..and it’s free.
You may remember that Amplive decided to remix In Rainbows without consulting Radiohead and got hit with a cease and desist. Radiohead realized that this was very un-Radiohead of them and the whole 8-track album is available here. It features vocals by Too $hort, MC Zumbi of Zion I, Chali2na of Jurassic 5, Codany Holiday, and Del The Funky Homosapien.
edit: Upon one listen, Video Tapez, Nudez and Faustz are pretty good.
Watching this video of an impromptu subway Thriller dance while listening to Architecture in Helskinki and having it sort of match up.
The title pretty much says it all. There’s a new song from everyone’s favorite post-Unicorns group over at their myspace. (the song is “The Arm”) Their new album comes out 4/28 and it’s called The Arm’s Way.
1st listen – Give up halfway through.
2nd listen – Man, that riff was awesome. I’ll just listen to that one part.
3rd listen – I guess I do like this song. I’ll suffer through the whole thing.
4th listen through 8th listen – Repeat
9th listen – This song is the greatest thing ever. I can’t believe I thought this part 6 minutes in was unnecessary.
10th listen – (Person inevitably in the car with you thinks this song is way too long).
I just ran into this article on a tech site. It looks at the effect that the recent Apple commercials have had on CSS and Feist album sales. It just goes to show you that everyone can appreciate good music, they just aren’t willing to find it. This is the argument for allowing your music in commercials, more so than anything Kevin Barnes has to say on the matter.
“Band: CSS
Song: Music is My Hot, Hot Sex
Commercial: iPod Touch
Numbers: 340 copies per week ballooned to 2,000 in the first week since the commercial release. It’s also number 15 on iTunes and 5 on iTunes ringtones. And the song has broken into the Pop 100 chart.
Band: Feist
Song: 1234
Commercial: 3 gen iPod Nano
Numbers: Feist originally debuted strong, but averaged around 6,000/week. Then in the weeks following the Nano campaign, sales grew to 14,000 first week, 19,000 the second, 28,000 the third and 20,000 the fourth. It was a first month bonus of nearly 60,000 sales and cumulative bonus of about 130,000.”
I ran into this on the internet today. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Watch the whole thing for a bonus song interlude in the middle.
Last Thursday I took the bus up to NYC for my personal event of the summer, the Daft Punk show at Keypspan park in Coney Island.
Keyspan park is the stadium for the minor league Brooklyn Cyclones, and ended up being a great venue for this show. As we got onto the field, we caught most of the opening act, Kavinsky, an awesome DJ duo that were the surprise of the show. They didn’t play on the stage, they had a little area to the right where they were DJing. This made the transition to the next act easier.
They finished abruptly, and second opener the Rapture started playing immediately after a brief introduction. I guess they were okay, but they didn’t fit with the show at all, especially after the awesome-ness of Kavinsky. They finished their set and the crew put up a huge curtain in front of the set as the trailer for Daft Punk’s new movie Electroma played. Then Kavinsky reappeared at their station at the side and DJed some more while the extensive light show Daft Punk is famous for was constructed. This took a little too long, and the crowd started becoming antsy. Kavinsky countered this by unexpectedly playing “Killing in the Name Of” followed by “99 Problems” then bizarrely “Holding Out For a Hero.”
They ended their second extended set and the lights went out. The curtain opened and the duo was barely visible with fog streaming around them in their robot suits. They started with a ROBOT vs HUMAN argument that went into Robot Rock. It was an unbelievable light show. It started out fairly basic, just using white lights and strobes, then the pyramid with solid colors. As the show went on the complexity of the displays continued to increase until full high resolution images were flashing on the pyramid during “Human After All”. When they came out for their last encore the pyramid was kept dark while HUMAN and TOGETHER flashed on the back wall. Then two orange lines slowly worked their way through the triangle lights until it got to where Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter were. Once this happened, the lights dropped and neon orange tubing around their suits glowed while they DJed the last song before once again stepping down from their pyramid to reveal the neon orange DAFT PUNK logo on the back of their jackets.
Setlist (taken from another blog):
Robot Rock / Oh Yeah -> Touch It -> Voyager / Technologic / Television Rules The Nation / Crescendolls -> Steam Machine -> Around the World -> Harder Better Faster Stronger / Burnin’ / Too Long / Face to Face / One More Time / Aerodynamic / Forget About the World? / The Brainwasher / Prime Time of Your Life / Rollin’ and Scratchin’ / The Brainwasher -> Da Funk -> Daftendirekt -> Superheroes // Human After All // Together -> Music Sounds Better With You -> One More Time (reprise)
Crappy video I shot of the encore, check youtube for more:
Two other things: Daft Punk enlisted people with video camera and gave them film in order to use their videos to create a live DVD of this show. In addition, they are going to be releasing a CD from when they performed in France as well. So if my weak descriptions aren’t enough, check these out.
I’ve had this song stuck in my head on a permanent loop for the past two days because of its awesome video. The song is D.A.N.C.E. by Justice, a French electro duo. (What’s the deal with french duos being awesome?)
I thought I’d share it with everyone. Here’s the final version of it. (note the unfinished version of the video is also worth checking out)
Carl Newman of The New Pornographers has an interview up on Pitchfork where he talks about their new album, tentatively titled Challengers, due sometime around August.
It definitely sounds like something that, when it’s quiet, I think it’s much quieter than it ever has been, to the point that there are actually songs that don’t really have any drums. Or, a song that has no drums for the first half, but then the drums come in, and even then they don’t come in that much.
As a bonus later in the interview he talks about the University of Phoenix Online commercial mentioned in my previous posting here.
All of a sudden, people started saying “I saw your commercial during ‘Saturday Night Live’” or “I saw your commercial during ‘American Idol’,” and I thought, “what the hell is up with that?” Then I began to realize that, well, I guess we inadvertently signed up to be in a big commercial. How about that?
Full interview here.
I’ve been toying with starting a periodic feature talking about music videos past and present that I find interesting. I figured I’d give it a try with one of my favorite videos, Daft Punk – Around the World, directed by Michel Gondry, who you may know from his films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep.
The first few times I saw this video I just thought it was crazy Daft Punk making another crazy video. Then I noticed that each of the five groups represented a different element of the song, all moving synchronized with their parts. The athletes represent the bassline, the robots the vocal, etc. The circular platform they are on represents a record, while those circular lights in the back are like speaker holes. All in all a satisfying video aurally and visually.
For bonus points, spot characters from this video in the LCD Soundsytem “Daft Punk is Playing at my House” video.
