Archive for March, 2006
Looks like Entravision finally put Dicky Barrett out of his misery
The $64,000 question: when will the format follow suit? #
Photos of Los Angeles by Ansel Adams, published in the March 1941 issue of Fortune Magazine
Check out the photos of the Ocean Park Pier, which eventually became Pacific Ocean Park, and was destroyed in the 1970s. (via LAist) #
Least-heard hits of 2005, part 3
This made it into my hands courtesy of one Edward Stafford, Amoeba’s coolest employee. This is Readymade’s third full-length; they’ve been putting out records for ten years or so.
You could call this shoegaze, or slowcore, or sleepytime music. It’s all quiet lyrics and quiet guitars and synthetic swooshes. The instruments bristle with a quiet intensity, like some of Mogwai’s earlier/quieter stuff—the drummer subdivides endlessly, always trying to pedal faster through the thick instrumental soup his bandmates create. It’s a lullabye for headphones that seems like it might explode at any moment, but never does. Even when a screaming electric comes in, it seems like it’s hovering at -15 dB—a tempest in a mixdown.
The lyrics, written by three of the Readymades, are a study in the resignation to the system of the world that comes with age: “we’re the rut of suburban housewives, rain on the outside, quiet inside.”
Did I mention they’re Canadian? Pleasantly political site/blog here, mp3s here.
Least-heard hits of 2005, part 2
Continuing the Least-Heard Hits of Aught-Five series: Piglet was 2005’s math-rock hotness. Lava Land is a manic jubilee of gratifying instrumental tracks—like Don Cab or Hella, but more cohesive, and much happier. The DNA of Chicago seeps through each of the six tracks on this EP; they fuse uptempo jazz and rock effortlessly, and each song features at least a couple time changes and tempo shifts.
The genius of Piglet is in the way they couch their math-rock misdirections in acres of melodic groove—complicated structures or not, most of these songs have a nice verse/chorus feel, and they plot their guitar stratospherics over mostly countable, headbangable beats. The middle of “Caramel” clocks measures in 7+5/4 before switching to a jam in 5/4, but it’s not so noticeable. The rest of the song is in 4, and it’s just another melodic idea flying by. I imagine a parallel Piglet universe—a pigletverse—where the nightly diversion is darts. Except the dartboard has time signatures and tonal centers on it, and the game is to sit for hours composing the most danceable song possible from the results of your three tosses.
What’s more amazing is the extent to which the tracks on Lava Land seem to be a live performance. There are no loops and seemingly few (no?) edits. I’m not even sure that it was tracked individually. Listen to this live set from WLUW in Chicago, which I’ll host here for a while. It’s a perfect, note-by-note performance of four tracks from the EP, at tempo or faster. This shit is ridiculous.
What’s more amazing is that (although I can’t seem to verify this elsewhere online and my memory is a little hazy) I remember it coming up in a post from bassist Ezra that he and his posse just graduated high school. So they’re only 18. Anybody have info on that?
PHP has Lambda
Too bad it has such a lame syntax… You use strings (!?) to pass arguments and code. #
Good music you (probably) missed in 2005
Over the next week or so, I’m going to round up a bunch of albums from 2005 that didn’t get the attention they deserved. 2005 was kind of a strange year for music; I didn’t really identify with a lot of what appeared on critics’ best-of lists. So, I’m going to try to do short reviews of some things you might have missed. My obscurity barometer: none of these records were reviewed enough to show up on Metacritic.
Anyway, Cloud Cult. Damn. Chalk this one up to indietorrents. I downloaded it on the recommendation of a bunch of users commenting:
“Hey, this is pretty good…”
“Wow, this is on my top 20 for sure.”
“…er, make that top 10.”
It’s 25 tracks, although I haven’t made it into the second half more than a few times. Why? Well, there’s this annoying screaming thing on the ninth track… but really, the first eight tracks are so amazing that I’m happy just listening to them over and over. In those 24 minutes, Cloud Cult manages to sound like, well, just about everything. Here’s the beginning in sequence:
- A string quartet
- Nine Inch Nails
- Mark Farina’s “Dedicated” from Mushroom Jazz 3
- Beck’s Odelay
- Les Mouches’s “Carload of Whatever”
- The Flaming Lips
- A highschool drumline
- Mouse on Mars
- KMFDM
- Drumline again
- Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey”
That was just the first three tracks. The rest is equal parts rock, hip-hop, and folk. More info at Cloud Cult’s official site, earthology.net (did I mention they’re all dirty environmentalist hippies? yeah!)—and there are a couple mp3s—try “Living on the Outside of Your Skin”, which corresponds roughly to Mark Farina through Flaming Lips above.
A great regular expression visualizer, with animated DFA and NFA graphs
Doesn’t support explicit qualifiers (i.e. {m, n}) but pretty swell otherwise (via daring fireball). #
Did you know Les Mouches broke up?
Too bad, their full-length You’re Worth More to Me Than 1,000 Christians was one of my favorites of 2004. #
