- The Knife - "Forest Families" - The Swedish duo take us over the river and thru the woods, to a very dark place. Trance riffs, Björk-esque crooning, and a mysterious tale of childhood exile, clean living and sexual repression. Buy the album here.
- Rick Leon - "Vice Xmas 2004" - If Sonny Crockett dreamed of sugarplum fairies instead of cocaine cowboys, this would be the soundtrack. Find out more about Rick Leon, electronic jazz artist (and obvious Jan Hammer fan), here.
posted by Maximus |
3:38 pm EST |
2006.12.25 |
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On Monday evening, I attended the The NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program's winter show. The twice-yearly ITP shows are a grab-bag of cool, strange, and fun experiments with interactive technology. Here are some highlights from Monday night...
Solar Bikini: Power your iPod or cool your drink while getting a tan.
Future Perfect: An interactive, street-level simulation of the gargantuan Atlantic Yards real estate project that's about to overwhelm a Brooklyn neighborhood.
Photo-Silhouette Booth: A photo booth with interactive virtual butterflies, balls, and balloons, that even a person who hates having her picture taken can enjoy.
WeRockNYC: When this site goes public, it should be the best user-generated guide to New York music and nightlife yet -- with RSS feeds, text messaging, maps, and other goodies.
The Orb: A spinning halo of colored LEDs renders brilliant but ghostly spherical images.
Fantastic Piano: An instrument whose synthesized tones, and bubbling columns of glitter and water, are triggered by moving your hands across beams of light.
Animalia Chordata: My favorite piece of the show -- a collection of miniature people in glass bottles, who react to you in various ways when you approach them. Whimsical and ingenious.
Mark your calendars for the ITP spring show, coming in May 2007. Also: Check out my post about last July's BAPLab digital/interactive art show.
posted by Maximus |
11:08 pm EST |
2006.12.20 |
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Tricia Romano notes the rise of new nightspots in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and takes this as a sign of growing disgust with bottle-service clubs:
Nightclubs are always opening (and closing) in New York, but this mini-surge of fresh venues is built on music and art, not the bling of bottle service, signaling the beginning of a hopeful new era in New York nightlife, one where the artists, musicians, and DJs—tired of the bottle service boom bullying clubs into a world of materialism and monotony—take back the night.
Perhaps we are just experiencing a time-honored cycle in New York nightlife. In 1990, venerable downtown club matron Chi Chi Valenti wrote a poem called, appropriately enough, "Take Back the Night"...
Take it back from mere attitude and return it to grand gesture.
Take it back from every futures trader yearning for a new life.
Take it back from sweater consultants and out of town investors.
Return it to ruined men with no feeling for the masses, and no stomach for the shameless sell.
...While many might say that the pendulum swing from music-driven clubs to bottle service is merely the market responding to consumer demand, others point out that the city's legislative tactics, such as utilizing the cabaret law (which prohibits dancing without a license) against smaller venues, has played a part, too.
"It's not that there's been a shift," says Jason Goodman, 3rd Ward's executive co-director. "It's that they've outlawed this kind of thing. There was nowhere to go anymore. They shut everyone down. But there's a huge demand with our kind of cultural events, and the city does everything they can do to stop it. The kind of New York they are creating is a completely whitewashed, upper-class-only, super-safe shopping mall."
And not even so safe. Following the case of 18-year-old Jennifer Moore this summer—after drinking at Guest House, she eventually staggered down the West Side Highway, and was found brutally murdered the next morning—a backlash has begun that stretches beyond the downtown artists' community. Club Row is now infested with invasive police patrols and giant billboards warning against underage drinking.
Toriton Plus is an experimental synthesizer interface. Touch the water's surface, and sounds are triggered by five lasers that sense the waves you create. More info at Little-Scale.
On the whole, I enjoyed the Pet Shop Boys' double album Fundamental + Fundamentalism, released last summer. Between the two discs, there was about one album's worth of fantastic material.
I do wish the PSB would take more chances with their now somewhat stale production style. Veteran Trevor Horn didn't mess with the formula in any big ways on disc 1, the album proper. It did contain a few standout tracks, but I'd love to hear an album that sounded more like disc 2, a collection of more adventurous remixes and extras.
For example, "Fugitive", available only on the second disc in an electrifying Richard X mix, is my favorite song of the year, and may be the best Pet Shop Boys song of the last decade. It sounds a lot like their best '80s material, but with the energy, crispness, and novelty of 2006. If only they'd let Richard X produce the whole project! A full-on electro PSB album would have been stunning.
There is another dimension to the Pet Shop Boys, of course, and that is the visual one. Design Observer discusses their legacy of style:
Other bands have moments of brilliance — the occasional great album cover or music video — but PSB pull it off repeatedly.
It’s a remarkable attainment: the sustained production of a "look" suffused with style, wit, art-world sensibility and pop-culture savvy. It’s an achievement that is currently celebrated by an exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery in London, and the publication of a sumptuously illustrated book, Pet Shop Boys Catalogue.
