Category Archives: Music

Music

Missing In Acton

I was pretty blown away when I first heard M.I.A.‘s (Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam’s) debut album Arular. The Sri Lankan supercutie creates a mix of ragga and electro funk, so it’s like a dancey, electronic reggae (and I’m not a big reggae fan). The lyrics are nonsensical (or in some dialect of slang I’m ignorant of), but that doesn’t reduce the likeability. Her award winning follow-up Kala has more of a traditional electronic dance, clubby feel. It also includes a cover of the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind? (which samples New Order to boot).

Instead of continuing this awkward description, why don’t you just check out some videos? Like I said, she’s easy on the eyes…

Galang (from Arular)

Bucky Done Gun (from Arular)

Boyz (from Kala)

20 Dollar (from Kala)
Note: fake video, real song

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Music, Television

Au Revoir, Très Bien

So by now you know that Très Bien has been voted off the fantastic Agent Mystery-produced show The Next Great American Band. If you dug their 60s rock, well, you really should be listening to The Zombies or The Yardbirds. But if you’re holding fast to some weird, self-imposed rule that your 60s rock must have been created in the last decade or so, check out The Hentchmen1. They recently re-released Hentch-Forth.Five featuring Jack White. You can enjoy it without breaking any of your stupid rules.

  1. Note the T in the name. Otherwise you’ll find Henchmen, and wonder why I suggested them. [↩]
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Internet, Music

Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)

Almost Famous was the first and last movie I saw in the theater alone. I’m one of those people who believe movies are a social experience. You grab dinner, see the movie, and then talk about it over coffee1. I’m pretty sure I’m in the majority. When Almost Famous was released, of course I wanted to see it with friends. But either everyone had seen it, or nobody wanted to see it. Normally I’d just wait for it to be released on DVD, but something told me I had to see this movie in the theater. So after meeting friends for dinner at the Santa Monica Promenade2 and failing to convince them to join me, I bought a ticket and went in alone.

It was practically a religious experience.

Seeing Cameron Crowe’s journey into the world of rock and roll at the age of 16 seemed like a wakeup call. A big “what the hell am I doing with my life” kinda thing3. The film immediately became one of my all time favorites.

And the music. Just fantastic. Complementing each scene so that hearing them again allows us to invoke Crowe’s memories as our own.

Of course, I bought the soundtrack right away. But even at 17 songs it only covers about a third of the music in the film. At one time I had ambitious plans to collect all the albums the songs had appeared on, allowing me to experience it the same way Crowe did. Luckily, procrastination sometimes saves you work. Eventually I discovered Rhapsody, which saved me from tracking down all those albums on half.com. And the good volunteers at the IMDB painstakingly entered the music credits4. All I had to do was find the tracks on Rhapsody and play them.

Unfortunately, Rhapsody doesn’t have the best search capabilities. But eventually I was able to find all the songs or determine if they weren’t available. When faced with duplicate tracks, I chose the one that appeared on the original album if it was available. This saves you the trouble of having to track it down, if you’re a purist like me.

In addition, I have listed below all the songs that were missing from Rhapsody. The great tragedy for this soundtrack is that Rhapsody doesn’t really have any Zeppelin5 . Considering that the fictional band Stillwater is a composite representing Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, and The Eagles, it is a real loss. Or a great excuse to buy a bunch of Zeppelin albums.

I hope this inspires others to do the same, as there are many movies with great music, and only one of me. However, this won’t be my last – stay tuned!

Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)

Continue reading Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist) →

  1. No coffee after a movie makes me sad. [↩]
  2. Back when it was cool, not just some clone of The Grove [↩]
  3. Unfortunately, my powers of procrastination and laziness are still as strong as ever, but at least I know I’m capable of being motivated for short bursts. [↩]
  4. As I count 48 songs, I’m not sure if it’s missing any since I heard there’s over 50 in the film. However, it does look to be very thorough. [↩]
  5. They must’ve really took “get the Led out” to heart. [↩]
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Music

