Now I’ve discovered how easy it is to create MP3 ringtones for my BlackBerry (make a 64KBit mono MP3 of short length, e-mail it to the phone, open attachment, save it, and select “Use as ringtone”), I just had to use this little snippet of the DeZurik Sisters: dezurik.mp3.
Category: choons
stuff I hear
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beautiful drone
The chill units in the new Loblaws Superstore in Scarborough make the most harnonious drone. I might just come here to listen.
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most abrupt stylistic change ever
Would have to be on The Silver Apples’ “The Garden”. The zappy bongoid weirdness of Canonball Noodle is followed by a very credible bluegrass version of John Hardy, which is then followed by Cockroach Noodle, a return to their previous “explosion in the VIC-20 factory” sound.
I like it …
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no Barnes for you
Kevin Barnes cancelled his solo Toronto show at the Mod Club tonight.
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glitch out
I really don’t think that my ipod was supposed to do that. But then, it was playing Columbus Fruge’s Saut Crapaud at the time, which is enough to make anyone shift a few pixels to the side:
Saut crapaud
ta queue va brûler
Prends courage
a’va repousser -
guess my music competition
So I could listen to semi-disposable CDRs in the car (and with that phrase, my green cred has vanished) I wrote a program that converts directories of mp3s to WAV files and TOC files for cdrdao. It works rather well.
In order to get sensible file names, the program truncates album names down to eight letters. I will send $5 canadian by paypal to the first person to guess correctly the album and artist of the following four names:
dancetun darlingc hepooscl maggotbr
Answers in the comments only, please. They’re all official releases, before you accuse me of getting you to guess my mix CDs.
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(imp)Ursonate
Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu,
pögiff,
kwii Ee.Ursonate, by Kurt Schwitters (and the score).
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Holy Modal Rounders – Live 1965
Someone helpfully posted Holy Modal Rounders – Live 1965 as MP3s. Both Pete and Steve are clearly out of their heads when they played, but it’s a diamond in the rough of the freak folk scene.
The recording has a chequered history. Recorded on June 5th 1965 (no-one knows or remembers where) by WDTM Detroit, the tape belonged to Peter Stampfel’s mother. It was found after she passed away, and mastered to CD for release in 2002. According to Peter, Steve borrowed a CD-R copy, and released it through an acquaintance. Much to Steve’s dismay, the acquaintance claimed that all the money from the release disappeared as expenses. It is now out of print, and seemingly any release could trigger legal action from either party.
Whatever the history, it’s a great record of the time.
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Rise Up Singing! in freedb
It took me a while, but I finally put all the track information for Sing Out!‘s Rise Up Singing teaching CDs (also on the artists’ website) on freedb. I was given the data just over a year ago by Mark D. Moss, the editor of Sing Out! magazine.
The discs are:- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc A
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc B
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc C
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc D
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc E
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc F
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc G
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc H
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc J
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc K
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc L
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc M
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc O
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc P
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc R
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc S
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc T
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc U
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc W
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc Y
Perhaps what took longest was working out a UTF-8 safe processing workflow, from converting the original Excel table to e-mailing the entries to the freedb server. Let’s just say that OpenOffice, sqlite, and Perl were very helpful here.
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decade
Was it really ten years ago that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (aka my favourite album ever) came out? Optical Atlas thinks so.
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hot chocolate
The Carolina Chocolate Drops rocked Hugh’s Room last night. They’re just your average banjo-playing, jug-blowing, fiddling, throat singing, kazoo-playing, charlstoning, Highland mouth-music’ing, bones-rapping, reso-guitar-picking, beatboxing trio …
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the analogue hole
I have a bunch of Catherine’s old family recordings to digitise (do people still do that – sit around a tape recorder and make recordings?) and I had recorded one of Ken’s shows on minidisc, so I needed a relatively clean way to get analogue audio onto the computer.
