Posts tagged music
Posts tagged music
In 1986, synthesizers could launch you around the Moon.
What happened to us? What happened to technology? Why have we lost what we once had?
AFP report quoting a segment from 60 Minutes Overtime:
Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein “had this great idea that we could enlist Bill Clinton to convince Led Zeppelin to reunite to perform at the 12-12-12 concert.
“So, Harvey and I got on a plane to fly down to Washington to meet with President Clinton who was going to be seeing the members of Led Zeppelin, who were being honoured at the Kennedy Center.
“And, you know, the president was terrific. He goes, ‘I really want to do this. This would be a fantastic thing. I love Led Zeppelin.’ And Bill Clinton himself asked Led Zeppelin to reunite. And they wouldn’t do it.”
Well, we tried as hard as we could. But if not even throwing Bill Clinton at the problem helped, what else could we possibly do?
In 1967, Steve Reich wrote a piece called “Piano Phase,” a piano duet. Compositionally it’s pretty simple: through the entire piece, both pianists just play three very short, one-handed melodies, each repeated many times. The trick of the piece is that the parts are very slightly desynchronized; one person plays a little bit faster than the other, so they gradually weave in and out of each other, coming in and out of phase.
As a mediocre pianist, I can barely imagine trying to play this with another person without getting fouled up. You’d have to fight the urge to get back in alignment with the other player through the entire fifteen to twenty minutes it takes to play this, all while the other player is going through the same ordeal.
In 2004, Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory student Rob Kovacs played both parts at the same time. I’m awestruck that a human being is capable of this.
“Space Oddity” recorded in, well, space by Chris Hadfield. Phil Plait has more details but really, DAVID BOWIE RECORDED IN SPACE is the lede here.
Today, on a very special Wednesday edition of the Nullary Sources tunebox*, comes posu yan covering “Here’s How!” The original is by Aivi Tran and surasshu on their album The Black Box, which is pretty cool and available free on Bandcamp.
*: The special Wednesday edition may or may not be a result of my forgetting to post this yesterday.
A Japanese fusiony prog band that I’m kind of fond of, Yoh Ohyama’s Electric Asturias, will be performing at the Rites of Spring Festival in Gettysburg in just a few days. I wish I could go!
Here’s a video showing part of their performance of “Double Helix” at a music festival in Portugal in 2010.
Les Aventures Sous La Mer is a duo, Man From Uranus and Jellica:
Les Adventures Sous la Mer are a new Electronic combo from Cambridge producing surreal and funky space music.
Here’s the entirety of their first album, released in 2009 and uploaded by MFU. Start it up in the background and move on to other things — it will treat you well.
Javelin are George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk. They’re signed to David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop, which was excellent enough to upload the entirety of their March 2013 album Hi Beams. Here’s “Airfield.”
It’s been ten months since the last time one of us posted a Kickstarter campaign. How the time flies!
Today’s money pit is a new joint by Paul Vo, the man who developed the Moog Guitar. He’s working on the Vo-96 Acoustic Synthesizer, a box you stick in your guitar that uses signal processors and magnetism to change the harmonics of the strings. This results in the unbelievable sounds you hear in the above video, all of which are coming directly from the guitar without an amp/speaker.
Colin plays the guitar, so I’ll let him have the last word on this one.
Colin: Anyway I watched that vid. WAT
Colin: That was dope.
Colin: I want one. Kind of.
Next up on your Tuesday Nullary Sources jukebox is “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock.
I’m posting it because I’ve somehow never seen the music video before now. It apparently cleaned up at the Video Music Awards. Just gonna quote from Wikipedia:
The music video, directed by duo Godley & Creme and featuring robot-like movable sculptures (by Jim Whiting) dancing, spinning and even walking in time to the music in a “virtual house” in London, England, garnered five MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, including Best Concept Video and Best Special Effects.