FLA@NYC

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I saw Front Line Assembly for the first time at BB Kings, May 3rd.
Acumen Nation and The Start, opened.
FLA’s playlist was fantastic since they were set up like a band (drums/guitars riffs) which is my favorate style for them. There’s nothing worse than watching an industrial one-man-band sit in front of a laptop while hopping and down trying to get the crowd into it.
Bill Leeb was in a sarcastic mood. He apolagized for the tour-bus-incident last time he tried to come to NY. The smoke machine ran out of fluid, so he suggested we all fart to keep the mist alive. He also voiced his aggrevation at the lack of any PA system so he couldn’t tell how they sounded, but it wasn’t that bad.
Although I didn’t recognize the other band members, I overheard someone point to Chris Peterson and someone else said Rhys Fulber wasn’t there. I can’t confirm any of this.
After performing, they came back for an oncore including Mindphaser that was phenomenal.
After the show we ate at Lucille’s restaurant, located in the same building. When we were done, we went outside to get a cab and found Bill Leeb (my idol) was just hanging out on the curb while they were loading the tour bus. He was practically alone! It figures I went through two batteries on my camera to get 1.5 gig of pictures and videos. (requests?). Even my cell phone was dead after searching for a signal in the underground club for 4 hours.
So I ended up just gawking at him like a teenager, think of nothing better to say than “duh…, I like music!” as he finished up outside and hopped on the bus.

Next time I will be better prepared.

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Film, Humor, Music

Weng Weng: Kung Fu, Rocketpacks, & Mini Motorcycles

http://youtube.com/watch?v=eqh5O9LbjhY

A Crackteam agent sent me this link from YouTube and I HAD to share it for a good laugh.

It’s a rap video montage of clips from the movies of Weng Weng [from IMDb], and music stylings from The Chuds [from MySpace]. The collaboration was edited and produced by John R. of the R Room. It’s taken a couple views to really appreciate it since my attention during the first round went to the visuals and camera tricks. But the lyrics to the soundtrack song, “Weng Weng Overture,” are equally entertaining. They can be read at The Chuds MySpace page.

I’m a little late to the phenomenon of Weng Weng [from WikiPedia], but of all the Kung Fu and spy spoofs I’ve seen his look to be the most entertaining. Films credits include “For Y’ur Height Only” and “The Impossible Kid”, which received 8/10 stars on IMDb from 50 dedicated voters. There’s even a drink named after him, called the Weng Weng. Well, that may be a false claim but it should be true.

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Music, Technology

Sandisk Sansa e200 Series MP3 Player Review

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For Christmas this year, I treated myself to a longtime object of my technolust: the Sandisk Sansa e280 flash memory MP3 player. Part of the e200 series, the e280 is the 8GB version. I paid $185 at Amazon (no blogger bribes here!). All e200 players have many features to thrash those precious iPod Nanos:

  • Plays MP3, WMA, and secure WMA (see below)
  • 1.8″ color LCD screen
  • Image viewer
  • Video player
  • Voice recorder
  • Data storage
  • FM tuner, with record capability
  • microSD expansion slot
  • User replaceable, rechargeable Lithium Ion battery with 20 hours of play time (average)

That’s what everybody gets. The real kicker is if you have Windows XP [1] and a subscription service like Rhapsody-To-Go, Napster, or Yahoo! Music. This is a Plays For Sure player, so you can take subscription content with you. As long as I am a subscriber, I can transfer any track in my library, even though I didn’t buy it. Since I just got a great deal on Rhapsody-To-Go [2] I expect to subscribe indefinitely. That gives me any of Rhapsody’s 3 million+ tracks anywhere I want. It is the awesome.

That’s quite a feature list, in a very compact package. Here are the highs and lows.

Highs

  • Screen is sharp, photos and videos look good.
  • Sound quality is quite good, both for WMA (160K) and FM stereo
  • Using Rhapsody’s jukebox software, transferring music is quite easy. You either drag and drop files, or synchronize with your Rhapsody Library. If you needed to, you could pick and choose from your Library instead of copying the whole thing. Personally, mine is a giant “best of” collection, so it’s very convenient for me to connect it to my PC have it automatically sync up. Right now I’ve got around 600 tracks that I’ve chosen over the last year, and it takes up about 2.7GB.
  • The design is very nice. It’s shiny! And black. It’s not quite as compact or beautiful as the iPod, but… duh. As far as I can tell, Apple has kidnapped the best designers on the planet (minus Agent Hulagun), so nobody else can have such elegant-looking products. It’s the modern day equivalent of Ivan the Terrible poking out the eyes of Postnik Yakovlev after he built St. Basil’s Cathedral.
  • New batteries are only $20 from Sandisk, compared to $60 for iPods.

