Disorderly Content

This afternoon found me in a concert hall for the first time in years. The venue was Davies Hall, home to the San Francisco Symphony. The event was a performance of The Composer is Dead, a twenty-first century version of The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra or perhaps Peter and the Wolf. So what was I doing there, not being a young person and all? Well, it had to do with the writer and not the composer (or the Composer), a strange fellow by the name of Lemony Snicket. I'm a bit of a fan of Mr. Snicket's work, and have been jealous of some of my friends who have met him, or at least his alter ego, Daniel Handler. So this was my chance to see if his strangeness and silliness translate from the page.

Short answer: they do. Longer answer: if you ever get the chance to see and hear The Composer is Dead, especially if its writer and its composer (definitely not the one of the title) are in attendance, go!

At least I think it's unintentional. I did a small doubletake this morning reading a blog entry on the Huffington Post. The title? Spice Girls Sell Out In 38 Seconds. Turns out to be about a concert, although you can certainly understand my confusion. I thought they'd sold out right around the time they met each other.

In the spirit of the season, I have to thank the folks at Boing Boing for turning me on to Panda Smash, and their minor key renditions of traditional Christmas carols. I like 'em so much better this way...

It's times like this that I really love the Interwebs. Here we have a pianist (which isn't dirty, although maybe it oughta be) explaining the process of making a Bach fugue out of Britney's immortal Oops...I Did It Again. Watch and be amazed.

Spotted on Wired News.

I've been trying hard to catch up on all my podcasts after spending a couple of weeks on the East Coast earlier this month. And listening to a recent episode of Coverville, I had my very first encounter with Dictionaraoke, the kind of pointless exercise that makes the Internets all worthwhile and stuff. Dictionaraoke, as its name would suggest, is karaoke performed using those little pronunciation aids provided by online dictionaries. Give it a try; I dare you to stop at just one! My favorites so far include Take On Me, Bomemian Rhapsody and Time Of The Season. Although I'm amazed at how weird Every Breath You Take doesn't sound after it's been given the treatment. See if you don't agree.

I can't believe it's been two months and fifty posts since I've mentioned Farscape here. Shocking, really.

Which is my unsubtle way of leading into a slightly Scape-related post. It seems Paul Goddard, who played the death-obsessed and generally unbalanced Stark on Farscape, has put together a jazzy album. Now granted, I'm not remotely objective where the work of the Scape cast is concerned. But I think it's really good. You can judge for yourself at Coleman Smith, Paul's nom de tune website. I'm hoping they can get it on the iTunes Music Store, so I can express my fannish enthusiasm on my other blog.

Not everything from the Good Old Days was any good, as this pre-MTV music video will demonstrate. It's also a little experiment; I've not tried to embed a YouTube video clip before:

In case you're curious (and why wouldn't you be?), the singer is called Joi Lansing, the song "Trapped In The Web Of Love". Which I guess explains the spidery and heart-y trappings.

From The iPod Observer comes news of a story at the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of all that is right and true, or at least it's true if you're on the right, that Apple is expected to abandon it's $.99 per track pricing model for the iTunes Music Store within a year. Call my cynical, but I have to question the source of this non-story. It's EMI, one of the record labels that's been putting pressure on Apple to charge more for hit songs than for the rest of its catalogue. Could it be that EMI has an ulterior motive in spreading news of a policy change at Apple? Like that once everybody believes it's gonna happen anyway, it'll be that much easier to strongarm Apple into going along? Naw, that can't be it. A record label wouldn't be that devious. Or that transparent for that matter.

(Filed under Music, although Scams is probably just as appropriate. And I'd have provided a link to the WSJ story, except they still think they can charge for their collective wisdom.)

The Huffington Post reported yesterday that Ice-T is going to produce a hip-hop album for the one and only (and aren't we all grateful for that) David Hasselhoff. Ananova is the source of the story. I hope it's true just for the horror value. And why not? After all, Pat Boone did Heavy Metal...

Let's go out and wave a flag or something.

This'll be my last eBay Live! posting. I promise.

The conference ended with a reception at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We arrived at the hall to face a gauntlet of eBay employees, applauding all the sellers (and sorta sellers like me) and giving us handshakes and high fives as we went down the insanely long receiving line. It was impressive and surreal at the same time.

I was excited by the entertainment for the evening, and in particular by the opening act. Bering Strait is a C&W band from Russia that now makes its home in Nashville. I decided they were blogworthy ages ago, and not just because lead singer Natasha Borzilova is so photogenic. They're just three days from releasing album #2. Guess I'll be checking the iTunes store on Tuesday. Which makes it pretty much like every other Tuesday.

