41 posts tagged with weirdmusic.
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Welcome to the BAAAAAAND OF TOMORROWWWWWWWWWWWWW
You know that girl who fell through a portal to the surreal future of year 3000 and has been Instagramming from it ever since (previously)? She's still there (seriously, President Prez refuses to let the year number change), and she's just uploaded an EP of music from the future: Unanimous Girth's Shard of Girth (list of other services it's on). It is... extremely 'Normal'. More audio from weird worlds after the jump. [more inside]
"a 'wall of sound' made from voice alone"
This world crucifies you again and again
Massivivid was a Christian industrial rock band active from 1996 to 2003, the brainchild of Wally Shaw and a spin-off project from Deitiphobia, the Christian Industrial band he had founded with Brent Stackhouse in the late 1980s. [more inside]
Season of the Witch
Modular for the masses
Over the past few months, VCV Rack has been gaining an enormous amount of buzz and excitement in the electronic music production community. What is VCV Rack? It's a modular synthesizer (think: someone hunched over a mess of cables, patching them into jacks on an arcane-looking device to alter and modulate sound signals in complex ways). But it's virtual, and it runs entirely in your computer. If you want to get started with VCV right away, you're in luck: here's a gentle primer suitable for people who are new to modular synths. Or read on for more. [more inside]
Les Filles de Illighadad
"Fatou Seidi Ghali is a pioneer of guitar in West Africa. She lives in Illighadad, a small scrubland village in the desert country of Central Niger, located outside of the Tahoua region—and she is one of only two known Tuareg women guitarists in Niger." [http://sheshredsmag.com] [more inside]
“And that was the end of everything. But it was also a beginning.”
Four Years Later, Destiny's Music Of The Spheres Has Leaked [Kotaku] “Composed by O’Donnell, his partner Michael Salvatori, and former Beatle Paul McCartney, Music of the Spheres was envisioned as a musical companion to Bungie’s ambitious Destiny. But Bungie and O’Donnell spent nearly a year battling over, among other things, publisher Activision’s failure to use O’Donnell’s music in a trailer at E3 2013. In April 2014, Bungie fired O’Donnell, and despite O’Donnell’s hopes, the company indefinitely shelved Music of the Spheres. He has made several public comments on the work since, and last month, he implicitly encouraged people to share it. “Years ago, when I was Audio Director at Bungie, I gave away nearly 100 copies of Music of the Spheres,” O’Donnell tweeted on November 30, 2017. “I don’t have the authority to give you permission to share MotS. However, no one in the world can prevent me from giving you my blessing.”” [more inside]
Working for the church while your family dies
Arcade Fire's Intervention as interpreted by St. Peter's Male Voice Choir Drogheda, and Musical Director Edward Holly, with the Lourdes Youth Choir. Annual Christmas Concert 2013.
“Praise Jah, It’s Christmas.”
If you want a change from that great Christmas jazz from the 60s, or if you need a soundtrack for your Caribbean Christmas black cake party, Dev Sherlock has put together a 28-song “Vintage Jamaican Yuletide Mixtape” over at Aquarium Drunkard. It Includes island versions of traditional numbers like White Christmas (The Wailers) and Winter Wonderland (Joe Gibbs Family), plus songs adapted to local circumstances, like Santa Ketch Up Eena Mango Tree. “Why Santa always coming down a chimney? We don’t have chimneys in Jamaica!” composer/singer Faith D’Aguilar explains. “So we decided it should be a mango tree instead.”
Death Rattle
There is a technical term for the kind of instrument it is, a wonderful word: idiophone. An idiophone is something that you hit to make a distinctive sound. That’s all there is to it. No strings, no flute-holes, just an object that you strike. A triangle would be the most obvious example. The root “idio” here means singularity or itself-ness or sole, as in, “alone.” Think idiosyncratic—not in sync with others, obeying its own rhythm. Or idiom—an expression that makes sense only in the language to which it belongs.In the African-influenced musics of Latin America one often hears a uniquely electrifying percussion instrument known as la quijada, the jawbone.
Minutemen Acoustic Blowout
D. Boon died 32 years ago today. Please enjoy this 1985 Public Access TV acoustic set from The Minutemen. [more inside]
Iqaluit Rock City
Uphere.ca Magazine's Northerners of the Year are the musical group The Jerry Cans. Known for songs like Ukiuq, (featuring throat-singing band member Nancy Mike) (English Version), the Celtic-tinged Mamaqtuq, the anti-domestic violence song Arnalukaq, the jaunty Iqanajarumanngittunga and Pai Gaalaqautikkut, the anti-PETA song Dear PETA, and the love song Aakuluk. But The Jerry Cans are not the only musicians heating up Canada's Arctic, many of them signed by the Iqaluit-based Aakuluk Recording Label. [more inside]
Gravy Day
Fill your buckets
A Bucketful of Happiness... Merry Christmas from Lord Buckethead
"So anyway, here's Wonderwall."
