Posts tagged music

Modular CPU

I love this project - implemented a CPU using euro-rack synthesizer modules. Also introduced me to VCV Rack whish seems super cool itself.

Faster, Stronger, Weirder

I just stumbled across this great arrangement of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger:

Which reminded me of the inventive finger-version for a decade (!!) ago:

And straight into the full body version:

Covers of Covers

These excellent covers of Ryan Adams' covers of Taylor Swift's 1989 are so hot right now.

Chip Rainbows

Sure, In Rainbows is great. But it would be much better as 8-bit chiptunes, right?

Right!

Heavy Rotation

Think your local radio station plays the same songs over and over again? Think that it's getting worse over time? Then prove it with graphs!

This excellent analysis of Minnesota's The Current shows what can be done with a little bit of R code and some curisoity.

In My G4 Over Da Sea

It's hard to overstate the genius of In My G4 Over Da Sea, a mashup of modern rap and Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. If you're a fan of NMH, you may not love it, but it's certainly a thing.

Thrift Shop

So much good music on the youtubes lately, with Kreayshawn's Go Hard and Watsky's Ninjas in Paris. Today's pick is definitely Thrift Shop by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

In followup to my previous post, someone has spent the time to create Spotify playlists for all of the Festive Fifties from 1976 to 2011, including the two all-time lists. Some excellent listening.

Festive Fifties

In honor of Mr Ward's first podcast (in addition to my remix) I put together a Spotify playlist of all the Festive Fifty number ones. There are a few missing, due to gaps in the Spotify catalog:

  • 1992 "Geek Love" - Bang Bang Machine
  • 1993 "Enough is Enough" - Chumbawamba & Credit to the Nation
  • 1994 "I Want You" - Inspiral Carpets featuring Mark E. Smith
  • 2004 "Theme From Sparta FC Part 2" - The Fall
  • 2005 "Grumpy Old Men" - Jegsy Dodd
  • 2008 "50-Year-Old Man" - The Fall

If they appear later on Spotify, I'll add them in the relevant position.

I just met you...

This is an excellent idea for business cards.

Hopefully you're already familiar with the reference. And the meme.

6th February, 11:33 am

very neat: a record player that plays tree rings

30th August, 5:03 pm

fishy fishy is way better than gucci gucci

29th August, 11:07 pm

this really makes me want a novation launchpad (i already have the ReMOTE SL)

29th August, 3:09 pm

it's an adele day: npr tiny desk and the vma's. nice

8th July, 2:05 pm

bookmarking for the future: echoprint is a free open-source music fingerprinting system

17th December, 4:40 pm

isle of tune is an awesome idea, very well executed

22nd November, 4:13 pm

an excellent visualization interface for samples used in the new girltalk album

15th November, 10:36 pm

be sure to grab the new girltalk album while it's free

7th November, 8:42 pm

i've been listening to this on a loop. not the best nature boy cover, but very catchy

6th November, 9:46 pm

mad men plus nat king cole = genius

24th July, 5:39 pm

east anglian boy was excellent, but newport state of mind is probably the best

17th July, 4:00 pm

undercover karaoke is a nice idea. odd choice of person though. i think the guy from Journey would be best

6th July, 11:16 pm

this hacked instrument is pretty awesome. sounds great when all smushed together

17th March, 10:15 pm

the telephone video is honestly the peak of music videos. yes

26th January, 11:53 am

if a music video has ever been about my life, this is it. err, maybe

20th January, 10:07 pm

coder girl is my new favorite song

23rd December, 10:53 pm

magnetic fields song in comic form. awesome

15th December, 12:06 am

best video i've seen all month - guy in a chicken suit playing "what is love" on bass and pianica

13th December, 7:21 pm

a 19 year old in london was literally killed by too much bass. that sounds like crazy talk

25th October, 10:10 pm

in my mind, all japanese poeple are just like this

16th October, 10:54 pm

i'm a sucker for interesting nmh covers, but she has a bunch of other great covers too

16th October, 10:42 am

linos is a beautiful little portable record player

20th September, 4:35 pm

even if you don't like arcade fire, watch this video. they are lovely

26th August, 1:07 pm

in b flat is pretty awesome (if your browser can handle it)

27th July, 1:58 pm

this interactive music video is wonderful. takes a while to load, and isn't obvious what's going on (percentage at the center bottom on light type)

26th May, 4:13 pm

lots of good live-action stop-motion recently. this music video is beautiful

11th May, 6:29 pm

the new propellerheads software, record, looks really nicely done. reason plus multi-tracking equals win. but i'd rather they just upgraded reason of course...

29th April, 4:30 pm

praxinoscopes are awesome. be sure to watch the 'making of' video, which explains it all

9th April, 2:39 pm

audiotool is an amazing piece of work - reason redone in flash. very very slick. seems to be the work of andre michelle, whose demo work is also excellent

7th April, 10:17 pm

tonematrix is a really fun little toy for making music. best part: it always sounds good

21st March, 7:41 pm

american boy on acoustic guitar is kinda awesome. very mellow

20th March, 3:14 pm

this awesome promo video makes me want to bust out reason right now

11th March, 7:45 pm

the new ipod shuffle looks pretty cool - tinyer than ever and now with playlists. the voiceover stuff is barely better than text-to-speech 10 years ago though. i wonder if itunes on your mac generates the speech files, or if the ipod has the software to do it at runtime?