Bering Strait was followed by The B-52s, tonight's headliners. They were in excellent form. And loud, really loud. I wasn't kidding with that title; my ears really are still ringing. But it's all in a good cause, right?

The folks at SoundSpectrum were kind enough to offer me a license to their G-Force visualizer for iTunes and other lesser music players. They seem to be under the mistaken impression that I might have influence over potential buyers, whereas you and I both know the truth. But hey, free software is free software. And those of us who weren't in the right place back in the drug era have to get our psychedelic experiences somewhere, right?

So what's G-Force like? It's hard to describe. A static image like the one on the right can only hint at the complexity of the patterns it generates from the music you play. You'll have to try out their trial version to fully appreciate it. But I'll tell you that it does add an interesting dimension to the listening experience. Especially if you start with some off the wall music, like the Stephen Lynch album I used for my own trial. As I listened to the song Special and watched the intricate interplay of lines and shapes on the screen, I could feel my own intellect dribbling away.

Thanks, guys; I was beginning to realize that a high IQ was just getting in the way.

Granted, first you have to be relevant before you can become irrelevant. So by that measure maybe nothing's changed. But let's hold off on that analysis for a moment...

You may know that I have a second blog, where I review music on Apple's iTunes Music Store. I put a lot of time into finding and reviewing music; why sometimes it takes actual minutes to get a single review ready for publication!

So I great the arrival of Indy with a combination of admiration and hostility. Indy is an application for Windows and, as of today, Mac OS X, that lets you listen to and rate music from a variety of independent artists. The idea is that as you rate each song, it gets a better idea of your taste and adjusts future suggestions accordingly. And when you like a song, the website of the band is only a click away.

The Mac version is build 2, which would normally be a very scary prospect. But so far it works very well. And it's free software, so you can hardly complain about the price.

As for my other blog, well, I guess I could keep it going for another week or so. Just in case, y'know.

At an alumni event in San Francisco yesterday for my college, I showed my advanced age by mentioning that my Computer Science education predated the personal computer. That's one of the things I like about the field, that so many developments have taken place within my own lifetime.

Including MP3s. According to this article at Business 2.0, which I discovered via Google Blogoscoped, we have Karlheinz Brandenburg and Suzanne Vega to thank for the ubiquitous music file format. Brandenburg for all his work on the lossy compression algorithm that lets an MP3 hold music that takes ten times the space on a CD; and Vega, because her song Tom's Diner was the one Brandenburg used to perfect that algorithm. If MP3 could compress Ms. Vega's natural a cappella performance with audio fidelity, everything else would be easy.

As a Suzanne Vega fan, I'm pleased to know her role in the digital music revolution. That makes her the Lenna Sjoblom of sound. Wonder what she thinks of it.

One of my nightly rituals involves checking my web access logs to see how visitors find me. It's not about ego. Okay, it's not entirely about ego. (Just mostly.) But every now and then I discover something to my benefit.

Tonight was one of those moments. I noticed a couple of hits on my iTunes Music Store blog from a blog on Salon.com called In Which Our Hero takes on entertainment. (Thanks for the link, Keith.) But once I found my link, I started to read the blog itself. And promptly got caught up in his entry from last Monday, about a podcasting site called Coverville that features song covers. (Duh!) And which he used as a springboard to talk about the group Big Daddy, a sadly out of print favorite of mine. That sent me over to Coverville to find that podcast from last October, consisting of 30 minutes of humorous covers. Including a track from an entire CD of Stairway to Heaven covers an Australian lady friend sent me a while back, a Springsteen-soundalike cover of The Flintstones theme and a whole lot more. Great stuff. And justification, if I really need it, to keep checking my logs every night for more treasures.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Wil Wheaton has redeemed himself many times since he played the most annoying continuing character in Trek's long history. But his response to news that ASCAP will demand license fees from podcasters is as insightful and honest as it is impolitic. The more the record industry tightens their grasp, the more star systems music fans will slip through their fingers. When will they learn?

Despite all the time I've put into my iTunes Music Store blog, which is a desperate attempt to become wealthy by getting all sorts of people to funnel their iTMS purchases through me and reap the rewards of 5% commissions ("And how's that working out for you?" "Not at all well. But thanks for asking."), I run across sources of music that are worthy of mention but that don't involve any compensation other than the chance to share a cool discovery. (Whew! And to think I said all that on one breath!)

