This week, I was listening to a lot of tracks in the “world” section of AmieStreet, and wanted to spotlight Pulsion. The tonality and composition is almost dreamlike in the guitars. This reminds me of some of the masters of guitar intros. Check it out!
ASMW is revived – Archetecture in Helsinki
The plugin and meme for Amie Street Music Wednesday has been revived! This meme had been garnering players for quite some time, and its growth was stopped in its tracks when Amie Street did a site redesign that stopped the embedded player from working. Mouseclone has been working with their developers to create a slick new player, and the code has been released today.
My first post with the new player is by an Australian indie-pop band called Archetecture in Helsinki. The song “That Beep” is pretty popular in Oz, and there are several mixes and dubs already.
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The beginning bit where they say “Hey kid can you wake up” seemed apropos for the revival post.
I called your doctor up
And he promised me shameless fun
Tried a little bit of moving on
It lasts for way too long
Dressed up as bubblegum
I’m stuck to your shoe lets run
Can you give me that
beep, beep, beep, beep, beep
SISAB One
I ran into this meme when reading Juliafish‘s blog, and thought that the result was uncanny when thinking of album covers I’ve seen over the past (ahem, many) years.
This was quick to put together, and was entertaining. You should do one, just to see what randoms you get.
The meme goes as follows:
Create your own band and debut album cover randomly
To Do This:
1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random” or click Wikipedia Random
The first random Wikipedia article that comes up is the name of your band.
2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations” or click Quotations Random – The last four or five words of the very LAST quote on the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click Flickr 7day random – The third picture in the top row, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use Photoshop/GIMP or similar graphics program to put it all together.
5 – Post it to your preferred online outlet with this text in the “caption” or “comment” and TAG the friends you want to join in.
Here’s the first release from my new band.
Gone to the ‘Dogs’
I think that I’ve mentioned here and in a few other “spaces” that I’ve been following closely the BBC show “Skins”. The other night, I went to see Danny Boyle’s latest movie, “Slumdog Millionaire”. Danny Boyle was the director of “Trainspotting” and “28 Days Later”, and has a knack for the hard part of storytelling; making it all hit home. Slumdog is a dynamite film, and I feel that I did a disservice to myself in not seeing it the day it was released. It has all the classic elements of a fairytale plot, including lost love, the underdog, rags to riches, lucid moral dilemmas, and good-guys-versus-bad-guys. The veil of the fairytale is not lily-white, however. The attention to detail in the story, the endless squalor, fleeting moments of elation, the brutal situations we are faces with along the journey make the whole story pop and crackle with reality. I haven’t seen a film in years that had its hand on my pulse like this, giving equal treatment to a whole range of emotion and thought. Dev Patel (who plays the part of Anwar in Skins) takes the lead in Slumdog, a story of a kid who made his own way from a blighted area of Mumbai, and in a plucky turn has ended up as a contestant in the Indian version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’. As the quiz show breaks for the night, he is arrested under suspicion of cheating because he was doing “too well” on the quiz. I will stop here so that I don’t drop any spoilers.
You should not miss this movie. I found it showing at a theater locally that is known to show mainly “art house” and foreign films. It will definitely go on the want list when it’s out on DVD…. I’ll also be looking for the soundtrack by AR Rahman, and featuring a couple of tracks by M.I.A.
the Zune
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Microsoft’s Zune is FAIL.
In the wee hours of this morning, all of the 30gb model Zune music players hit a system glitch. A power cycle will not clear it. There are some reports that opening the unit and pulling the battery cables off the connector will clear the situation, but a lot of users won’t be comfortable with that.
This comes after the lowering of the price of the Zunes, and immediately after Apple stated that in 2009, the prices for macbooks and ipods will be dropping.
Not exactly good timing for this kind of news.
Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t carry an ipod, either. I’ve been using mp3 players for much, much longer than there has been an “ipod” at all, when all mp3 players were referred to as, well, “mp3 players”. I have been getting some really excellent mileage out of the small, flash memory-based ones that can now be bought for very little scratch, and for that reason, you aren’t afraid of a system fail (if it ever did happen), and you aren’t terribly worried about it if you happen to leave it in sight somewhere, and you don’t really mind wearing it when doing housework, yardwork, or even working out.
These days, they all seem to have a lot of the same features: an FM tuner, alarm clock album cycling, true random play, FM recording via schedule, etc. It really comes down to the interface on the device and the capacity, and if you follow it at all, you know that memory costs next to nothing now. The last round of flash-based mp3 players I got (maybe eight months ago) all have microSD slots, which allow for massive expansion, and allow you to swap out your stock of tunes and podcasts on the run.
To everyone with a 30GB Zune: Your music player has passed its “freshness date” Return it to the manufacturer and ask for an upgrade.
The odd-yssey
FISHHAWK
GREATER VA VOOM
GRIP PLYAZ
JUDI CHICAGO
Facebook apps
I’ve been getting back in touch with a bunch of long-lost people lately on Facebook, which is the time that Social Media is at its very best.
I’ve been running into some issues lately with several apps (not just this one) where some of the basic functionality just does not work with Opera.
I’ve been using the Opera browser as my primary for about six or eight months, and it’s like riding a rocket, but things like that are ridiculous. Opera is more standards-compliant than any other browser, and you run into things like this. First guesses would be shoddy programming by apps developers, but I’m also starting to wonder if maybe it’s something in the FB API, since there is a standard display message about it.
It might have to do with the widget framework that they were harrowing to developers. It might be worth writing an FB app just to try to hit the Opera barrier.
Have any suggestions for an FB app? Leave ’em in the comments!
ASMW — Dirty Epics
This week, I discovered a band called the Dirty Epics from Dublin. They have an interesting alt-punk and ska sound, and from the videos, seem to put on quite a live show. The issue that I have with them is that they currently only have *ONE* track up at their Amie Street page. To see or hear much else, you will have to go trolling places like MySpace page. Anyway, check them out!