sc140: 22 minimal electronica tracks composed in Super Collider using 140 characters or less. Twitter user, computer scientist, and compilation curator Dan Stowell started the trend by tweeting his encoded field recordings of waves crashing on the beach. [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Nov 21, 2009 - 16 comments

When Jonathan Coulton scheduled his October 10th show at Chicago's Park West, he didn't know that fellow nerd-rockers They Might Be Giants were playing on the same day, at the same time, in the nearby Vic Theater. Not only that, the Giants were performing their hit 1990 album Flood in its entirety. In a tongue-in-cheek effort to make sure somebody showed up for his performace, Coulton, along with Paul and Storm, decided to perform their own take on Flood. Hightlights included absolutely no accordion ("that's a selling point"). In nine parts on YouTube. Audio recorded directly from the venue's soundboard.
posted by indyz on Nov 19, 2009 - 79 comments

Keith Schofield(previously)'s new video for Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck has ruffled a few feathers. [more inside]
posted by progosk on Nov 19, 2009 - 33 comments

10 Magnificently Modern Musical Instruments
posted by Joe Beese on Nov 18, 2009 - 47 comments

27 live recordings from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival can be streamed for free at Wolfgang's Vault. Here's a few of the musicians you can listen to: Count Basie & His Orchestra, Dizzy Gillespie, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Oscar Peterson Trio and Thelonious Monk. Registration is required but it's oh so worth it. The New York Times has the backstory of how these recordings ended up at Wolfgang's Vault.
posted by Kattullus on Nov 17, 2009 - 11 comments

Been hypnotized lately? Anthony Burril's video for Acid Washed's "General Motors, Detroit, America" is pure eye candy.
posted by flatluigi on Nov 15, 2009 - 9 comments

Singer, beatboxer, electric ukelele player Merrill Garbus says "It was about a woman selling her child to the butcher," referring to her puppet show that led to her first written songs. Her one-woman band Tune-Yards (24:59 video) is like Imogen Heap's live performing, mixed with some Phoebe Snow and Nina Simone. [more inside]
posted by cashman on Nov 14, 2009 - 9 comments

NPR's jazz blog A Blog Supreme recently concluded a series in which they asked jazz bloggers to "name five albums you would recommend to somebody looking to get into modern jazz". The results are now up in the category Jazz Now; the intro has the index, including reactions elsewhere. Destination: Out had some pricklier suggestions—see also their best of the 90s list (and their own nominations). [more inside]
posted by kenko on Nov 14, 2009 - 40 comments

Krautrock - the movie [more inside]
posted by philip-random on Nov 14, 2009 - 19 comments

Thousands of people who play setar in Iran are against me,” he said. “They say why add two more strings to the instrument? But I don’t get upset with them.

Hafez Nazeri, son of renown Persian singer Shahram Nazeri, is an Iranian setar player and composer. Tomorrow night, he will be the first Iranian composer to headline a concert at Carnegie Hall. The concert will feature a new instrument invented by Nazeri: the Hafez. [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski on Nov 13, 2009 - 5 comments

Jerry Fielding (1922-1980) was one of cinema's most distinctive voices in the 1960s and especially '70s, the perfect musical complement to the films of Sam Peckinpah*, Michael Winner, Clint Eastwood and others. His scores are marked by modernism and intricate orchestrations but also a poetic beauty and intensity—an appropriate accompaniment to the decade's strange and often sad (but never sentimental) criminals and antiheroes, be they in westerns (The Wild Bunch) or crime films. He was, however, capable of numerous styles (he was a former Vegas bandleader), and wrote a great number of scores (from sticoms to dramas to sci-fi) for television. - Film Score Monthly [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Nov 13, 2009 - 2 comments

The Carillon is the most massive musical instrument in the world. Carillonneurs bang out heavy metal with their fists loosely clenched. It will leave your ears ringing. (Yes, it's bells. Big bells.)
posted by not_on_display on Nov 13, 2009 - 46 comments

A few years ago, Gruff Rhys, lead singer of fabulous Welsh pop oddballs Super Furry Animals (Cymraeg/English) set out to make a film about the search for his uncle, a 1970s Argentinian pop star called René Griffiths. The result is Separado!: part travelogue, part music film, and part history of how a small band of idealists set out to establish a Welsh colony in the Argentinian part of Patagonia. [more inside]
posted by Len on Nov 12, 2009 - 14 comments

