Dude! Have you heard about mashed-ups? They're the latest trend! You take two songs that are vaguely similar and blend them together to make a whole new song! It's brand-new!
Pah.
Me and my band-geek friends in high school were doing this back when people still called hip-hop "breakdance music" and Dangermouse was just a cartoon. Slick Rick mixed with Madonna mixed with Public Enemy mixed with the theme from Sesame Street. Looping and sampling through the fine art of pausing and rewinding your cassette deck. Busting out break-beats on a Casio keyboard. Oh Hells yes. I still have a tape somewhere of Paul Hardcastle's 19 mixed with 1940s radio ads for a series of marriage counseling books and samples played off a (then state-of-the-art) SK-1 Sampler.
So don't tell me about your mash-ups, kid. I've already been there.
Now, having said all of that. A lot of the stuff coming out lately is pretty good. Most recently, I took advantage of Dean Gray Tuesday to snag a copy of American Edit. Mr. Gray has re-mixed the entirety of Green Day's "Rock Opera" American Idiot throwing in lyrics and beats from sources as divergent as Queen, Ashanti, and the theme from the BBC series Dr. Who. That last, featured in Dr. Who on Holiday is actually a mash-up within a mash-up, as he seems to be using the Timelords' 1988 hit Doctorin' the Tardis, which blended the OOOeeeOOOs of the Dr. Who theme with the Na-NaNa-Na-NA-AH(HEY!) of Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Pt. 2. Post- modern-y!
If you missed out on Dean Gray Tuesday, I'm sure you can find it with your Hampster or your Ka-zam! or what have you. And I suspect that lots of hipster kids will be giving and getting CDs of American Edit over the holidays. I know I plan to wrap up a few copies.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Hovercat
[Church has ended, and I'm waiting for someone from the Music Department to arrive for a recital that was supposed to start loading in a half-hour ago. Hrmm.]
Before I started at my current job, I worked as a customer service rep for a company that sold pyrotechnics, confetti cannons, fog machines and other special effects products for the entertainment industry. For reasons I'll detail in a later post (maybe) business at "the fireworks stand" was slow. Really slow. By the time I finally left the company it was like 2-3 sales a day slow.
Lack of business left me with a lot of free time on my hands during the work day, time I filled by playing games with the Internet. (Not on, with; there's a subtle yet important difference there.) I started with the old standards: vanity surfing, looking up old classmates and girlfriends, and posting nonsense to Unsenet.
During the course of my surfing, stalking and posting, I became a big fan of Google's ability to return a result for just about anything I could think to type into its search box. So, on one particulary slow day, I played my first game of what I now call Hovercat.
The rules are simple: Pick a word or a phrase that, as far as you know, is completely meaningless. Feed it to Google. Hit "I'm feeling lucky," and see what comes up. Of course, the first time I played I used "Hovercat," because, as far as I knew, there was no such thing. The result I got back wasn't the one I've linked to here, but it was similar and I like the animated version a lot better.
From that first result I was hooked. I played Hovercat obsessively for a week at least, and posted some of my more interesting finds to a.r.k. I went from searching regular English words to making up words to just pounding on the keyboard at random. I got a lot of junk results, domain names bought up by web speculators and seeded with pages of random search terms, but I also found a lot of interesting, unique and unintentionally funny content that I would have never even thought to look for on purpose. In a way, it was like dumpster diving the internet, finding little forgotten treasures buried in online catalogs, weblogs and discussion groups.
I still play Hovercat, though not nearly as much now that I have a job that actually involves my doing some work during the day. The FCC gigs are good Hovercatting time, though, especially a day like today when I find myself just waiting around for a group to arrive and load in. Try it yourself, and remember: keep your buttered side up!
Before I started at my current job, I worked as a customer service rep for a company that sold pyrotechnics, confetti cannons, fog machines and other special effects products for the entertainment industry. For reasons I'll detail in a later post (maybe) business at "the fireworks stand" was slow. Really slow. By the time I finally left the company it was like 2-3 sales a day slow.
Lack of business left me with a lot of free time on my hands during the work day, time I filled by playing games with the Internet. (Not on, with; there's a subtle yet important difference there.) I started with the old standards: vanity surfing, looking up old classmates and girlfriends, and posting nonsense to Unsenet.
During the course of my surfing, stalking and posting, I became a big fan of Google's ability to return a result for just about anything I could think to type into its search box. So, on one particulary slow day, I played my first game of what I now call Hovercat.
The rules are simple: Pick a word or a phrase that, as far as you know, is completely meaningless. Feed it to Google. Hit "I'm feeling lucky," and see what comes up. Of course, the first time I played I used "Hovercat," because, as far as I knew, there was no such thing. The result I got back wasn't the one I've linked to here, but it was similar and I like the animated version a lot better.
From that first result I was hooked. I played Hovercat obsessively for a week at least, and posted some of my more interesting finds to a.r.k. I went from searching regular English words to making up words to just pounding on the keyboard at random. I got a lot of junk results, domain names bought up by web speculators and seeded with pages of random search terms, but I also found a lot of interesting, unique and unintentionally funny content that I would have never even thought to look for on purpose. In a way, it was like dumpster diving the internet, finding little forgotten treasures buried in online catalogs, weblogs and discussion groups.
I still play Hovercat, though not nearly as much now that I have a job that actually involves my doing some work during the day. The FCC gigs are good Hovercatting time, though, especially a day like today when I find myself just waiting around for a group to arrive and load in. Try it yourself, and remember: keep your buttered side up!
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Wizards of Winter Real Says Snopes
Updating my previous entry about the "Wizards of Winter" video. Tha Snopes-dogg has determined that the lighting display shown in the video is real; it just looks animated because of compression issues.
For those of you who, like me, are now being pestered by their wives to create an animated Christmas light display (complete with a low-power FM transmitter to broadcast musical accompaniment) here's a link to Light-O-Rama, manufacturer of lighting controllers and sequencers: http://www.lightorama.com/
Of course, if you really want to do it up right, you could rent a 96 channel rolling rack, a few hundred Ks of PARs, some VLs and MACs, and a GrandMA to keep it all under control. Then call the boys in the TSO and see if they're available to perform "Wizards of Winter" twelve times a night on your front lawn. That'll show Flanders! (stupid Flanders...)
For those of you who, like me, are now being pestered by their wives to create an animated Christmas light display (complete with a low-power FM transmitter to broadcast musical accompaniment) here's a link to Light-O-Rama, manufacturer of lighting controllers and sequencers: http://www.lightorama.com/
Of course, if you really want to do it up right, you could rent a 96 channel rolling rack, a few hundred Ks of PARs, some VLs and MACs, and a GrandMA to keep it all under control. Then call the boys in the TSO and see if they're available to perform "Wizards of Winter" twelve times a night on your front lawn. That'll show Flanders! (stupid Flanders...)
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