The book is aptly named; it catalogues Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant’s firm grasp of image and style, and their brainy understanding of pop myth-making. Their career can be seen as a multimedia art installation permanently on show at the heart of the merciless music industry machine; or it can be viewed as a high-camp exercise in mask-making as the duo flirt boldly with styles and shifting personas. ...
As Tennant says: "I see us in the tradition of Joe Orton and Noël Coward in that we are serious, comic, light-hearted, sentimental and brittle, all at the same time..." — qualities that vividly animate PSB record covers, videos and stage shows, and which reveal the pair as daring impresarios of the notion that pop at its best can be the equal of the so-called higher art forms.
MP3.com, founded in 1997 by Michael Robertson, once had one of the largest collections of downloadable music on the net. ... After being acquired by Universal Music in 2001 it was later sold to its current owner, CNET, in 2003. ...
CNET had transformed MP3.com into a music news and editorial site, but now the site is once again offering audio uploads for aspiring bands.
MP3.com is now offering band profiles, 100 MB of audio storage, and software to upload and edit music, videos, and photos. There’s also a new Flash audio player that creates and saves playlists.
One of my first posts on Voltage was about how CNet pulled the plug on MP3.com's collection of independent music. Thousands of musicians' MP3 files and profiles were deleted when CNet made this decision.
Now, two years later, MySpace is offering the kind of services that MP3.com used to offer to indie musicians... and it's one of the most popular sites on the web. "User-generated content" is all the rage. So CNet suddenly wants to win back all the musicians it drove away when it deleted their accounts? Good luck with that.
posted by Maximus |
4:02 pm EST |
2006.12.14 |
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Today comes word via Diplo's website that the ace DJ/party-starter-- along with UK producer/remixer Switch, aka David Taylor-- is right now mastering M.I.A.'s second album, the follow-up to 2005's white-hot Arular.
Details on the new disc remain scant, but we do know that M.I.A. shacked up in the studio at some point with everyone's favorite chaperone to the chorus, Timbaland.
posted by Maximus |
11:02 pm EST |
2006.12.11 |
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A New Wave classic is reincarnated, in this amazing performance by Peter Murphy, Trent Reznor, and two of Reznor's musical pals (Jeordie White and Atticus Ross):
NYC's monthly salon of eclectic electronics ends the year with another triple bill of amazing live acts!
RADIO WONDERLAND
After remixing Chaka Khan, Ofra Haza and They Might Be Giants during the '80s, and dabbling in opera and theater during the '90s, Joshua Fried has a new gig: turning live radio into recombinant funk. With a boombox, a laptop, four shoes, two drumsticks, a steering wheel, and a MIDI controller, he plucks sounds from the airwaves and spins them into wild electronic collages. Totally improvised every time, and unlike anything you've seen or heard!
MAXX KLAXON with Marlene Mars
Comrade Klaxon returns to SPLICE, accompanied by the lovely but deadly Marlene Mars on bass guitar and backing vox. Their set will include the public debut of a new song, which Maxx describes as a "global warming party jam." This will be the last Maxx Klaxon performance of 2006. Don't miss out on New York City's finest electropop mind control!
YO JESSE
This NJ-based trio describe their sound as "digitally enhanced tribal dance music". Their kinetic live show features a tag-team performance style, mixing guitar, djembe, sampler, turntables, keyboard, dumbek, durbakka, glockenspeil, flute, vocoder, and more. Modern beats and ancient technologies produce a rich and completely original experience.
SPLICE @ Solas
232 E. 9th St., between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, NYC
LIVE: Radio Wonderland, Maxx Klaxon, Yo Jesse
PLUS: DJ Reybee, spinning new and vintage electronica
7 pm
21+
Free
posted by Maximus |
1:21 am EST |
2006.12.08 |
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The Turn Table PC from Fujitsu has a touch-sensitive LCD panel on the front that lets your DJ skills run wild.
As well as spinning some virtual discs, you can control a connected MP3 player using a display on the front, without flipping the notebook open. ...
Fujitsu unveiled the Turn Table PC at the Ceatec technology fair in Tokyo and while it is only a concept item at the moment, the company reckons they’ll be rolling off the production line within the next two years.
Looks like a super-sized version of an iPod touchwheel.
Some music hipsters may consider mashups to be passé, but I think this is a really cool project:
After being asked by the remaining Beatles, Ringo and Paul, along with Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison, to make experimental mixes from their master tapes for a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil, Sir George Martin, the Beatles legendary producer, and his son Giles Martin have been working with the entire archive of Beatles recordings to create LOVE.
The resulting tracks combine familiar elements and alternate takes from different Beatles songs in startling new ways, and with crystal fidelity.
George Martin is deservedly known as the Fifth Beatle for his contributions behind the mixing desk. He and they basically invented studio-centric pop music as we know it. So this is as about as "authentic" as it gets (if that matters; I also thought the totally unauthorized Grey Album was brilliant). And it's a late contender for my "top ten of 2006" list.
Here's a download of the LOVE version of "Strawberry Fields Forever", in which I can hear bits of at least half a dozen other songs. And you can stream clips from all the tracks on the album at the official site.
posted by Maximus |
4:43 pm EST |
2006.12.06 |
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