This is a great little blog by a guy called Todd Hart who basically buys up old cassette tapes from the Oxfam shop in Dalston then digitizes them and shares them on his site. Having a quick flick through I’ve found some pretty cool tracks by Gill Scott-Heron, Groove Train and a nice James Brown mix by Matt Black (right-click and select “Save Target As” on the links). www.dalstonoxfamshop.blogspot.com
Thanks for the link Chris
There’s something I really love about this Muxtape site, it basically allows you to upload mp3’s and create online playlists or mixtapes. However I think it’s the interface which is almost over-the-top simple, but there’s something really beautiful and art-like about it?
On Saturday a friend of mine booked out a room for a birthday party and asked me to bring some music along. Unfortunately, for some reason just plugging my iPod into the mixer produced a horrible sound quality so I was forced to use the CD decks - this would have been fine except the only CD to hand was a 3 disc ‘Best of the Eighties’ album which I had to make last for over 3 hours (I think towards the end of the night I’d played Grace Jones ‘Pull up to the Bumper‘ about 8 times?!)
Anyway here’s a picture of me posing like I’m doing some cool DJ scratch move or something (in reality the most advanced bit of skill was a fade in)
All in all it was quite possibly the worst bit of DJ’ing ever, though someone came up to me at the end and said that “never had one person done so much with so little” which I thought was nice - and most people seemed to be feeling the fly beats I was laying down:
Creative Review have written a great post featuring some current cool new music video’s. My favourite of which is this one, directed by Keith Schofield for the Supergrass song ‘Bad Blood’. It basically features a wicked trick of locking the camera axis point to random objects and actions in the video … though rather than trying to explain it’s better to actually just watch it.
Nice … it’s all about track 2 for me! Download here:
http://fffff.at/audio/top10_rap_4_white_people.zip
Found on the ni9e blog
Really like the new music video for the Justice track ‘DVNO‘ which takes a poke at the old retro tv idents. One of them inparticular reminded me very much of the old BBC video ident - so cooool!
We had some people come in over lunchtime and give an interesting presentation on a website/application they were working on called ’show me how to play’ - basically it allows you to see how instrumental parts are put together to make up various songs. However apparently the next step in the site will be to bring in a live / collaboration element - sort of like an iChat A/V for musicians! www.showmehowtoplay.com
Really enjoyed the Liverpool Nativity performance shown on BBC THREE a few days back, really well told, some great music, and thought the ‘asylum seeker’ twist on it was really interesting. If you missed it, it’s available to watch for a couple more days on iPlayer
Interesting article in Wired this week with David Byrne interviewing Thom Yorke - getting his thoughts on the current state of the music industry, as well as talking about the recent ‘pay-what-you-want’ release of the last Radiohead album:
Byrne: What about bands that are just getting started?
Yorke: Well, first and foremost, you don’t sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority. If you’re an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don’t see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.
Byrne: It should be a load off their minds.
Yorke: Exactly.
Last Saturday’s episode of Click was interesting - all about the concept of visualising radio, how it might work, pro’s and con’s etc. The argument seems to of come around due to the fact that most new devices for listening to radio these days will come with a small colour screen which will enable extra information to be broadcast alongside the audio.
On the minus side it has been claimed that this will just mean for cheap tv, but I like Andy Parfitt’s idea (head of Radio 1) of “glanceability” in that “it can’t be content that you must look at in order to get the picture” (so things that nicely supplement the audio - EPG’s, visualisations, track lists etc)
Read the article / Watch again
If I’m honest I’ll admit that I do tend to be quite partial to a good fad every now and again, the latest one involves learning to play a banjo. Here’s a video I recorded on Saturday morning with my housemate Rich (please bear in mind I’ve only been learning for two weeks!). Watch video
