music
goodmath | November 14, 2008
Hawkwind, "Masters of the Universe": Great bit from the early days of psychadelic/progressive rock. I've got recordings of both the live and the studio versions, and I vastly prefer the studio.
Peter Gabriel, "The Family and the Fishing Net": This is
just a magnificent piece of music. I love pretty much everything
that Gabriel has written, from his days in Genesis, to his solo work like this, to his movie soundtracks. But the "Security" album is
something special even for Gabriel, and this is one of the best tracks
on the album.
Michael McGoldrick, "The Fisherman in the Wardrobe":
Ick.…
ddobbs | November 10, 2008The wonders of YouTube. Couple of highly distinctive voices here. Wonderful stuff.
Hat tip: kottke
ddobbs | November 4, 2008From "Bye-bye blackboard ... from Einstein and others," an exhibit at the Museum of the HIstory of Science in Oxford.
‘I wrote the music on this blackboard while I was giving a lecture about Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Holywell Music Room on 22nd March this year, before performing them. I was trying to make a connection between Bach’s super-sensitivity to the contemporary styles around him – very very acute in this piece – and today’s musicians. There’s a lot of information in the Goldbergs – structure, harmony, a ladder of canons – and coded information we can only guess at – myths…
edyong | November 4, 2008You are the alpha male, the top dog, the grand kahuna. A young upstart is trying to muscle his way onto your turf and compete for your women. Your solution - click your knees loudly at him. It seems like a strange strategy. For humans, a clicking knee would hardly be a sign of strength but it's all part of the bizarre communications of the world's largest antelope - the eland.
Elands bulls have a strict pecking order that determines their access to females in the herd. On the few occasions when they fight, they hardly ever use their dangerous horns and hooves, preferring instead to prove…
ddobbs | November 3, 2008
I like several of Ian McEwan's novels and especially admired his novel Saturday, which, being among other things a riff on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," updated that novel's m.o. by giving the stream of its narrator's narrative a decidely neuroscientific tint.
In another novel, Amsterdam, his protagonist is a somewhat pompous composer who, toward the end, is caught rather embarrassingly suspecting he is a genius even as he churns out a piece of career-wrecking unoriginality. "Genius," he dared think himself, and it proved otherwise.
I thought at the time the composer was partly a…
terrasig | October 31, 2008Much hubbub is to be had today over the work of Dalhousie University mathematics professor, Dr Jason Brown, in solving the mystery of George Harrison's opening chord of The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night," played on a Rickenbacker 360/12 guitar. The PDF of Prof Brown's report is available online.
As the report and article show, The Beatles did indeed record this in one take with no overdubbing such that Harrison could not have played the chord alone. We now learn from Brown's work and others that Harrison and Lennon played two different guitars but the nice flavor was added by producer George…
aardvarchaeology | October 26, 2008
I've reached an age where some of my generation's brightest pop musicians are doing nostalgia tours. The Olivia Tremor Control reunited! But guys, couldn't you please write us some new songs as well?
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2008
Monday night me and Moomin went to an of Montreal gig at Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm. Amazing stuff. Seven musicians on stage, everybody swapping instruments all the time, three mimes prancing around in weird masks, psychedelic animated films on the backdrop, and a solid 90 minutes of intricate pop music, everything tightly rehearsed. I'm glad I had done my homework on the new album, because this isn't the kind of music that you get the first time around -- particularly not with so-so live sound quality.
The last time I caught the band live, they ended their set by covering Sabbath's "War…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2008
I worry about of Montreal's musical motor, pop genius Kevin Barnes. He first got records out in 1997-98, when he was an elegantly naivistic singer of sad love songs. Then he shot like a lysergic rocket straight into Pepperland with four beatlesque albums in 1999-2004. On his 2005 album he suddenly said goodbye to his old band members, returned to confessional mode and sang the praises of married life and parenthood in Norway of all places. And two other new themes appeared: 80s-style electronica and deep depression. That's where he still is.
