Went to the Friday evening show at Mutek, an annual electronic music festival in Montreal. (continue reading…)
At Mind on Fire here.
“The stuff that really brings people together, and makes us happy to live together, originates from a caring and thoughtful mind that’s been exposed to many streams of education.” That was the key point I took away from a presentation — talk, acoustic concert, and Q&A — by Greg Graffin, frontman and co-songwriter for the seminal punk band Bad Religion, who was honored with an award the Saturday before last at Harvard’s Memorial Church. (more…)
“The stuff that really brings people together, and makes us happy to live together, originates from a caring and thoughtful mind that’s been exposed to many streams of education.”
That was the key point I took away from a presentation — talk, acoustic concert, and Q&A — by Greg Graffin, frontman and co-songwriter for the seminal punk band Bad Religion, who was honored with an award the Saturday before last at Harvard’s Memorial Church. (more…)
Here follows an abridged timeline of my life in music so far, followed by some goals for the futue — (continue reading…)
So in addition to the Leaving the Garden post, I’ll be covering for John the next few weeks at Mind on Fire by posting the next few Wednesdays.
Pending conversations with John, this Wednesday I’m planning to post about Greg Graffin’s talk and acoustic concert last night at the reception of the “Rushdie Award” given to him by Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.
And next week I may post about an event at my college this week: a retrospective about a perfect storm of LGBT activism that took place on campus a year ago. Unless something else turns up between now and then.
(Now that I’ve gotten audio working again on my computer (h/t Elisa!) I hope to have more to post about music soon…)
It’s too early to know for sure, but I might be warming back up to Linux.
The complaints detailed previously haven’t changed, but at least I’ve found three halfway decent looking audio programs, for free: recording with Audacity (which I had heard of) and sequencing/etc. with Ardour and Rosegarden. And programs like Rosetta Stone seem to be working with a certain Windows emulator. (I think it’s technically not an emulator, but I’m an incorrigible populist)
PLUS: A friend just told me about Ubuntu Studio…
So when I was in Chicago last week I made the de rigueur blues club visit, at Lee’s Unleaded Blues.
Ironically it was a soul night, but a good time was had nonetheless.
I was mostly trying to listen, and talk to an interesting musicology student doing her thesis on Lee’s and another club called Rosa’s Lounge, but I did manage to take a few blurry photos, and a lousy “video” clip of the excellent house band, which nonetheless has a certain charm –
(Clearly I need to get some better recording equipment. For audio I’m leaning towards the Zoom H2 or a Roland, don’t know about video.)
Since it was an open mic, the aforementioned student later played some viola with the band(!), and in good time I got up to sing 2/3 of the lyrics to some Marvin Gaye. I wanted to sing Sam Cooke’s “Lost and Looking”, since I actually, you know, know the lyrics to that one, but the band didn’t know it :(
At the end I ask the MC how he tied his crazy tie, which had more knots than one would reasonably expect. He goes, “Oh, it’s a clip-on,” and reaching behind his head, “Do you want it?”
So David Bazan of Pedro the Lion fame played a show at Gordon College Thursday night, with Damien Jurado opening.
It was kind of perfect — a singer who has blurred the line between Christian and secular music, playing at one of the the more freethinking Christian colleges, for an audience of students and alumni who end up broadly agnostic at higher rates than you might expect. One of them asked during the Q&A, “Are you indifferent to or ambivalent about religion?” He said no, but made some non-propositional insinuations. And mentioned he was reading Bart Ehrman.
You could almost hear the faith (of a certain kind) being lost during the finale, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” –
(video from a previous show.)
His new CD has a song apparently about the breakup of Pedro the Lion and his new solo career, which at first seemed a little self-indulgent… but I quite like it now. (starts at 1:05)
I confess I always thought of Pizzicato Five as J-pop for the uninitiated, a band for tokenistic mixes. But musical snobbery aside, this song is killer — “The Night is Still Young”:
I came across it via the version below sung by Miku Hatsune — who is a computer, a version of Yamaha’s singing synthesizer Vocaloid:
We’ve all heard speech synthesizers before, but it seems that singing synthesis is a bit newer.
In other weird simulatory news, here’s ELIZA reacting to the recent death of her creator. (Who, I just learned, intended her to be a parody of a Rogerian therapist)
English lyrics under the cut: (continue reading…)
I haven’t posted for awhile, because I’ve been working on a few longer pieces of writing, one of which I’ll post in an hour or so tomorrow eventually. Plus some life-plans developments, which I’ll post later.
For now, my favorite song this past week: Akon’s remix of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” — a song I was never crazy about in the original — from the recently released 25th anniversary edition of Thriller. Full song here, but this version from a French TV station deserves posting because of the video:
Apparently he’s working on MJ’s upcoming studio album as well…
…is the title of a mix CD I recently made for some friends. It’s not autobiographical — I just had a bunch of heart CDs that I needed to use up, and it was timely. Tracklist:
I’m a firm believer in the rule (which I made up, actually) that mix CDs should be 10 songs or less, but the narrative wouldn’t quite fit in 10 songs. And 14 is appropriate of course.
