip showing Wayne dropping off the first five to buy the Gummy Bear Skull at a record store in Oklahoma near Wayne’s house.
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Steve Ballmer Developers Rap
Mad props for getting Linus Torvalds into a rap song. This has to be a first.
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The world is not going to change. Each one of us will change.
It has been two weeks since the disaster in Japan. We can choose to look at this as a setback or an opportunity. Mother Nature has taught us all a valuable lesson. A lesson we seemed doomed to learn again and again.
We are not masters of our domain, we are but passengers on this lonely rock hurtling through space. We can choose to either get along and celebrate our life together or continue to fight each other to rule over our patch of dirt and make it our own. The choice is ours.
Retired martial artist Genki Sudo is a performance artist in Japan with the group World Order and has this message for Japan but also for all of us looking at Japan.
“We are one.”
The sooner we realize that, the better. This is the lesson.
Sudo’s message in the YouTube video description:
The unprecedented disasters unfolding in Japan; earthquakes, tsunami, and nuclear explosions, will somehow change things to come. And to send my message about this, I have expressed it here with WORLD ORDER.
These disasters can be interpreted as a turning point for civilization. I think that we have arrived at a time of revolution, shared with all the people of the world, in today’s society, economy, and political systems.
Incidents themselves are neutral. I believe that every single one of us, wandering through this deep darkness, can overcome anything, if only we let go of our fear, and face the it all in a positive light.
The world is not going to change. Each one of us will change. And if we do, then yes, the world will be changed. It is darkest right before the dawn. Let’s all rise up to welcome the morning that will be so very bright for mankind.
– via Pink Tenticle
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will.i.am on chips talking to chips
In a post last year, I paraphrased a quote, “If you are not paying for a product, you are the product.” Will.i.am recently updated this quote with the line,
You are either the person getting pimped, or you’re the person doing the pimping.
will.i.am’s description of how the Black-Eyed Peas negotiated a new type of advertising unit for the Super Bowl and collaborated with Marc Benioff and Salesforce to promote Chatter.com through the mini-site thebabypeas.com is a glimpse at how switched on celebrities are using modern tools to manage their brand without the help (or interference or commissions) by an agency.
But the most visionary thing and something I keep coming back to is will.i.am’s vision of the next generation internet. It’s a world where brand “alliances” pool together to subsidize content producers. A world where, “chips talk to chips” without a middleman to make the free flow of content seamless and automatic. In this new world, a collection of devices will marry themselves to a library of content and work seamlessly together.
Extended further, it’s a world in which we no longer need the internet to connect us all. When you text someone next to you, why do you need to connect to a cell tower and send the message over a network only to round trip it right back again. If you extend the chips-talking-to-chips metaphor, why not just have the phone turn itself into the modern version of a walkie-talkie and beam the message right over? Bluetooth and NFC have started this vision but taken further, why can’t cellphones self-organize into mini-networks so that a group of phones together could share information without having to connect to the cloud?
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Bohemian Rhapsody on Ukulele
TED has a video of Jake Shimabukuro playing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on his Ukulele. As Jake says, “If everyone played the Ukulele, this world would be a much happier place.”
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Fun with SoundCloud
I’ve been playing around with a service based here in Berlin called SoundCloud. It’s geared towards DJs who want to distribute their mixes making it drop-dead easy to upload typically large files and embed them across the web in widgets. The closest thing I would compare it to is the flickr badge for photos or YouTube embed for videos.
What’s nice about SoundCloud for the professional DJ is that plays on the widget and also back on the profile page are collected for reporting back on the artist’s SoundCloud home page so the DJ can see where their tracks are getting the best, er, traction.
It’s also a great service for someone like me who would just from time to time to shine a light on my favorite live music sets. Here’s a set from the April, 1999 run Phil Lesh did with Trey and Page from Phish at the Warfield in San Francisco. And see that little widget over in the sidebar to the right? Yeah, I listen to a lot of music so if you have a mix you think I might enjoy, use the Dropbox to push it my way.
Enjoy.
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Misa, a touchpad guitar
The Misa is “not a guitar” says Michael, it’s creator, based out of Sydney, Australia. The Misa is designed to play electronic music.
In electronic music, the timbre (or colour) of the sound can be morphed in an infinite number of ways. For a guitar to accommodate this, the right hand needs more control than just plucking strings. You need to be able to control elements of the sound, such as sustain, pitch, filter cutoffs, contour or any other synthesizer parameter, in a way that has no physical constraints.
Misa digital guitars to acoustic guitars or electric guitars. Those are different instruments, for different artforms, for different music. This is electronic music.
The Misa plugs into a MIDI controller and runs a Linux kernel. The instrument’s software is open-source and designed to be enhanced by the community.
Here’s how it works.
if you tap on the left side of the screen you play a note with an effect parameter knob turned more to the left and if you tap to the right side of the screen the note is played with the knob turned to the right. Similarly with the top and bottom of the screen. Since there are two axis’ (X/Y) you can actually control two parameters at once.
Pretty cool.