With his recent album, Skeletal Lamping, Barnes…
terrasig | October 11, 2008Nobel Prize month also means that Denver's 5280 magazine has announced the annual results of their top 270 medical professionals in 79 specialties. While the picture here is the cover of last year's issue featuring my dear colleague, Dr John J (Jay) Reusch, the good doctor was again named among the top six physicians in Cardiovascular Medicine. Our other compatriot, Dr Daniel (Dan) Bessesen was named for the sixth year among the top specialists in Endocrinology, Diabetes, & Metabolism.
Even my former pulmonologist, Dr James (Jim) Good, made the list - for his 14th year! The Pulmonary…
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2008Two of my favourite song writers have revealed themselves as astronomy nerds in love songs.
Frank Black in "Sir Rockaby" (1994):
How many stars girl
Can you both count
And then classify?
I'm standing here in this big swirl
Singing this lullaby
Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo in "7 Stars" (2007):
Seven stars in the sky
You're feeling sociable
Silver stars in your eyes
You feel emotional
And you don't even know my name
And I know every constellation
oracknows | October 4, 2008Unfortunately, I'm going to be ensconced in my Sanctum Sanctorum most of the day, pounding out text far less fun than the text I like to pound out for Respectful Insolence. However, I have to admit that this video sums up the attitude behind a whole lot of woo that I like to apply a skeptical deconstruction to--with music!
goodmath | October 3, 2008 Don't forget to go and donate some money to schools through
our DonorsChoose challenge. Seriously - throw them a couple of bucks. It doesn't need to be much. There are around three thousand people per day who read this blog; if you each contribute $5, it would more than pay to fully fund every project I chose for the challenge!
And don't forget: if you donate more than $100, you get to pick a topic for a post! (Just email me to let me know you donated that much, and tell me what you want your post to be about.)
Metaphor, "The Sparrow": An excellent track
from a great neo-progressive band.…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2008
With thanks to Moomin, here's a fine clip with Max Raabe und das Palast Orchester performing "Amalie geht mit 'nem Gummikavalier ins Bad" from 1927. How low haven't the lyrics of the popular song sunk since that golden age of wit and erudition!
Update 22 October:My translation of the song's title doesn't bring across just how naughty it sounds in German. In Bad gehen does mean "to go swimming", and the lyrics make it clear that Amalie and her rubber gentleman are indeed on the beach. But it also means "to take a bath", so to someone who only reads the title of the song, it appears to mean "…
neurophilosophy | September 29, 2008Learning to play a musical instrument is known to involve both structural and functional changes in the brain. Studies published in recent years have established, for example, that professional keyboard players have increased gray matter volume in motor, auditory and visual parts of the brain, and that violinists have a larger somatosensory cortical representation of the left hand than do non-musicians.
Musical training is a complex process involving simultaneously perceiving the inputs from the senses of hearing, sight and touch, as well as co-ordinating these with the outputs of the motor…
awild | September 21, 2008
The BBQ Song. Once this gets in your head, good luck. It won't come out.
oracknows | September 21, 2008No, it's not Pink Floyd, but I needed surgery, I'd want these guys trying to wake me up after it was over:
They don't have to sing about it while they're doing it, though. After I'm safely awake and in the recovery room would be fine.
aardvarchaeology | September 21, 2008
Sättuna excavation team member Peter Forrester is a big fan of Finnish folk metallers Finntroll. The other day he played me a funny untitled bonus track from the group's 2007 album Ur jordens djup ("Out of the depths of the Earth"). The song sits at the end of the album's closing track "Kvällning" after a quarter of an hour of silence. Here's a translation of the Swedish lyrics.
The troll was sitting on a rock and called out, "Hey!
Who has spilled my mead?"
But none of the animals in the woods or [...]
knew who had spilled the troll's drink.
The troll was sitting on a rock and called out…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2008
My son just played me a song he can't get out of his head, "Still Alive". It's the closing-credits music of the 2007 computer game Portal, sung by a heavily vocoded Ellen McLain. As it turns out, the song was written by science fiction pop songster Jonathan Coulton, whose excellent love songs about robots and zombies I have heard on the Escape Pod podcast. And here's Coulton himself performing "Still Alive".