In honor of the London opening of Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda and the cast (and orchestra/band) perform a mashup of Hamilton songs and British pop songs. It's delightful.
Jingle Rock Bell
CHRISTMAS BOOTY
We're gonna have us a time
Those fan-made videos that you come across on YouTube, the ones that throw up a different photo for every line of a song (you know what I mean) are usually, um... not my cuppa tea. But sometimes they get it so right that they really help you comprehend the songwriter's intentions, especially if the song is as long and wordy as Choctaw Bingo by James McMurtry. Check it out. This song is so kickass. And, oh yeah, hilarious. Oh, and here's a live version. And, like I said, it's wordy, so you might wanna check the lyrics here.
'Vanilla,' Indeed
The 1997 British pop music charts saw four Spice Girls songs reach number one (and not even the one or two that you know). Elton John's dreadful "Candle in the Wind"/Princess Diana song was the biggest hit of the year (it's the #2 selling single of all time), and *the Teletubbies* had a #1 song for two weeks in December.
That silliness (allegedly, though likely apocryphally) led two British music veterans - one of whom went on to bigger things - to make a cynical bet over whether they could create a group and score a hit with an objectively bad song. Spoiler alert: they could. [more inside]
Well, you needn’t listen. But you should.
“Who needs Monk?” A few months after what would have been Thelonious’s 100th birthday, All About Jazz provides young musicians with four lessons they should learn from the great pianist’s life and work (in addition to “the not particularly helpful insight that it's good to be a genius”). Also in honor of The Monk Century, pianist Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, in The New Yorker, tells us to “Think of Thelonious Monk” (while recommending this video performance in particular as “glorious”). [more inside]
“Pop”-peroni Pizza
Grandiosa is the most popular brand of frozen pizza in Norway: per Wikipedia, they sell twenty-four million pizzas each year even though the population of Norway is just over 5 million. With offerings like a "Hot Nacho" variety, complete with little baby tortilla chips on top, it’s little wonder why. (By comparison, the most popular brand in the US makes around 90 million pizzas for a population of 325 million.)
Grandiosa is so popular that two of their advertising jingles reached #1 on the Norwegian pop charts. [more inside]
Taonga Pūoro - Singing Treasures
An index of over 1000 composers, improvisers and sonic artists.
Manymanywomen.com is an active index dedicated to collecting and curating women artists working in the avant-garde, electronic, experimental, noise, classical, jazz and other non-mainstream audio/music arts. "As of December 12th, 2017, there are 1,205 artists listed in this index."
I aint one of yall peers, I'm the sum of all fears
The Roots' Black Thought unleashes a blistering freestyle on Funkmaster Flex's show on Hot 97 (NSFW language) for 10 minutes straight, doing everything from flipping words to talking about his position on late night television, to referencing a multitude of rappers from Rakim, the D.O.C., Kanye and Dr. Dre, to Kendrick Lamar, to talking about his mother and his upbringing and the current crop of rappers.
The Journal of Prince Studies
The Journal of African American Studies devoted its September 2017 issue to Prince. You can read and/or download all the articles at the journal's site.
im a soviet refugee singing for salam
Orgonite are a Middle Eastern Rave group from Tel Aviv with lyrics in Hebrew, Russian, English and Arabic: Habibi Yaeni, HAMSA, Adibass, Kayfuyem (feat. Arsen Petrosov) [more inside]
Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract or combust.
