music
grrlscientist | May 1, 2008tags: Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, humor, music, You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore, culture, streaming video
This truly odd streaming video was sent by a friend who learned that I will be going to London in August. I guess she thinks that I need to have a bit of a cultural adjustment prior to going there .. [4:09].
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2008From UK rapper Elemental, an extremely witty song about tea with a funny video!
Via Paddy K and Brass Goggles.
neurophilosophy | April 29, 2008My exams begin on Friday, so things are going to be pretty quite around here until around mid-May. I will post various bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, here are some interesting links that I've found recently:
In the New York Times Magazine, Gary Marcus discusses the possibility of memory chips - future generations of neural implants which use algorithms inspired by Google to augment the retrieval of information.
The author of the above article is interviewed by Carl Zimmer on bloggingheadsTV. Marcus is a professor of psychology at NYU, and the author of a…
awild | April 26, 2008Jo-anne has made a project of reorienting me towards a more Australian temperament. Her tactics are subtle but persistent. If I send her off to the video store, for instance, she comes home with some Aussie movie or another.
The most insidious of her methods includes buying CDs of Australian bands and playing them until they sink into my subconscious. These are hit or miss. I've not become a big You am I fan. But now and again Jo-anne finds something that takes hold. One of my new favorites is Missy Higgins:
terrasig | April 18, 2008A group e-mail showed up today from some of my boyhood friends and fellow Springsteen worshipers on the sad passing of Danny Federici yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC from melanoma. He was only 58.
Here's my open letter and response to the thread:
Hey-a Boyce,
Not too much more to add here except my sadness on the passing of a great musician and, as O'D sez, one of the crucial background guys who added so much to the sound without needing the spotlight. I watched the killer video of Danny from March 20th in Indy doing the accordion on "Sandy" - he looked fabulous…
awild | April 17, 2008
While googling about for the latest CD by the Rustic Overtones (Light at the End), I discovered that copies of Shish Boom Bam are now selling for as high as $350. Shish is the crappy old recording from 1994 when I used to play trumpet with the band, back when R.O. were all rosy-cheeked teenagers. Apparently the green jewel case is something of a collector's item. Now I can't even remember where I've put my single remaining copy.
gregladen | April 14, 2008Rokia Traore sings the moving "M'Bifo," accompanied on guitar and on the n'goni, a lute-like Malian stringed instrument with a soulful tone. A quietly mesmerizing performance.
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2008Those questionable characters in productive Swedish goth band Kurtz have set up an RSS feed direct from their rehearsal room to your desktop. Coming up next: a song about a dorm mate of singer Pocke who was once in 1976 hung-over and wondered where the cereal bowls were.
[More blog entries about music, rock, gothic, Sweden; musik, depprock, rock, goth, Uppsala.]
gregladen | April 11, 2008What would a music video look like if it were purely directed by the music? Not driven by a concept, nor by a desire to build an image, but purely as an expression of a great song? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form. The song is "Moonlight in Glory," from David Byrne and Brian Eno's classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, remastered in 2006.
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2008
Last night's Hayseed Dixie gig rocked. This is the bluegrass band playing metal songs that I blogged about recently. Me and Paddy K went there after checking out some stand-up comedy with the ladies. We had been given the wrong starting hour, so we arrived at the Debaser Slussen club in the middle of the fourth song. But I believe John Wheeler and the others played for about an hour and a half. Afterwards they scattered into the crowd and chatted with everybody.
I spent the entire gig with a big foolish smile on my face. They placed so fast and so skilfully with a constant feeling of…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2008
It's a running joke around Sb that the single most popular blog entry on the whole site is one where a scibling calls Britney Spears the High Priestess of something not very flattering. In fact, as Spears's latest hit demonstrates, she is the High Priestess of Swedish dance pop.
Look at her run of chart toppers.
1998. "...Baby One More Time". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
1999. "(You Drive Me) Crazy". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
1999. "Born to Make You Happy". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
2000. "Oops!...I…
neurophilosophy | March 30, 2008This track, called Design Coding by The Poetic Prophet, has just been uploaded on YouTube. I thought it was hilarious the first time I saw it, and it's still very amusing on the fourth viewing. I'm not an expert on search engine optimization, but the advice provided here is, as far as I know, accurate.
Here's a transcript of the lyrics:
Your site design is the first thing people see,
It should be reflective of you and the industry,
Easy to look at with a nice navigation,
When they can't find what they want it causes frustration,
A clear call to action to increase the…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2008
Bluegrass music is rootsy acoustic proto-country. 70s heavy metal is bluesy electrified hard rock. Imagine what classic heavy metal songs would sound like if played by a bluegrass band -- banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass... Imagine that. Imagine Hayseed Dixie!
This US quartet has released nine albums in the past eight years. The first one was all AC/DC covers -- thus the name Hayseed Dixie. But they record a lot of their own material too, and they rock. Excellent stuff if you like bluegrass, or classic heavy metal, or both!
On Sunday 6 April, at 19:00 hours, the Hayseed Dixie will perform at my…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2008
Last night I had the pleasure of catching two of my home town's best live music acts, each playing in a basement venue a couple of hundred meters apart on Stockholm's southern island. The Crawfish Cook and the Skandalites are both 60s-70s cover bands, but since they cultivate genres I usually don't listen to, they might as well have performed original material.
Crawfish Cook play New Orleans soul funk, with material culled from Doctor John, Professor Longhair, the Neville Brothers, the Meters and Little Feat. Last night they were an eight-piece: male singer, guitar, bass, drums, percussion,…
terrasig | March 19, 2008Two political posts in two days. Apologies to those who come here for the science but these are the issues getting my attention and energy this week.
Billy Bragg is a special guy in my life and this song from 2002 was particularly prescient.
In memory of those lost in the 11 September attacks, the Spanish 11 March bombings, the thousands of allied forces and Iraqi people dead and injured, and all around the world whose needs have gone unmet in exchange for financing an unguided and unnecessary war. . .
mikethemadbiologist | March 14, 2008The NY Times has a hysterical op-ed piece about the Really Terrible Orchestra, which is "an inclusive orchestra for those who really want to play, but who cannot do so very well. Or cannot do so at all, in some cases." It's brilliant.
zooillogix | March 13, 2008
What's different about this than people swimming with Whale Sharks? Fundamentally... probably nothing. However, I think this falls into the lighter shades of gray that the zoo and aquarium world must operate in, and ultimately I'm OK with, for the following reasons:
1. Walrus training is fairly common and does not pose a physical threat to the animal
2. Dolphin and sea lion training is enjoyed by the animals, obviously because their is a slimy fish reward involved, but also because new physical activity breaks up the monotony of life in a fish tank
3. I'm assuming that there is an…
terrasig | February 28, 2008[Note: Mr. Tweedy's first post, Shaking It Off, went up on 5 March 2008]
Yesterday, London-based blogger Mo at Neurophilosophy alerted us to a new blog at the New York Times website entitled, Migraine: Perspectives on a Headache. A notable cadre of prominent migraine sufferers have started blogging about their experiences and answering reader questions. Bloggers include author Siri Hustvedt, author-journalist Paula Kamen, German neurologist and psychiatrist Dr Klaus Podoll, and noted Columbia professor and author Dr Oliver Sacks. The blog description is as follows:
More than 28 million…