iamcal.com Since May 2000

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

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:

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

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

Right!

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.

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.

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 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.

This is an excellent idea for business cards.

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

very neat: a record player that plays tree rings

fishy fishy is way better than gucci gucci

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

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

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

isle of tune is an awesome idea, very well executed

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

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

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

mad men plus nat king cole = genius

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

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

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

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

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

coder girl is my new favorite song

magnetic fields song in comic form. awesome

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

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

in my mind, all japanese poeple are just like this

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

linos is a beautiful little portable record player

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

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

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)

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

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...

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

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

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

american boy on acoustic guitar is kinda awesome. very mellow

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

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?

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

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

detecting the click track through science. nice

awww. keepon dancing to another spoon track

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

songbird finally goes 1.0. congrats guys!

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

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

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

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

lego album covers are pretty awesome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in my brain this morning: pork and beans acoustic version

the cern rap is just too awesome for words

bert and ernie rapping. thanks jeremy

and norah jones on sesame street

from mr baio: the studio version of bk baby

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

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

an awesome ben kweller recording from forever ago

two muxtapes i've been listening to lately

an odd feist video

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]

new hobby - finding awesome nmh covers on youtube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a song about social networks? ze is hot

last graph makes some really beautiful graphs

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.

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

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

hatebeak sound awesome [via jallspaw]

the klf created pete doherty? now that would be funny

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.

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

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

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

this swing version of smells like teen spirit is addictive.

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.

brilliant brilliant flash music video via pep. lovely style

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?

this musical flash toy [via b3ta] is great.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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)

'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

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

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.

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

rip john peel :(

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

the pixies really rock

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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".

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

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

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.

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