Christopher Bird at Mighty God King has written some corkers in the past - from his ejection from Livejournal owing to his review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to his frequent conversations with Flapjacks and Photoshopping of Final Fantasy Covers (previously). He's really outdone himself this time, with Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer. Read it, and, quite possibly, weep. Bonus points to the first person who constructs a Primer-level explanation of what happened.
posted by danhon on Nov 11, 2009 - 43 comments

Jazz in Azerbaijan [more inside]
posted by netbros on Nov 10, 2009 - 13 comments

The Beatles never broke up.
posted by klangklangston on Nov 9, 2009 - 111 comments

Few men can reach the notes, and few women have the lung capacity to manipulate them. Most of these arias have not been heard since the deaths of the castrati for whom they were written. Mezzosoprano Cecilia Bartoli has released an album entitled Sacrificium. The album is a compilation of 17th-century arias written for castrati--male singers who were castrated in order to sing in a higher register. Commentaries on the work are favorable; commentaries on the history of castrati and Bartoli herself are just as interesting.
posted by jefficator on Nov 9, 2009 - 44 comments

40 years ago today, The Rolling Stones played two concerts at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. In the darkness of the audience was a man known to history only as "Dub"... [audio auto-plays] [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Nov 9, 2009 - 13 comments

Whether working with the Nicholas Brothers (Previously), working with the muppets, working with that funny, funny, funny reefer man, or making out with your wife, Cab Calloway never fails to entertain.
posted by Uppity Pigeon #2 on Nov 7, 2009 - 29 comments

Boys dared to grow their hair and girls dared to wear mini skirts and in Korea indecency officers patroled the street with scissors and rulers, publicly cutting hair too long and checking if skirts were too short. Shin Joong-hyung, was there with his 70s hit, Beauty, as were other musicians and artists like Sanullim and the Key Boys. [more inside]
posted by kkokkodalk on Nov 5, 2009 - 12 comments

BBC test card music and other delights. Relive those rainy summer afternoons when the only thing to watch on television was a photograph of a girl playing noughts and crosses with a clown to an easy listening soundtrack who would later be fictionalised for Life on Mars. Join the club!
posted by feelinglistless on Nov 5, 2009 - 18 comments

What is “Try Not to Breathe” about? The Studio 360 podcast interviews a listener who, remembering how her father died of a sudden illness, has a touching eureka moment about the message of the song on R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People: “I think it’s about somebody who has reached the end of their life. They have a level of acceptance that maybe the people around them don’t have. I felt like that was my dad talking to me.... It’s about facing the truth and accepting that life is ugly sometimes.” (Contains download link and embedded player of radio segment.)
posted by joeclark on Nov 3, 2009 - 44 comments

Jig Dolls as a percussion instrument, here played by Jean Ritchie [previously] and The Beers Family. There are modern exponents though - Limberjacking is NOT just for folkies.
posted by tellurian on Nov 2, 2009 - 4 comments

A guide to a capella arranging from SmarterMusic, including some nice analysis of examples.
posted by Wolfdog on Nov 2, 2009 - 16 comments

Battle for Milkquarious - The greatest Rock Opera ever made. About milk. [Flash, dairy advertising] [more inside]
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 on Nov 2, 2009 - 20 comments

Taylor Mitchell, 19, was a promising Canadian folk singer. Her life was cut short by a rare coyote attack. Her music can be heard on her Myspace page. Mitchell on Facebook. From her bio: Taylor has just released her debut full length recording "For Your Consideration"- a collection of mostly original songs that showcases a range of styles, from folk to country-rock to pop, and reflects the diversity of her talent.
posted by cjorgensen on Oct 29, 2009 - 105 comments

The first time they came and recorded with me—which was January 23, 1988—they didn't have a band name, and they just had a borrowed drummer, which was Dale from the Melvins. But, yeah, they came and recorded 10 songs with me in one afternoon. I was left going "God, who are these people?" The cassettes I gave out just said "Kurt Cobain and Company" on them, because that's all I knew. - Recording Nirvana Before They Were Nirvana. As Nirvanas first albulm hits 20 years old, with Sub Pop prepare to release a remastered anniversary edition, the Seattle Weekly takes a look back at the album that launched grunge.
posted by Artw on Oct 28, 2009 - 94 comments

