I am very little concerned with confronting, disrupting, or disturbing. I am too tired, too old now to be about that sort of activity. No longer do I wish to be an irritant, but rather a spreader of balm.
From a lovely zine I read in Asheville NC in June 2023.
I did like the mood (and soft-spoken narration) of the introduction but I absolutely loved that background music. It’s called Lambent Rag by Clark and is worth a listen and a watch1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNrt1FWmPA4 The Air looks nice2 but I’ll baby my iPhone 13 Mini, perfection as far…
In German so I needed a translation.…
A crowdsourced list of the best trip-hop songs with each letter of the alphabet. Most popular are Massive Attack and Portishead (no surprises here). Here’s a YouTube playlist. Track Artist Angel Massive Attack link Building Steam With A Grain of Salt DJ Shadow link Cowboys Po…
Here’s a demo site (demo:demo). I was able to launch it in under 30 seconds (M2 MacBook Air, 24GiB) against a ~200GiB music library.
UX and beets integration aside, it’s essentially what I tried to build a long while ago. A simple music player (based on Rust/Golang, SQLite, and simple Web APIs) whose UI made sense to normal and reasonable people and not ambitious product managers.
Not completely unsurprising, but yeah: I was struck by how it’s essentially a continuous tone after about 2,000 BPM. Makes one wonder if anything in the Universe is really continuous or if all of it is fundamentally discrete. Also makes you wonder how animals like bees perceive the world.…
First listened to this with SB in Iowa City at his place. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This is one of the most magnificent pieces of music I’ve heard in my life and I hope to hear it before I leave.
My dudes. Cached here via YouTube because it is too precious to be yanked off the internet. Via Rob G. It also occurred to me that the OS in the video would be more usable, more respectful, and less full of spyware than the giant crock of shit that is Windows 11.…
At the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur. About as mesmerizing as percussion can get. Speaking of mesmerizing, see this performance by the great Zakir Hussain at the Berklee College of Music.…
If you took “Buttons” by The Pussycat Dolls and deep-fried it in stale peanut oil, you would get the result below. It’s by Youtuber Dii and it’s all I’ve been humming for the past 48 hours.…
A most beautiful, graceful, and sublime rendition of one of my all-time favorite songs. Lovely, lovely stuff 🙏❤️ (via Deepu) See also: Worlds Beyond the Stars…
There isn’t much variety in the music I listen to. I stick to soundtracks, minimalist composers, some weird surprises1, and mostly to what my good friend calls “electronic windchime shit” (by which he means “ambient music.”) This means I’ve heard fewer than, say, twenty country songs in my life so…
Koji Kondo is a “sound designer” who composed music for Super Mario Bros. He was inspired by these songs. Music Artist Song The Main “Overworld” Theme T-Square Sister Marian (3:08) When you go down the Warp Pipes Friendship Let’s not talk about it When you get a Star…
My favorite visualization of “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich. Here’s a video of him performing it with one other musician.…
“You know I wrote this in… when I was looking at the mirror, right?” “I’m serious.”…
A group of stringrays is called a fever (my head: “So that’s where that album name came from!”) This is what they look like:…
Don’t. Just let this kid assure you that everyfing’s gonna be alright.…
Taken completely out of context, for the letter itself is a lot of bro-y “locker room talk.” My mind is dried up, exhausted. I’m disgusted to be back in this damned country where you see the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig’s asshole. Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Ernest Cheva…
A documentary about the avant garde music in NYC. Features Glass, Reich, Cage, Zappa, and a bunch of dissatisfied viewers in the comments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0NwiTHIhGM…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owog55voMcs…
From a Reddit thread on the subject. With as diverse of a sound as trip hop can have, I wanted to know what everyone here thought would be the one song they would pick if someone asked them “What’s trip hop?” User submissions: “Glory Box” by Portishead “Teardrop” by Massive Attack “Roads” b…
Bilal Göregen (YouTube, Instagram) is the Turkish street musician in my favorite video of 2020. He sounds like a very positive, gracious, and sweet human being on this KnowYourMeme interview1 which features this delightful nugget (emphasis mine): Q: How has the r…
This is lovely. More here.…
Just pure joy. Source (without annotation). See also: “Ave Maria”.…
They call themselves Blac Rabbit. Here they are on Ellen.…
via Mark…
This is the "the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world" and dates from “either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD.” It was found engraved on a tombstone and was “dedicated by Seikilos to Euterpe, who was possibly his wife.” (…
I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make…
Wonderful stuff by Christopher O. Mathews. My favorite track has to be “Azimuth”.…
Brilliant, beautiful.…
Set to “Destino” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV40xyl9bRA 💗💗💗…
This is absolutely beautiful. I’m happy there’s a way to generate music that sounds like one of my favorite tracks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYvHwyjUGFg…
TL;DW? Denzel Washington is Liam Neeson from Taken (with a lot of that movie’s tropes.) Over on Reddit, an essential discussion of who would win a fight. Features my favorite hipster-henchman, Tait Fletcher whom I last saw in The Accountant. Loved the first half of this song: https://www.youtube.…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOXULpUpR08 Heard this and was made aware of this timeless album for the first time at a very strange party at Iowa State. RIP Sam Zaman.…
Vulture’s 2018 Guide to Soundcloud Rappers wherein they’re classified by name: “The Lil’s” (Lil Pump/Xan/Skies/Wop/Yachty/Uzi Vert/Peep), “The Adjectives”, “The Creative Spellers”, and “The (Almost) Full Sentences”. I’ll take this one.…