55 posts tagged “music”

I think I'd like to keep making Muxtapes every now and then. Here's my first one, which I made on a challenge from Jules. I have another one ready to upload but I'll wait a couple of days.

So I looked at the Information Aesthetics post about graphing out one's music listening history from last.fm. It's pretty neat, but of the two tools available for drawing these kinds of graphs, one is for Windows and the web-based one has been processing my data for like four days so far.

Music history clip

I couldn't find bass tabs for this song, so I tried to learn it by myself. For reasons I don't understand, I became able to kind of figure out songs by trial and error. It's probably pretty wrong, so if you know the right way to do any of these parts, please let me know. 

I keep coming back to this as one of the greatest musical performances I've seen.

A mysterious package arrived at my home today. When I opened it up, it was the free copy of the Snakes & Arrows DVD version that Musictoday promised me after I had to deal with their awful concert ticket purchasing site. I hadn’t heard anything about it in over a month, and this version came out back on June 5, so I’d just assumed that they never sent it. But there it was. I guess I shouldn’t complain about getting my free stuff late.



The app you use to browse the contents of the disc is industrial waste. It took long enough to launch that I was worried it would never fully open. Of course, it has an interface reminiscent of the mid-90’s “Enhanced CDs” that were supposed to change the way we experience music, but instead just made us embarrassed that someone obviously spent lot of time and energy to make something so unimpressive. The performance was bad enough to make my one-year-old MacBook stutter the video more than once per second.

And, as a final stab, the “create your own ringtone” feature as advertised on the package:

• It is, for some reason, a separate Flash app.
• It makes you scroll through a list of hundreds of cell phone models to find yours.
• Once you choose a phone and a song, it gives you this completely fake waveform graphic for finding the segment of the song you want.
• Once you have chosen your song segment, you are expected to click the BUY MY RINGTONE button. Isn’t it grand that if you pay the extra money to get the awesome, ultimate version of an album, you are blessed with the opportunity to pay for the music again in another form? Thankfully I know how to open Bluetooth File Exchange and move an mp3 file I already own onto my phone for free.

This would all bother me a lot more, but! Someone smart made it so that, if you dig around the folders on the disc, you can get at all of the content without launching the awful custom interface. All of the photos, desktops, icons, music, and videos are sitting there as sensible files you can drop onto the apps of your choice. That common-sense feature makes it all worthwhile.

As good as clammbon’s studio albums are, their live performances seem to be on an entirely different level: the word that keeps coming to mind as I watch or listen to their concerts is chemistry. Each member of the band, the music itself, and the audience are involved in a big, profuse positive-feedback loop that precipitates happiness.

3 peace ~live at 百年蔵~

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It’s not common for a non-comedy music album to make me laugh out loud while I listen to it. But the way the members of the band and the audience crack each other up makes me want to laugh along with them. At the beginning of “Gaishutsu-chuu”:

Mito starts making weird, rhythmic mouth noises that aren’t in the studio version

Ikuko: “Wait a second…!?”

Mito: “Uh, I was trying to sound kind of hip-hop, but it ended up sounding like a male adult-video actor…”

Audience member: “I wouldn’t want to see an adult video like that!”

Everyone laughs

This all happens during the song. Several audience members call out jokes, comments, and exclamations during and between the songs. One guy in particular quite annoyed me for a while, until I realized that the band was dealing with him in the most graceful way possible: not darkening the atmosphere of the show by complaining, but playing along, dubbing him the voice of God, and telling their own jokes back at him.

The show is a record of how close and friendly the band is with their fans. Through the antics in their music videos, their encouragement of tape-trading, the tone of their live shows, even the whimsical designs of their album packages, the band has always been saying, hey, let’s be friends.

3peace at c-b e-b

When I first heard that the next clammbon album was going to be comprised of covers, I was a little disappointed. I had been hoping for some new original material. But I faithfully ordered it and waited for it to arrive. When I started listening to it, it was the middle of summer 2006 and I had just moved to a new apartment closer to work, so I was having a couple of nice walks through the city every day.

So, this album will always summon up images of summer in Seattle. It turned out to be nearly as satisfying as a real new clammbon album; some of the songs like “Summer Nude” by Magokoro Brothers and “Kahlua Milk” by Okamura Yasuyuki have really stuck with me strongly. And so far, the album has helped me discover at least one excellent band, Magokoro Brothers, to listen to.

LOVER ALBUM

Clammbon

Also, you can’t beat that album art. :D

When this album came out, I was living in Seattle, getting used to my new job. I checked with the folks at the local Kinokuniya about whether they’d have the album, and they said they would. Moving to Seattle meant having physical access to stores where I could buy the music, comics, and video games I’d come to love in Tokyo. It’s nice to be able to walk the aisles, looking at what’s new and popular right now. At the same time, the atmosphere is just a facsimile of the various nichey shops that I frequented in Japan, so it’s kind of like trying to sate an appetite for sushi by buying a prewrapped box at the grocery store.

Anyway, the Kinokuniya turned out to be lying; they weren’t getting the CD in stock. So I went on iChat and talked to my roommate from when I lived in Nakano: “Can you pick up a CD for me?” Half an hour later, he came back online, “got it.” I wanted to ask him to rip the CD and send me the files, but he’d done enough for me already. I had to wait.

「てん、」

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If you add up listens between the two differently-mastered discs, this is strongly my most-listened-to album of the past three years. The music is even more experimental, the lyrics are even more introspective, and the execution is even more direct and unrefined. The subtlety is there, but the main message is right out front: We want to rock out together. We want to emit positivity. We want to hold on to our impressions and memories.

Here’s ten, at my site.