Lows

  • Like just about every other MP3 player I’ve read reviews on, the earbuds kinda suck. Sound quality is decent, they’re just these big round discs that don’t feel like they were designed to go in your ears. They’re too big for your ear canal (I think they’re more bellybutton sized), and I haven’t figure out a way to place them so they don’t feel like they’re about to fall out. I’m looking for a replacement, and have my eye on the Sennheiser PMX60 headphones. I’m pretty sure the larger drivers will drain the batteries faster, but at least they’ll be comfortable without messing up my incredible hair.
  • The voice recorder seems to record a high-pitched whine along with your voice. It’s annoying, so don’t expect to make any podcasts from it. And you have to speak into the mic, so I don’t think you can use it to record lectures. Of course, the mic hole is about 2mm in diameter, so it’s a wonder it works at all. At least you can pause and continue the recording.
  • When using the thumbwheel, your thumb rests on the left side of the wheel, which is not optimal. You scroll down, you’re turning counterclockwise, and the screen scrolls up. This is really an artifact of using a very compact device, and I don’t see a solution – that’s just where your thumb naturally rests. To make this more ergonomic you’d need to make it bigger, which nobody wants. I’m sure most compact MP3 players have this issue.
  • When connecting to my PC for transfer, the Rhapsody software needs to scan the device for tracks. This takes several minutes, and I only have about 600 tracks (“only” meaning it’s only 1/3 full). In “mass storage” mode, you can’t transfer subscription content, only drag and drop files. So it doesn’t scan your tracks when you connect, but when you disconnect it essentially reboots and does this “Refresh Database” thing that also takes a couple minutes. You can’t win.
  • The only way to recharge the battery is by hooking the device up to a USB port via the included cable. Not an issue – unless you want to travel with it. Luckily, there are many 3rd party Sansa accessories that solve this, and they’re even blessed by Sandisk. This includes USB charging ports for your car’s cigarette lighter, as well as wall chargers.
  • The LCD stays on when the device is connected to a PC. Since you connect to charge the battery, it seems dumb to be draining it by lighting up the screen.
  • Photos and videos can’t be placed on the microSD card.

I’m nitpicking a bit with the lows, but I’d rather be thorough in case one of them is a deal-breaker for you. Overall, I think the highs far outweigh them, and I’m quite happy with my purchase!

[1] And presumably Vista, but don’t hold me to that. I think it just needs Windows Media Player 10 or better.

[2] I’m afraid it’s gone now, but during the holidays they offered the to-go service for $8 month. I’d been paying $10/month for the Unlimited service, which doesn’t allow you to transfer to MP3 players, and the upgrade price was $15/month! I created another account, hoping to merge the two, but the best customer support could do was cancel the old one. I downloaded the entire library from my original account and then imported it from the new one, so I was able to save just about everything. After spending a year carefully selecting 600 tracks (out of several thousand), you don’t want to have to find them again!

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Film, Music

Great Concert…..at your house!!

This is unusual for me; I never write about music. That is probably because all of the composers on my playlist have been dead for hundreds of years (Mozart is 250 this year, woo-hoo!) and my pop music tastes tend to be Beatles-bland. The less said about it, the better.

But some days ago I attended a cool concert at a friend’s house. The venue was intimate –45 people or less—and the artist was new to me. Bob Bennett is a well-known Christian guitar player, and his folksy ballads are what I remember about that evening gathering. The guitar was expertly and sweetly played (again, I don’t know enough music-related adjectives to give a good description) but the real draw were the vivid lyrics and sheer poetry of his work. Hmmm…. I have heard the phrase ‘dulcet tones’ used, but I don’t know if it applies to the vigorous work that Bob Bennett performed that night.

Also included:our evening is graced by an iconic film actor who just happens to play a mean guitar…..

Continue reading Great Concert…..at your house!! →

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