9th March, 11:56 pm

and worldwide best selling artists is interesting too (yay tom jones - 100m+ records sold)

9th March, 11:50 pm

it's wikipedia evening! the world list of best selling albums is really interesting. a bunch on there that you wouldn't have suspected. the uk list is a little more embarrassing

2nd March, 4:00 pm

detecting the click track through science. nice

7th February, 7:40 am

awww. keepon dancing to another spoon track

15th December, 9:38 am

my song colors are a bit busted. wonder if there's an XSS bug if you listen to certain music...

2nd December, 2:25 pm

songbird finally goes 1.0. congrats guys!

13th November, 5:58 pm

check out daniel burka in his high school ska band. music isnt bad either

27th October, 10:04 pm

@kastner pointed me to this mp3 sample from the dynamics groups i linked to a couple of days ago. freaky

26th October, 6:57 pm

julia nunes' new album ("i wrote these") is super fucking awesome. buy it

9th October, 4:31 pm

the unicorns are awesome. like to "i was born a unicorn". now [via rr]

8th October, 11:15 am

lego album covers are pretty awesome

3rd October, 6:43 pm

an explanation of the lyrics behind brimful of asha. i'd always assumed it was random made up words. oops [via leah]

24th September, 12:01 pm

i love sweetafton's road trip song. becoming a uke addict

12th September, 2:54 pm

did i ever link to the macbook air / girl talk mashup ad? no? well, i should have

11th September, 5:31 pm

a full radiohead concert on the npr player. good working music, if that's your thing

6th September, 3:12 pm

i was told about this a while ago but only just found it - an awesome infographic showing the samples used in a single track from the latest girl talk album

3rd September, 9:43 pm

this xkcd still makes me smile. it helps if you've seen the discovery channel advert

25th August, 3:24 pm

listentoyoutube.com is just what i'd been looking for - an easy way to extract an mp3 from youtube videos. lovely

7th August, 10:25 am

in my brain this morning: pork and beans acoustic version

2nd August, 4:27 pm

the cern rap is just too awesome for words

21st July, 7:43 am

bert and ernie rapping. thanks jeremy

16th July, 10:38 am

and norah jones on sesame street

14th July, 1:11 pm

from mr baio: the studio version of bk baby

13th July, 11:42 pm

last one, i promise. an ice ice baby cover. i saw him do this a while back and it was as awesome as it seems

13th July, 11:37 pm

more live kweller, from a record store in brisbane. pretty good quality recording

13th July, 11:31 pm

an awesome ben kweller recording from forever ago

9th July, 12:47 pm

two muxtapes i've been listening to lately

2nd July, 5:09 pm

an odd feist video

30th June, 12:08 pm

there's no way to permalink to the radiohead blog (wtf?), so i'm linking straight to the swf. thom and jonny playing portishead. my day is complete. [update, here's the permalink]

13th April, 10:43 pm

new hobby - finding awesome nmh covers on youtube

4th April, 3:08 pm

adrian's radiohead remix is lovely - much more upbeat than the original. i'd like to hear a remix of last flower

5th March, 7:27 pm

i have a total love-on for 13 & god at the moment. german electronica ftw

24th November, 11:31 am

daft punk with hands? keep watching, it gets better [via pb]

20th November, 4:21 pm

this music video by bat for lashes is awesome - make sure you keep watching for the first 30 seconds

18th November, 10:26 am

the sadly-departed mr baio found an even better live version of still alive - nice work. the cake makes it sound better. and the song is pretty awesome

24th October, 10:02 am

almost certainly computer generated, but still [beautiful](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5XVeENmLMk ) [via coates]

23rd October, 9:17 am

a page of a million "love will tear us apart" covers. found while looking for the josé gonzález one (which is quite good)

11th October, 5:19 pm

a song about social networks? ze is hot

11th September, 8:24 am

last graph makes some really beautiful graphs

23rd January, 12:11 am

copyinf pb - my top artists from the last year. is that really what i listened to? the lack of ipod tracking skews it significantly, since it means i only capture work and not travel.

5th September, 7:14 pm

"i started a blog nobody read" is actually quite catchy [via coates]

8th July, 11:37 pm

fact of the day - pusa played made-up instruments called a basitar and guitbass

10th May, 9:23 am

hatebeak sound awesome [via jallspaw]

24th February, 10:56 am

the klf created pete doherty? now that would be funny

20th February, 11:26 pm

todo: ask leonard what music this is and why it sounds so familiar (leonard knows all) update: the song is heartbeats by jose gonzalez from his 2005 album veneer. it's familiar as it was used in the sony bravia advert (think bouncing balls). thanks to everyone who emailed, phoned, IM'd or spoke to me on the bus.

