The other day I unexpectedly received a CD in the mail, from a sender whose name I didn’t recognize. The band: “Letters vs. Numbers”, album: “Bone Tired”. The back of the sleeve was a handwritten list of other recipients along with a printed request that the recipient rip the album to their computer, add their name and location to the list, and send it to someone else.

Always one to obediently follow directions, I ripped, signed, and sent. I also listened, and damned if it isn’t a great little album. Here’s the first track, “Forget Everything”, for your streaming or downloading pleasure¹ :

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download mp3

I’d highly recommend that you receive this album by mail from a friend or an anonymous source. Failing that, the mysterious band² has a website, a myspace page³, and the album is available at both the iTunes music store and the Amazon MP3 store.

1. Hit the triangle button to play the track in your browser, or the download link to download the mp3 file [↩]
2. Their myspace page doesn’t list the names of band members, their number, or even a location. [↩]
3. The album can be listened to on the page in that icky myspace music player widget. [↩]

Since I don’t live in Europe, I often miss out on the better music that hits the charts over there. I’m not saying they listen to better crap than USians in general because that generalization doesn’t¹ ring true (case in point: Crazy Frog didn’t go nuclear over here, thank god).

But every once in a while I hear something awesome from across the pond, and am surprised it got a massive amount of airtime elsewhere and is completely unknown here. The songs of Soko, a French singer/actress, fall into that category. Here’s her demented folk-rock hit “I’ll Kill Her”:

I ran into the song because it was the inspiration and soundtrack of this great motion graphics piece:

http://motionographer.com/2009/07/08/joerg-barton-ill-kill-her/

Worth a listen and a look IMO. Broaden your horizons, listen to songs about murderous impulses from across the pond².

1. I nearly wrote “…that generalization doesn’t always ring true…”, meaning to imply that sometimes the generalization is true. But since a generalization that is sometimes true is by definition not a generalization at all, I left the original statement unqualified. To be clear, I think there’s plenty of great music all over the world, and plenty of crap. [↩]
2. After all my larger-world talk and attempts at drawing sweeping conclusions, I should point out that Soko has apparently moved to Los Angeles. So I guess that makes her yet another singer who lives in the US but is for now only well known and popular as a recording artist and performer in Europe, like David Hasselhoff or Steven Seagall. [↩]

What I see when I power-up my iPhone. Below this should hopefully be an embedded QuickTime player set to play my Apple ][ disk drive ringtone.

A couple of weeks ago I met up with my friend Ben and we transferred a bunch of old apple II disks across a serial cable into a Linux box and saved them as disk images. Now I can once again run the programs I wrote in 3rd grade, in an emulator. While we transferred the disks, I was struck by the sound of the apple floppy drives and by the fantastic graphic design on the disk sleeves.

I snapped a photo of the disk sleeve and recorded the sounds of the disk drives with my iPhone. I took the disk drive noises and edited them into a ringtone, and set the disk sleeve image as my iPhone home screen background image.

The ringtone begins with the Apple II's boot sequence and then transitions to a repeating sequence of disk head recalibration sounds. If you ever had an Apple II, you'll recognize all of these noises. I installed the ringtone by double-clicking it (which loaded it into iTunes) and then syncing my iPhone to install the ringtone. It was then available in General Preferences > Sounds.

In case anyone else would also like to use this ringtone, I've added it to this post as an attachment. I have also attached the disk sleeve background image.

Download Apple ][ ringtone

Download Apple ][ disk sleeve image

“Shure I2C-MP Stereo Earphones / Headset (iPhone Compatible)” $19.99 at Amazon.com

Additional Note: These may be now be out of stock at Amazon. If so, the link will take you to the same item but likely at a different price, provided by a vendor other than Amazon. The different and likely higher price, and the lack of free shipping if your order hits $25, may be less enticing.

I bought a pair of these earbuds when they were marked down to $40 and have been using them for running. They’re very high-quality earbuds that are cheap enough that I don’t worry about destroying them with sweat or excessive wear and tear. These produce better audio than any earbud or headphone sold for under $50, probably better than any under $90 but I may have lost track of the market a little and am being conservative in my superlatives.

