New Order performs “Age of Consent.” Note out of key guitar intro, angry removal of pop-screen from microphone, and ‘gay sperm’ on the amps. Kick Ass.
August 24, 2007
Age of Consent
Temptation
Video footage of New Order performing “Temptation” at the BBC studios live in 1984.
July 16, 2007
I still love Beware of the Blog
WFMU revives an obscure bit of Velvet Underground lore. Lou Reed got his start writing music for a pseudo-Brill Building outfit and wrote and recorded a novelty single titled “The Ostrich.” The band recorded as “The Primitives” and also featured John Cale. It basically sounds like one of VU’s goofier singles. You can listen to it here.
July 2, 2007
Let them eat cake…
A very low-budget video with a simple concept from Low, but I can’t stop watching.
June 30, 2007
Song Meanings
The name might throw you off a little, but SongMeanings is actually a lyrics database. It has a lot going for it. A huge database of song lyrics, no pop-ups or spyware, and a discussion feature where users post their interpretations of the songs.
June 29, 2007
There is a light that never goes out
YouTube strikes again. The (sole?) musician behind a project called Primrose League has posted several videos of himself playing songs by The Smiths. His recreations of Johnny Marr’s playing is obsessively close to the originals. Here’s an instrumental of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, a beautiful song, with or without vocals.
April 13, 2007
Tonic Closes
Generally, I’m all real estate going to the highest value use. But the notion of value is actually pretty elusive because of the great many things you can’t put a dollar value on. One thing you really can’t put dollar value on is the cultural capital of New York. This cultural capital exists only in it’s exercise and we have it. But music exists to be performed and listened to. Without anywhere to play, there will be no more music of the kind that Tonic supported.
It makes me very sad that New York has turned into the kind of place where the only use we have for space is to put a condo on it. New York is killing the vibrant cultural life that makes it a desirable place to live in the first place. Usually, I’m in awe in the kind of the abundance of wealth and choice we enjoy here. This trend of closing clubs and performance venues has me ironically wishing for decay of one thing to save something else that we value.
January 4, 2007
Velvet Underground Acetate
If you missed your chance to hear the rare first acetate of The Velvet Underground and Nico, WMFU has now posted it. You can download all the tracks – many are different mixes and some are different version entirely from the commercial release.
November 26, 2006
November 4, 2006
Latency & Crystal WDM
If you own a Dell laptop computer and you are a musician, you’ve probably run into latency issues on the built-in Crystal audio cards. Most recently I was getting 46ms of latency out of my machine. This makes live performance pretty difficult, you need to get that latency below 15ms if it’s going to feel at all live and responsive. Luckily a bright programmer has written a an ASIO driver for Crystal WDM. It’s called ASIO4ALL and you can download it from the author’s site.