Granted, I used to dance to my modem

February 14, 2022 12:44 AM

Are you aware MF's own waxpancake/Andy Baio & jake made a track-by-track 8-bit reinterpretation of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue?

Post (featuring arguing about doubles!) and preceding Kickstarter both on The Blue back in '09.

On the creation process, from jake:

Programmed into a spreadsheet-like mod tracker program...Not just note by note but every nuance of each note, every bend and trail-off. Chris and I have been writing in trackers for 13 years and never come across a challenge requiring so much precision. It was much easier to go into our own solos later on, with our own styles.

Guys, Andy's not kidding: the samples are really not representative. It goes from "nice video game transcription, whatever" in the samples to "jazz, full stop" later on in each song. If you can listen to Sam's "All Blues" all the way through without any interest at all, I will eat my snow hat.

More Miles on The [not kind of, actual] Blue:

Scaled in Miles: an interactive visualization that "... is a look at the history of Miles Davis' career and collaborations according to his recording sessions as documented by the Jazz Discography Project. (From cwest in 2015)

Bitches Brew wus robbed: For Stereogum, Phil Freeman ranks Miles Davis albums from worst to best. (from MartinWisse in 2014)

Kind of Review: Miles Davis does a blind listening test, identifying and rating other jazz musicians. (grouse in 2012)

I also posted Davis' chili recipe in the not-too-distant past.

[This post title via loquacious. As Rhaomi reminded us the other day, Everything is a Remix.]

posted by youarenothere (11 comments total)

Oh, and includes a Disasterpiece track... I really love his work; Mini Metro is a secret masterpiece of sound design.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:15 AM on February 14, 2022

The story behind the lawsuit for the cover art is interesting too - it's linked in the kind of bloop site but just in case you miss it, it's here.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:01 AM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

"All Blues" really did make me feel like I had grown a third brain lobe
posted by thelonius at 5:11 AM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Brilliant! This is what keeps me coming back to MeFi.
posted by xtian at 6:09 AM on February 14, 2022

Excellent. When the weather breaks, I’ll be tooling around west end Toronto playing this from a Bluetooth speaker, at dusk, on a Brompton with multi-coloured spinning LEDs on it's tiny wheels.
posted by brachiopod at 6:26 AM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have a physical copy and I still listen to this regularly. It was one of the first Kickstarter projects I ever noticed. Andy delivered an excellent album in collaboration with a lot of good musicians. I was afraid it might come off sounding like a joke or a lame chiptune compo, there's a lot of those out there. But this music is something better, a novel interpretation of a very important piece of music.

Unfortunately the stress, legal problems, and financial risk about the cover art copyright claim was really unpleasant and kind of spoiled the whole project. Copyright maximalism harming creativity. The silliest thing is the cover is largely incidental to the whole project! I'm glad Andy was able to keep the album online, the music is excellent.
posted by Nelson at 7:09 AM on February 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I miss jake. Hope he's doing ok.
posted by kjh at 9:23 AM on February 14, 2022

Looks like Jake's got a lot of video game gigs. The latest on his Bandcamp is from Dec 2021.
posted by Nelson at 9:27 AM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Aww, seeing this pop up in my feedreader is a nice surprise. Despite the artwork debacle, I'm still so happy with how Kind of Bloop came out and I love that people are still discovering it regularly. All five musicians on the album really went above and beyond in making it something special, and I still get occasional fan messages about it.
posted by waxpancake at 11:15 AM on February 14, 2022 [10 favorites]

Is Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood a secret Mefite? He just tweeted it to his 200,000 followers and I truly can’t think of any reason but this post for this renewed interest in the 13-year-old album.
posted by waxpancake at 7:30 AM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh my dang! Andy, that's awesome!!
posted by youarenothere at 1:16 PM on February 18, 2022