Luigi Russolo was a futurist painter, experimental composer, and instrument builder. In his 1913 manifesto "The Art of Noises" he declaimed the death of traditional Western music and foresaw the dawning of a new music based on the grinding, screeching, moaning, crackling and buzzing of mechanical instruments. He and his assistant Ugo Piatti built the Intonarumori to bring these new sounds - "the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags" - to life. Listen to them, then and now.
posted by fire&wings on Oct 28, 2009 - 10 comments

Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, sing to us (auto-tuned in a way that I actually don't hate), in We Are All Connected*. *Possibly NSFW owing to sidebar video links. Something similar was mentioned here previously.
posted by bwg on Oct 28, 2009 - 38 comments

Os Gameboys are a band from Brazil who play only music from classic videogames. They are really, really good. (via waxy: "the best live Mario cover I've ever seen")
posted by joshwa on Oct 27, 2009 - 26 comments

Chanteur puissant à la voix rocailleuse. And here is bluestab's blog And here, via Babelfish is bluestab's blog in an English of sorts. Then, while, looking for mp3s to match the tabs, I came across the universe of African American history and culture that is AfricanAfrican aka NegroArtist.com, a site so big it has two URLs. [Billy Mays] But, wait--that's not all! [/Billy Mays] [more inside]
posted by y2karl on Oct 23, 2009 - 12 comments

Ignore Everybody: Reflections on living a creative life, via No Depression blogs.
posted by Miko on Oct 23, 2009 - 44 comments

Fox Rox was a local music show that ran from 2001 - 2007 in San Diego. Here's the YouTube archive of more than 230 good-quality studio performances from bands as disparate as Electric Six, Blackalicious, Drive-By Truckers, Buzzcocks, Peaches, High on Fire, and many more. [post-mortem || myspace]
posted by milquetoast on Oct 22, 2009 - 4 comments

"It's ridiculous. What's the world coming to when Big Brother wants to charge you for singing a wee tune?", Sandra Burt said. So, Big Brother thought about it a bit, and decided, well, maybe she's right.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Oct 21, 2009 - 34 comments

You know who's been busy? Nick Pitera. Previously posted to MeFi, the animator/YouTube star sings his Michael Jackson tribute, his Poker Face, his Glee duet, his Whitney, his Mariah, his Over the Rainbow.
posted by hermitosis on Oct 20, 2009 - 6 comments

Bill Cosby Presents the Cosnarati: State of Emergency The project includes songs about frustration, incarceration and .... [more inside]
posted by Jenny is Crafty on Oct 20, 2009 - 14 comments

aliens, planet Voca, music The Voca people are 8 friendly aliens from the planet Voca, a musical planet that has no verbal communication but use vocal expressions only. They have heard the music from earth for decades now and with their imitation abilities they have decided to pay a one evening tribute to humanity and to perform the songs they love as musical- gratitude. And, for your continued enjoyment, a more.... because, sometimes we take things way too seriously around here!
posted by HuronBob on Oct 20, 2009 - 8 comments

Never Mind the Pity: How Killian Mansfield's Dying Dream Turned into the Making of a Miraculous Album.

While still hospitalized, Killian puts together a dream list of musicians he’d like to work with, focusing on those who spend time in the Catskills. E-mails are sent, calls made, favors asked. He wants to make the record a love letter to the idyllic, eclectic swath of America where he’s lived the past few years. As the responses come in, however, the project shapes up to be far more ambitious than anyone first imagined. Among those who sign on are Dr. John, the legendary New Orleans songwriter; Levon Helm, the drummer for the Band; Kate Pierson of the B-52s; the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian; and Todd Rundgren. Ralph agrees to put off all other work in the studio. Killian, meanwhile, compiles a list of songs that, in some way or another, are connected in his mind to integrative therapy. He sees “Scratch My Back,” by renowned bluesman Slim Harpo, as a reference to massage; “Express Yourself,” the funk classic, is chosen to give props to the Cancer Dancers, a group that reaches out to sick children through dance. “Kiss” he deems “one of the greatest love songs ever written,” love being perhaps the best integrative therapy around. Topping his “dream list” of collaborators is David Bowie, with whom Killian imagines recording a uke version of “Starman.”