15th January, 12:44 am

i need to take a look at the gnupod module to see if i can hook up ipod play counts to lastfm for better stat tracking

12th January, 12:40 pm

she keeps all her ports open like windows ME, there's so much drama in the PhD. [via leonard via gordon]

7th January, 12:41 am

audioscrobbler's web services offerings are looking a lot more comprehensive these days. need to hook up the media page at some point soon.

15th August, 3:45 pm

this swing version of smells like teen spirit is addictive.

13th August, 10:12 pm

last.fm's new team page is great. and so is the site in general. i used to be a subscriber in the early days, but kinda forgot about it. back to subscribing now i have good bandwidth at home and need some new music.

12th August, 11:28 am

brilliant brilliant flash music video via pep. lovely style

5th August, 6:42 pm

i've just gotten my first piece of audioscrobbler spam (i imagine i'm well behind the curve on this one). somebody suggested i listen to avec-a. anyone heard of them?

22nd July, 2:04 pm

this musical flash toy [via b3ta] is great.

14th April, 10:16 pm

ryan (of dinosaur comics fames) has written probably the best livejournal post ever. i kinda sorta want to give it a try

5th April, 10:50 pm

the new decemberists album is super super awesome. i've been playing it on loop for the past week and am still loving it. genius.

20th March, 10:37 pm

su claims this is the best hip-hop video of the year staring men in animal costumes. i think it's probably the best hip-hop video ever staring men in animal costumes.

13th March, 2:11 pm

ourtunes is excellent - it allows you to easily browse and download itunes tracks on your local network. works on windows too.

25th February, 3:47 pm

via lealea: the blind pianist has released a free album or mario and ff themes.

24th February, 11:08 pm

dave hoffman wrote a song titled 'i was a teenage billionaire psychopath' (j-ro reference) and it's not bad.

1st February, 11:21 pm

anime lyrics (rock!) has the words to the rather great opening theme to GITS:SAC theme, "inner universe". i hadn't realised some were in english.

29th January, 9:07 pm

i'm not sure quite how awesome the iDog is, but it seems pretty awesome. i mean, come on - it can dance.

18th January, 9:36 pm

audioscrobbler still rules, even if it tells me i've now spent over 4 hours listening to holland 1945 by neutral milk hotel (that's a track not an album. yeah)

10th January, 7:40 pm

'it sounds kind of like if guided by voices got in a fight with 1984-era R.E.M., and maybe neil young is there, but he is just kind of watching and nodding, just kinda like, "oh, yeah. that is awesome.".' drew's new album is out

7th December, 10:42 pm

the world needs more britney rock covers. yay for localh.

30th November, 6:48 pm

churning through the email backlog, i came across the frankie big face mailing list update. first one in almost two years. must go check out his new music.

29th November, 10:22 am

gah. sealab 2021 is awesome, but the theme song by calamine is really really addictive.

26th October, 9:21 am

rip john peel :(

21st October, 11:48 pm

new band of the week: bearsuit are english and very cool.

3rd October, 8:52 pm

the pixies really rock

15th September, 10:25 pm

listening to lee and herring from years ago i came across the dream warriors - wash your face in my sink. i was trying to remember what this song was called a few weeks ago. pretty awesome.

9th September, 5:52 pm

acen of 1992 "trip to the moon" fame has all his stuff online. great stuff

8th September, 11:44 am

john vanderslice (ex of mk ultra) has a bunch of mp3s available to download on his site. as in whole albums. must download later when i get time.

26th July, 12:55 pm

i quite like train (or, at least, the one track i have), but it appears i have bad taste in music.

26th July, 9:56 am

interesting and not entirely unexpected - a study found that file sharing has zero effect on music buying. duh.

23rd July, 1:32 am

on flickr: lots of nice photos of the polyphonic spree at the apple store in sanfran.

21st July, 6:51 pm

keiren pointed me at this indie music site with a bunch of free downloads. i'll check it out when i get a chance.

21st July, 6:34 pm

found a nice neutral milk hotel fansite with all the lryics and tabs.

19th July, 12:55 pm

a new launch with simon waldman from the guardian: mp3blogs.org.

13th July, 4:57 pm

this is the only itunes/mirc/now-playing plugin that i could get to work. it also makes itunes 'always on top' in mini-mode, which is a feature i've been wanting for a while.

12th July, 8:02 pm

popbitch pointed out this nice guide of band-name origins.

12th July, 5:36 pm

i suspect i've already mentioned it, but you should be listening to snow patrol's songs for polar bears. it's been playing inside my head all weekend, mixed with ben folds and the pixies. my head is like an awesome radio station but without CBC1's great "Finkleman's 45s".

12th July, 11:47 am

joel has released some of his songs on mp3. i recommend the giant bee song, which isn't online yet.

8th July, 12:54 pm

webjay is pretty cool - share playlists with people without sharing the music. must try it out.

6th July, 11:31 pm

snow patrol are currently taking the uk by storm [sic] with their album final straw, but their first album, songs for polars bears, is a hidden gem. a much rawer sound, but still excellent.

6th July, 11:13 pm

one of the best things i've heard in ages is this guy playing the mario theme on a ukulele. awesome.

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This is the personal website of Cal Henderson, Slack co-founder & CTO.

I give occasional talks, write code and sometimes articles.

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