I wrote a little review of the i2c’s the last time they were on sale, gushing over what a great deal they were at double the current price. $19.99 is ridiculously low, I wonder if these have been discontinued? The previous review is worth a read if you’re considering this purchase.

If you do purchase these earbuds, I’d also recommend getting foam sleeves for them as it makes a huge difference in audio quality. The earbuds don’t ship with foam sleeves, but thin silicon sleeves that just hold the earbuds in the ear and provide negligible isolation from ambient sound. There’s also markedly more¹ bass when listening with foam sleeves.

Here are links to a few options for replacement foam sleeves:

• The Shure Black Olive sleeves work well, though it takes a little work to fit them onto the earbuds.².
• A slightly better sounding, but uglier and quicker to wear out set of foams are the Shure orange foam sleeves. They’d probably suck for running as they’d get saturated with sweat and are not easily washable.
• The fancy ‘comply’ viscoelastic foam tips might be the most expensive and highest quality option, I’ve never tried them.

I’ve linked only to the large sizes of all of these foam sleeve options, as I figure the larger they attempt to expand the better seal they’ll make in the ear canal, leading to more sound isolation and better sound. But if you’re not sure you’ll find the large foams comfortable, they’re all also available in medium and small sizes if you poke around those web sites.

1. but not excessive or muddy [↩]
2. The tubes in the black olive sleeves are slightly too narrow to fit, but can be momentarily stretched with a set of mini needlenose pliers just before installation on the earbuds. The tubes then shrink and hold the sleeves very tightly in place, which I think is a positive thing [↩]

Watch or download at higher resolution (1280×720) on the Vimeo website.

My cousin’s band, Saint Motel, performed at Spaceland a couple of nights ago, and at the venue he asked if I wouldn’t mind shooting some of the show. It so happens that I had some equipment with me. I’ve shot many a rock show with a 35mm still camera, but never video. I figured it’d be fun to get some footage, even as a purely educational endeavor.

From this experience, I’ve learned a few important things:

• Bring earplugs, the club won’t always have them.
• The nearby 7-11 probably won’t sell them either, despite being located across the street from a loud music venue.
• Torn napkins kind of function like foam earplugs, without ease-of-use, comfort, or discretion.
• Saint Motel is very good. OK, I already knew this.
• Guitars sound good. I need to learn guitar already. I’m actually looking forward to installing the new iLife ‘09 suite and playing with the learning sessions built into GarageBand.
• The Canon HV20’s lens isn’t really wide enough to get a good shot at a reasonably close distance that includes the whole band.
• Clubs are dark! Life is easier when you can add just a little light by bouncing a flash off the walls or ceiling.
• A Steadicam Merlin if a fun and extremely well designed tool. It is also a bitch to balance, and it was necessary to rebalance it every few minutes –this perhaps because the movement of the tape shifts the balance or because of temperature changes in the camera during use. The HV20 only weighs 1.2lbs, maybe that stabilizer is less fiddly when used with a larger camera. When balanced, the Merlin did a much better job preventing camera shake and vibration than the camera’s built-in optical image stabilization could possibly have done. It didn’t keep me from being jostled around, but it isolated the camera a little.
• Perhaps because the curtains at the back of the stage were brighter than the performers, the HV20 kept focusing on that backdrop. I sometimes switched to manual focus in order to have a level of control, but it’s pretty difficult to dial images in sharply with the tiny servo-linked focus control and small LCD screen. The camera has a helpful ‘focus assist’ mode that zooms into an area of the image and enhances the contrast, but it can only be engaged when not recording.
• The HV20 does not set its audio levels sanely when presented with truly loud noise. I should have set the levels manually. Most of the audio is “burnt”, lots of clipping and distortion.
• Next time I’ll be a little more assertive about moving to exactly where I want to go within the crowd. A shot from stage left would have been nice.

I hope you enjoy the video. Please note that it’s not really edited. It’s just a few highlight clips that represent the energy of the show, jammed together, separated by a deliberately-rough interstitial shot of a mounted deer head with the glowing name of the band tracked in. Fun.

