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Get that bleedin' kettle on

monome


Blummin' ace, and the wood smells lovely. This is it running dj64, a genius mixing app. Not that I'll have time to play with it...

Filed under  //   monome   music  
Posted February 7, 2009
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I love tracking parcels

As if wasn't exciting enough, I get to view the progress of my Monome over the Atlantic via UPS. Hooray for the bleedin' internet, god I love it.
 
I imagine it's being prodded at East Midlands Airport by customs who are busily trying to work out what the possible killing range is.

Filed under  //   monome  
Posted January 28, 2009
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8tracks - new muxtape-style service, plus an acid mix


So Muxtape was killed off a while back, death by the inevitable hand of the RIAA, and several services have sprung up in its wake. I've got to be honest; the first I'd heard of 8tracks was through the Flavorpill Daily Dose email - score one for traditional e-mail marketing... It operates in a similar sort of way to Muxtape, allowing you to upload tracks (as MP3s) and order them into a mixtape. There's some extra functionality in that you can comment on other people's mixes, search across genres and artists, and also create more than one mix per user name.

They're working on getting links to Amazon set-up so you can buy the tracks - it would be great if they could work with smaller suppliers like 7digital and Boomkat too, but I imagine that's kind of unlikely. I've already been trying to get hold of "Hot Hands" by Hot Hanas Hula from Acieed Ed's mixtape above, but as per - can't find it in any online stores.

8tracks are also offering a beta-y Uploader for the Mac - and it seems to work pretty well. I got a bit confused when alt-tabbing, wondering where it'd gone, but then realised the program goes into the menubar at the top. I never said I was clever.


Just before it uploads your tracks, it seems to do some processing - CPU jumped massively on my Macbook. I'm guessing this because of the "Identify tracks using MusicDNS" tickbox. MusicDNS is a way of fingerprinting tracks to recognise what they are - wonder where this feeds in to the process? As I say, all the fans in my laptop whirred up at this point and everything slowed down, so I'd probably recommend turning the Performance level down to low in the settings. 


There's no bandwidth restriction setting for uploading as far as I can tell, it'd be nice to be able to set that.

At this point you're probably thinking - right, this ain't going to last very long, the RIAA will send the boys round to smack some bottoms - but 8tracks is running as if it's operating a radio station, only the DJs are us, uploading the tracks and creating the mixes. There are some restrictions on the licence try and not compete with bought music, to ensure that the service can fit into the idea of being a radio station - from their legal page: 

Hence, the rules of the compulsory license require that the sequence of playback cannot be pre-determined by a listener, and the listener may also not know what song he or she will hear next (i.e., no pre-announced playlist). Accordingly, a user cannot see the all of the songs included within a playlist at the outset and then fast-forward or rewind to songs of interest (which would make the service interactive). Similarly, there are limits on (a) the number of songs that can be included from any one artist or any one album on a given channel or playlist within a 3-hour period, and (b) the number of tracks that can be skipped per hour on a given channel.

I mentioned 8tracks on Twitter, and promptly got a tweet back from 8tracks to say one of the people behind 8tracks helped set up Live365, internet radio behemoth, so I imagine there's a bit more behind this than the "let's do it and sort the legal stuff" later attitude from Muxtape, which incidentally, is coming back this month, for bands. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out, there's already a lot of online apps working in that area at the moment - not that I can remember any of their names, which is indicative - but with Myspace having gone nowhere fast over the last few years, maybe there's room for them.

I had some other half-formed thoughts about Muxtape - it was so basic, the interface was so wonderfully pared down, in the same way that Twitter is, it soon attracted a bunch of user-created services around it to extend it and provide functionality that was missing. I was wondering if that could be a tactic for building online apps, just to make something really pared down that does the job with a hugely simple UI, and provide a solid public API for the more engaged users to code against and produce new uses for your data. 

Yeah, I told you it was half-formed.  Anyway, enough pontificating, here's an acid mix, going all the way from Phuture in '87 through to Chris Moss Acid and AFX in the 00s.




Posted January 14, 2009
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So you're saying people will "tweet" what they're eating for breakfast?


(via Pete Ashton, who got off someone else, who got it off someone else etc.)

Posted January 13, 2009
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Invisible Conga People - "Cable Dazed"


I mentioned this the other day, but I really love it - a scratchy, moody thud that somehow isn't "house", and doesn't take off and become disco either. As usual 20jazzfunkgreats say it best:

They record casio calculators having lazy conversations in badly lit smokey bars, travel down analogue wiring with microphones in hand to see what sounds it makes and hold a recorder to the shifting tectonic plates for the bass. Then they roll everything together to construct kraut beat-parties for Japanese ghosts.

Possibly still available from Boomkat on mega-expensive vinyl.

Filed under  //   disco   italiansdoitbetter   music   youtube  
Posted January 13, 2009
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Wall sticker for the nursery


With a baby on the way and all that, we've been putting the finishing touches to the nursery with a wallsticker by Tado, via Domestic.fr. It's difficult to put these things up - especially that bottom piece: it took us a good couple of hours because of all the tiny elements. 

Here's the final result: how long with it last before Junior is up on his/her little legs trying to pull the stickers off the wall?

 



 

 


Filed under  //   baby   nursery   wallsticker  
Posted January 11, 2009
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Move On! Northern Soul and R&B night in Coventry


Can't see me being able to make it with the baby popping out around this time but here it is, Move On! - a northern soul and R&B night at the Coventry Colliery Sports and Social Club in Keresley, Coventry. A fiver in, they're promising to play off sevens only - original ones at that.  (via modculture)

Filed under  //   club   coventry   dj   northernsoul  
Posted January 6, 2009
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"Look I'm sorry if my limbs aren't MIDI"



Drummer Jerry Fuchs gets all stroppy with John Maclean over monitoring.

Filed under  //   drumming   interview   juanmaclean   video   youtube  
Posted January 2, 2009
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Top tracks of 2008


'Cos all them kids are doing it, only I can't be bothered to filter out what came out this year and what didn't. Anyway, Last.fm says Four Tet's "Ribbons" was my most played track this year, with Syclops' bouncey, squiggly electro-funk at 2, Four Tet again with "Ringer" at number 3 and then behind that a bunch of tracks ripped from Portishead in Portishead, which was way better than the rather studied fucked-up-ness of the studio LP. (Do we still say LP?)

Ex-Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall's demo of "Start Stop Synchro" was all the more heart-warming for its' rough lo-fi Casio tones, recalling "Work and non-work"-era Broadcast. "Requiem pour un con" is a fucking banger, no question - and I played Scientist's stuff to death, De Materialize has a bassline to die for. Baby Woodward is going to grow up with those echoed bleeps and deep basslines reverberating round their cot.

EOD's warm and moody acid track "Unirater" reminds me of much of the Analord series, mmmm - love it. There's loads more over at 002q.com.

I love going through other people's lists to see what I've missed - but I can't be doing with yer Fleet Foxes, Elbow, TV on the Radio, Gang Gang Dance, Santogold, Glasbloodyvegas etc... I'm still going through the Pitchfork Top 100, but I'm adoring Invisible Conga People's hushed disco thud "Cable Dazed" from Italians Do It Better.

Filed under  //   2008   chart   lastfm   music  
Posted January 1, 2009
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Herrmann's "Vertigo" score dissected on the Film Programme

There was a great bit on a recent Radio 4 Film Programme, with the pianist Neil Brand talking through Bernard Herrmann's beyond classic score for Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" - I've excerpted it here...

  
(download)

Filed under  //   alfredhitchcock   bbc   bernardherrmann   film   radio4   soundtrack  
Posted December 29, 2008
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