I ended up getting a Griffin iMic, a small USB audio input device. The sound quality is remarkably clean; here’s a sine wave recorded from CD to minidisc, then recorded on the iMic:
The iMic seems to work with all Mac audio software as an input device. The free Final Vinyl recording sofware is pretty, but a bit buggy and annoyingly, only works when the iMic is connected. I just use Audacity, and have done with it.
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Ken Reaume | Wavelength Music Series + Zine
Interview: Ken Reaume | Wavelength Music Series + Zine
January 20th 11pm – 18th, 2008Ken Reaume– at Sneaky Dee’s (431 College St, Toronto)
“Four Horses” CD release
This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.
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moicy!
The Holy Modal Rounders documentary DVD, Bound To Lose is now available for us international types. But the price? $28 in the US balloons to $40 elsewhere. At that price, I’d expect Peter and Steve to deliver it in person!
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down home radio show » The End of the World Banjo Band
down home radio show » Various Field Recordings
Anthology Film Archives – New York City 12/8/07:This show was after a screening of the film “Bound to Lose†which is a GREAT documentary about The Holy Modal Rounders. “The End of the World Banjo Band†is a current project by Peter Stampfel of The Holy Modal Rounders. It’s an all banjo band featuring Peter Stampfel, John Cohen (of the New Lost City Ramblers), Jeannie Scofield, Walker Shepard and Down Home Radio’s own Eli Smith. Faced with the end of the world, seemingly the only option is actually to create an all-banjo-band. The band has 5-string banjos, banjo-mandolin, and 6-string banjo-guitar.
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best of 2007
I said I’d bend the rules a bit, but here’s the ten best albums I heard this year, in alphabetical order:
- The Aliens — Astronomy For Dogs: add a Lone Pigeon to a few remaining Betas, and the result is funkiness. This album has more earworms than is safe. They are even better live.
- Animal Collective — Strawberry Jam: I pretty much have to be alone and sitting down to listen to this. For Reverend Green especially; it’s all involuntary limb movements, sinuses exploding with joy (this probably doesn’t happen to you, I hope), and ullulating Oo oo weeuh yeh … ee yeh yeh etc for me. Other Animals didn’t do so badly either this year: Panda Bear’s Person Pitch was joyful, and even the bafflingly backwards Pullhair Rubeye from Avey and KrÃa had something.
- Colleen — The Golden Morning Breaks (2005): very sparse but beautiful notes. I’ll Read You a Story is the sound that angels make.
- A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble: featuring magyar madness, crafty cimbalom, and the only piece of bagpipe music that won’t make you want to hack your ears off with a meat cleaver. It’s doubly nice that it features Zach Condon actually playing with his heroes, rather than just trying to sound like them.
- Ideal Free Distribution: lush 60s rhythm and harmonies, with a ton of mellotron laid on top. Poppy enough that no-one I’ve played it to doesn’t like it.
- Dan Jones and The Squids — Totally Human: Dan has clearly listened to a lot of both Robyn Hitchcock and The Minutemen, and has come up with a noisy but thoughtful album, which we play all the time.
- Old Man Luedecke — Hinterland (2006): merge sly alt.country lyrics with pretty clawhammer banjo, and you’ve got the Old Man. Bonus points for coupling the words “oracular bent” in a song, and getting away with it, too.
- Ken Reaume — Four Horses: Ken quite modestly compares himself to Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. He’s easily the equal of both. Beautiful fingerpicking and whispered confessional lyrics.
- Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter — Like, Love, Lust, & The Open Halls of the Soul: you’ll fall for Jesse’s world-weary lisp and the drawling psych guitar. I did (and unfortunately discovered her other two albums, Reckless Burning and Oh My Girl, are almost identical. Oh well; very good, but very samey).
- Porter Wagoner — Wagonmaster: if you’re gonna go, go out on a high note. That’s exactly what The Thin Man From West Plains did. It’s very straight country, but the decades of experience polish it brighter than rhinestones.