I’m a little behind the times –you’ve all probably seen this already, but I really appreciated this music video. Please note before clicking: as far as music videos go, this one’s on the more violent and disturbing end of the spectrum. And if the imagery doesn’t disturb, you may not find the music easy on the ears, especially if you’re not already keen on the less accessible tracks from France’s Ed Banger Records.

The iconic jackets, the pseudo-documentary feel, the match between the relentless nature of the music and imagery, and the Clockwork-Orange-esque synth notes at the end that may have been the inspiration for the entire video –all resonate for me. It reminds me of the film Man Bites Dog but with no attempt at intelligence, irony, or a point. Just a straightforward and effective cinematic and emotional experience.

There’s a pretty amusing parody of the video available here.

Aesthetically, this clone of an Apple iPod Touch, advertised on Facebook’s China network, looks like the closest match yet, though its dimensions are not listed so it’d be tough to say for sure.

Other notable iPod Touch clones are the Optimus Touch, the Tsinghua Tongfang PMC-V560 (apparently only costs $52), the Portronics/Onda VX858, and the Meizu M7.

Of course, these are all just lookalikes, I’d expect they lack the features that make the iPod Touch so appealing –great multitouch interface, high resolution, robust Unix OS, great email application, great web browser, etc. But it’s amusing to me to watch the number of Chinese iPod Touch clones increase.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, OS X

Until today I hadn’t heard this song for years and it’s just as well. Wow. The super-white band attempts to rock out and do frat-barbecue-ready funky hip-hop, with a guest rapper making annoying interjections and then taking over at the end to jam awkwardly with the sounds of a cheesy organ. Yeeuck.

I’ve been hard at work lately on several projects: A website, some film-related I.T. work, and have started preproduction planning on a music video I’ll be directing. As often happens when I’m engaged in other pursuits, musical themes intrude into my head and I have to go buy them and listen repeatedly . This time it’s the nihilist pop of Ladytron, with a track by Martin Gore on heavy rotation as well:

Song	Album	Artist
Evil	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Seventeen	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Destroy Everything You Touch	Witching Hour	Ladytron
Playgirl	Commodore Rock	Ladytron
The Reason Why	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Discotraxx	604	Ladytron
Compulsion	Counterfeit [EP]	Martin Gore

If you think these tracks are easy to find in Beijing, you should by rights be wrong. However, almost as quickly as the songs popped into my head, I ran into people who had all of these albums.

This playlist could be entitled “music for not smiling”. Despite the inhumanly mechanical musical textures, this kind of music often broadcasts more emotional content to me than songs with more inflected and showy vocal and instrumental stylings. These and other musical artists of today should be commended for confusing the historian bots of the future, who will likely one day uncover these albums and have huge debates lasting milliseconds over whether or not the tracks were released before or after all humans died out and were replaced by robots.

Some guy actually listened to the early 90’s song Informer, by Snow, for six hours non-stop. I know I’m a year late in passing along my appreciation, but wow. This man’s one act undoubtedly caused a rupture in the space-time continuum.

For those of you who don’t remember the song, it’s a sort of gangland anthem sung in an impenetrable and speedy Jamaican patois by a Canadian white guy whose name is not really Snow. I think the only word I can understand in the entire song is “Informer”, everything else is an interestingly syncopated blur. The song was pretty catchy back in the day, and was #1 for a while on some chart, but now people remember it as an oddity if at all.

There’s a reason I just now remembered the existence of this song and did the net searching that led to discovery of the 2005 Snow marathon, and it’s not that I’m just trying to distract myself from thinking about the fun I’m going to have going through airport security on Monday for my trip to the U.S. The real reason is that a good friend stopped by Beijing for a visit. He hooked his iPod up to my stereo, and in rotation along with a bunch of forgotten songs from the 80s and 90s was Informer. We listened to it once, which was pleasant, but I can’t imagine what 6 hours of Informer could do to a person. (Don’t remember the song? You can hear a clip at iTunes, or Amazon)