Monday, March 11, 2013

"St. Nick on the Fourth in a Fervor" & "Caney Mountain" by Ha Ha Tonka

IMG_7578

 Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go
This glimpse of brilliance is much better than a long look at mediocrity

I own all of my ideas
I stole just one or two

I owe all of my ideas
To the ones I stole from you

Pretty much my theme song right now for those lyrics up there above the clip.   This has been stuck in the van’s CD player for awhile.  I keep thinking it’s time to switch it out, and then this song, or another one or two on the album, will come on and I decide to let it play through one more time.

"Caney Mountain" is a good song too, but I really love this video…  Saw this after initially posting this, and I had to throw it in too!

Can he climb old Caney Mountain?
Can he outrun this Crusading mob of men
who aim to kill him with the Crucifix theyd fished out of Hodgsons Mill.
They drug her cold, blue body from its depths.
That old relic served to drown her as a millstone round her neck.

Can he clear that western wall which looms large out the Ozarks side?
Calls of men and dogs are closer as is the end of his life.
Could he ever find forgiveness from those gospels he came to preach.
held her down as he baptized her so that heaven she might reach.

High shined sequined buckle in that Bible belt
High shined sequined buckle in the middle of that Bible belt

More lyrics: http://www.lyricsmania.com/caney_mountain_lyrics_ha_ha_tonka.html
All about Ha Ha+Tonka:
http://www.musictory.com/music/Ha+Ha+Tonka

 

       


Related Posts

Saturday, March 2, 2013

MAX Software (& Artist Interviews)

 What is Max? « Cycling 74:

Max gives you the parts to create unique sounds, stunning visuals, and engaging interactive media. These parts are called ‘objects’ – visual boxes that contain tiny programs to do something specific. Each object does something different. Some make noises, some make video effects, others just do simple calculations or make decisions. In Max you add objects to a visual canvas and connect them together with patchcords. You can use as many as you like. By combining objects, you create interactive and unique software without ever writing any code (you can do that too if you really want to). Just connect.

http://cycling74.com/category/articles/interview/

I’ll run through the interviews later and add the interesting ones…

Related Posts

Monday, February 4, 2013

REM’s “Losing My Religion” – Major & Minor Keys; After & Before

REM's "Losing My Religion" shifted into a major scale - Boing Boing:

Michael sez, "Someone has gone to the trouble (I don't know how but would suspect using Melodyne DNA or somesuch) of processing REM's minor-scale downer hit 'Losing My Religion' so that all the minor notes are now major. When I followed the link I thought it'd be a cover, but no, it's the original, processed. It's uncanny - the song is just as familiar as always but the impact is utterly different. Kind of like finding a colour print of a film you'd only known in black and white, or seeing Garfield minus Garfield for the first time. I like it."

Major Scaled #2 : REM - "Recovering My Religion" from major scaled on Vimeo.


Related Posts

Child of PLOrk: Sideband

 about | Sideband:

Using specially designed and custom made hemispherical speakers and a fleet of laptops, Sideband turns each member of its ensemble in to an island of sound, returning a sense of acoustics and space to the normally flat world of electronic music.  Ranging from solos and duos to sextets and beyond, Sideband is an evolving project that inspires composers, performers and audience members to reevaluate the role of computers in music.

Sideband’s parent ensemble, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), was formed in 2005 by Dan Trueman (composer, Norwegian fiddler, and computer music hacker) and Perry Cook (computer scientist, electrical engineer, and music hacker) to be a test-lab for a new way of thinking about electronic and ensemble music.  PLOrk has performed widely (in Princeton, New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.), has won a MacArthur Foundation grant, and has worked in collaboration with Zakir Hussain, the American Composers Orchestra, Matmos & So Percussion, and others.

Sideband was conceived out of a desire to explore the PLOrk model of music making in a more sustained fashion, outside the annually changing context of academic classes.  Formed in 2008 to premiere a piece with the American Composers Orchestra at Carngie Hall, Sideband is currently made up of a group of long-term members whose skills range from orchestral percussion to installation art, research in machine-learning algorithms, traditional Norwegian folk music, solo performance, electroacoustic music, software design, and scored composition.

 

Related Posts

PLOrk (Princeton Laptop Orchestra)

VIDEO: Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) – Princeton Engineering:

Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) founders Perry Cook and Dan Trueman, in pre-concert interviews, explain the philosophy behind their laptop instruments and the on-the-fly computer coding that takes place during performances. PLOrk started as a freshman seminar course at Princeton.

"Most of our students don't know that these things are impossible," says Cook, "and therefore they're not." The PLOrkestra director opening this video is Ge Wang, who received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton in 2008. Wang is the founder ofStanford's MoPhO, a mobile phone orchestra. Wang and Cook also are cofounders of Smule, an iPhone applications company specializing in sonic  media.

 

PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra – Free listening, concerts, stats, & pictures at Last.fm:

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can we create? how can we physically control these sounds? how do we compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do we organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?

"The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether," PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra:

"The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether," for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All the performers have identical performance/composition programs -- a custom flexible step-sequencer -- that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge, like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning unrecognizable to their creators.

Telephone Game
, version 1:

Telephone Game, version 2:

PLOrk : The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (Official Site)