Anyway, that's a longwinded way of mentioning a cool website called Bollywood for the Skeptical, which is intended as an introduction to the music of Indian cinema. About which I know very little, although that's changing even as I type; the site has MP3 files of nineteen classic tracks that try to cover the breadth of Bollywood. No idea if it succeeds, or even if that's possible in 92 minutes of music. But it's fun to experience the attempt.

Oh, and if you want to burn this stuff to CD, someone has even done CD cover art. Thanks to Boing Boing for the links.

Another blog I discovered in passing mentioned an amusing meme idea: put iTunes in shuffle mode and report the first ten songs it picks. What a wonderful way to write a blog entry without actually having to do any of that hard thinking or creative work! And what a wonderful opportunity to embarrass myself, depending of course on what comes up. Here are the results of this little experiment:

1. Moonfall (from The Mystery of Edwin Drood) by Renée Fleming & Bryn Terfel
2. I Don't Want To Wait by Paula Cole
3. When I Look At You by Linda Eder for The Scarlet Pimpernel concept album
4. Call Off The Search by Katie Melua
5. I Resolve by the 1994 London Cast of She Loves Me
6. Senor Burns (the long version) from Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons
7. Lucille by Kenny Rogers
8. Waltzing Matilda by Peter Russell-Clarke
9. Never by the original Broadway cast of On The Twentieth Century
10. Midnight Confessions by The Grass Roots

Funny; I'm not ashamed of anything on that list. I'll have to work on that.

Over on my other blog I posted about an album in support of Sudanese refugees. Apple's done a good thing here, promoting an album and then giving all the proceeds, including its own fees, to the cause the album supports. My own efforts are a lot less significant, of course. All I did was buy a copy and then recommend that my two or three readers give it a listen. So imagine my surprise when I got an email from the project coordinator, thanking me for the mention. Heck, I'm surprised he found me so quickly; I only discovered the album myself two days ago on the far superior As The Apple Turns.

Anyway, if you have an iPod, give some thought to buying The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project. It's some amazing music. And you'll feel good listening to it.

My first post in days! I spent the weekend in Burbank at the fifth annual Farscape convention, courtesy of the folks at Creation Entertainment. And while I was there I spoke to the folks at La-La Land Records, a small genre music label. It seems they're putting together albums of the music from select Farscape episodes. First up are Eat Me and Revenging Angel, the former a reinvention of Night of the Living Dead and the latter a spin on Chuck Jones' Road Runner cartoons. The CD is a limited edition and only available at their website. So don't delay: read about it here.

I run this other blog. It's a nice little blog. Nothing fancy, just some music I found on the iTunes Music Store that I feel like writing about. Mostly it's good music, stuff I enjoy and you might like if you gave it a listen. Occasionally it's not so good; it just reminded me of something funny or tragic or otherwise worthy of note. But whichever it is, I like to think of it as a sort of public service.

Which makes me wonder what possessed somebody to create this. What we have here is what the iTMS calls an iMix. It's a playlist somebody made that they just had to share. There are thousands of 'em on the iTMS. Some are good, others are obvious. But this one, this one is inspired. Its creator went looking for every truly awful recording he (it just has to be a he) could find, all so he could share them with the world.

Some tracks are just plain bad, like anything done by William Hung. Then there are uninspired covers of songs that deserve better by artists who should have known better. (Picture Mel Tormé singing Happy Together. Or Fiona Apple on Frosty the Snowman. Better yet, don't.) Others are just plain weird, like California's Governator leading you through a workout routine to It's Raining Men. Amazing.

There's an embarrassment of riches here: 161 tracks at the latest count. And every one guaranteed to bring a tear to various bodily orifices.

God, I am so jealous.

Update: Great minds think (sort of) alike. Mere moments after posting the above, my RSS newsreader came across this.

I got an email yesterday from Magnatune, whose slogan is "We're a record label. But we're not evil." The email was a thank you for my purchases last year and an offer of a free download of any of their albums.

If you haven't tried Magnatune, you really should. They're an online music store that lets you decide how much their music is worth. Seriously, you can pay as little as $5, or more if you so choose. (50% of the price you pay goes to the artist.) They have streaming versions of all the tracks, so you can sample all you want before making a purchase. And you can get your music in as many formats as you want, including MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV and, for an extra $5, a physical CD. (They still make those?)

I hadn't been back to their site in a while; much as I like their concept, their selection is kind of obscure for my tastes. But a free download was a good inducement. And of course, I knew as soon as I started exploring that I'd just have to find something to buy. It just doesn't feel right to take the freebie and run, does it?

Yeah, like I said: I am such a patsy.