Four years ago metafilter was introduced to Pandora. This weekend, the New York Times introduced the world to the minds behind the music genome project. [more inside]
posted by jefficator on Oct 19, 2009 - 76 comments

To promote their soon-to-be-released album, In This Light and On This Evening (coming October 27), British indie rockers Editors have made an interesting hack of Google Maps Street View. If you go to the Editors website here, you can wander through the streets of London looking for landmarks set out by the band. [more inside]
posted by rocket88 on Oct 19, 2009 - 9 comments

Enrico Caruso Remastered. Aside from his musical skill and his tempestuous character, he was also known in the English-speaking world as a gentlemanly public figure, and patriot.
posted by StrikeTheViol on Oct 18, 2009 - 18 comments

A few days back I was introduced to the Banjo Ninja [via Boingboing] and found myself instantly hooked to the 'gritty hard edge Appalachian claw-hammer and Scruggs style banjo with punk rock intensity'. The more I watched video and listened to streaming tracks on Phillip Roebuck's web site, the more I liked it, particularly Summons Song, which blew me away. Other great tunes include Little Bo Peep and Monkey Fist. The downside to my newfound musical interest is that being in Hong Kong I can't buy any of the tracks via iTunes or Amazon, which sucks royally because I would love to send Phillip some money for my favourite tracks. After searching MeFi all I could find was one brief mention in the green back in 2007 (which I missed as I don't always visit Ask MeFi), and couldn't believe Roebuck hasn't been introduced via the blue, so I hereby rectify that situation. It may not suit everyone's tastes, but I defy you not to tap your feet.
posted by bwg on Oct 16, 2009 - 34 comments

Zappa. Kirby. Pals! (via)
posted by COBRA! on Oct 15, 2009 - 16 comments

It was 30 years ago today... October, 1979: Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang was released. A few days later, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five gave us the tighter and catchier (IMHO) Superrappin'. Hip Hop had arrived. Here's a charming interview with a New York City paramedic who, as a very young photographer on the South Bronx scene back in the day, was the unofficial photo-documentarian of the birth of hip hop.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Oct 14, 2009 - 32 comments

The Works of Swede Mason: "Jeremy Clarkson," "Get in the Back of the Van," "Jungle All The Way," "Bill Wyman's Metal Detector," "Put the Lotion in the Basket, *" "Got The Sucka," "The Gobshite, *" "Squashed Thingy," "Spare Me The Madness," and the pair of tracks based on Neighbors deaths "Coffee And Croissants" and "Todd....Dead." [more inside]
posted by flatluigi on Oct 13, 2009 - 14 comments

Tom Waits has a new live album coming out. You can get 8 full length tracks--just under 40 minutes--from the forthcoming release for free on his site. Requires you surrender a valid email address, however.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy on Oct 13, 2009 - 42 comments

Peter Goldmark, developer of early color tv technology, is lesser known for a cooler invention, the Highway Hifi – the first recorded-music player for an automobile. The under-dash system played records provided by Columbia Records which played at 16 ⅔ rpm even when the vehicle was in motion. It was first released with Chrysler models in 1956 but lackluster promotion of the option by both Columbia and Chrysler led to the option being discontinued before the 60s. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn on Oct 12, 2009 - 36 comments

uPlaya uses algorithms to determine if a song will be a hit. [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski on Oct 12, 2009 - 42 comments

Juan Cabral, the commercial maker behind the Sony Bravia bouncing ball ad has completed a new piece: this time, he and collaborators, including Múm, Richard Fearless (of Death In Vegas) and the people behind Sigur Rós' live concerts, transformed the Icelandic town of Sey∂isfjör∂ur into an ambient sound installation, placing speakers throughout the town, playing music (from folk to electronica to ambient orchestral) and filming the reactions of the locals as they went about their lives. [more inside]
posted by acb on Oct 12, 2009 - 17 comments

Electric Junkyard Gamelan is the brainchild of bandleader and composer Terry Dame, and fuses Dame's passions of composing, inventing and building. Originally inspired by traditional Gamelan music from Bali, the group recycles and repurposes everyday objects into musical instruments. While some of their songs do indeed resemble the hypnotic percussive melodies of a Balinese/Javanese gamelan orchestra (The Nutbutter Challenge), other tunes strike out into new, distinctly urban American directions (Ode to Fred Beans). Following the band's motto, "Reuse, Recycle and ROCK," instruments are fashioned from coat hangers and rubber bands, bed frames, old farm equipment, turntable platters, clay pots, saw blades and truck springs. The "Big Barp" rubber-band harp makes a particularly unusual sound. [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco on Oct 12, 2009 - 5 comments