"[Songs from the Edges] is a playlist of this week's top 100 or so fan discoveries from the 1500+ microgenres I help track at Spotify. Some of the styles you will know, some you won't. Some you won't like. Some may make you lunge towards the Skip button after 4 seconds. But see if you can keep yourself from hitting it quite yet. That song may sound weird, but there's a group of people somewhere for whom it's the most exciting thing happening right now. Maybe they have a point. " [more inside]
New Zealand’s First Christmas
The Christian origins of Christmas meant that before European contact, the celebration had no place in the calendar of Aotearoa. The first celebration of Christmas in New Zealand coincided with Abel Tasman’s voyage to New Zealand in 1642. Unfortunately, things did not get off to a good start.New Zealand’s First Christmas [more inside]
Mary H-G: Inventor of Visual Instruments / Pianist
The "light organ" and "light piano" are the instruments. As I understand it, in the early 1900s Mary Hallock-Greenewalt devised a method of creating light instead of sound when playing these instruments. "Nourathar" is her name for this visual music (the name honoring her Beirut heritage). Here is another photo of the organ, (an earlier version) early organ showing the non-linear rheostat she invented and patented (and which General Electric and other companies stole and used, but she sued them and won). [more inside]
Streaming NOW: 50 Hours of Electronic Music
Always On is a 50-hour Youtube livestream of electronic music and beats featuring female, nonbinary, and transgender performers from 17 countries, sponsored by Moogfest. The NYTimes has more on Moogfest in May, the livestream, and celebrating these amazing artists. (Stream started at 12PM EST, so should run until 2 PM EST on Dec. 8.)
not roxanne
Boomhauer Drums
I'm-a teach you how to make lasagna
Have another Christmas song to argue about
Xmas Express was a series of commercials for Japan Rail that ran from 1988-1992, with a reboot in 2000. They featured the Japanese Christmas song "Christmas Eve," recorded by Tatsuro Yamashita in 1983, and a different up-and-coming actress each year. In each, the main character is shown meeting her boyfriend at a train station - because if you didn't know, Christmas is a romantic holiday in Japan, where the traditions include going out to a romantic dinner, seeing the lights, and sharing KFC and a Christmas cake. (Other holidays are outside the scope of this post, but if that piques your interest, you might also want to read about Valentine's Day and White Day in Japan.) [more inside]
Wintergatan melody - Minecraft cover
You like the Wintergatan Machine (right?) - and you like Minecraft (right?) - then you'll definitely like the Wintergatan song in Minecraft, automated with note blocks and redstone! [more inside]
although my voice was very unlike the soft music of their tones
Coditany of Timeness Two technologists trained a neural network to produce a black metal album.
They started with a pre-existing recording, cut it into tiny tracks, then taught the software to arrange the clips into convincing music. Here's their paper. [more inside]
They started with a pre-existing recording, cut it into tiny tracks, then taught the software to arrange the clips into convincing music. Here's their paper. [more inside]
Mr. Sandman, bring me a horrible nightmare
Sound Designer Jeans rose to prominence with his "uncomfortably meaty" rendition of Mr. Sandman. Since then he has gone on to destroy Mr. Sandman in just about enough ways to make a whole album, including an unsettling one, one that bridges the divide between cute and horrifying, an even more unsettling one, a wavy one, an existentialist hellscape, and the version that you hear on a slow train through the afterlife when you die in your sleep.
If you're not into increasingly disturbing renditions of Mr. Sandman, let Jeans take you uptown. Or to the town of Ween. Or to Flavortown.
Chapelier Fou, the musical mad hatter from France
Chapelier Fou (fr.wiki; Mad Hatter via auto-translation) is the stage name of Louis Warynski, a multi-instrumentalist who composes complex pieces on violin, mandolin, harp and various electronic pieces and synthesizers, as you can see in this live clip of "Darling, Darling, Darling" as a solo piece in 2009, and for some proper madness, an augmented live video, featuring more artists accompanying Warynski and delightfully weird, surreal animations. You can find more videos from his YouTube channel, and most of his discography (Discogs) on Bandcamp.
If All I Was Was Black
"I have a mind to bury them whole,” Mavis Staples sings on her new album, If All I Was Was Black (YT playlist). It is not a very Mavis-like thing to hear the perpetually upbeat gospel legend sing. But after a lifetime devoted to fighting injustice through her music, such is the singer’s recent mood toward a renewed wave of bigotry and racial violence. Mavis Staples has had it. [more inside]
Drinking Pace Indicated, Not Recommended
Titus Jones' Mashup Power Hour 206 songs. 159 artists. 60 mashups. 60 minutes. 60 shots.
Because everybody could use some disturbingly good-but-how-did-you-think-to-try-this micromixes to start their Friday off right.
Singing Bulls and Sun Blindness
Imagine 19th Century America. Say you were out on the Oregon Trail, but instead of dying of dysentery, you ate some ergot-tainted bread and stared at the sun until you went blind? Or perhaps you were enchanted by the dulcet tones of a wonderful singing bull?
Probably not the vision of 1800's America that readily springs to mind, unless you are familiar with the singular work of a group that has gone by many names since its founding in 1982, but currently rejoices in Caroliner Rainbow Blumbeigh Treason of the Abyss.. [more inside]
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