Chess

A huge post about the musical Chess, one of my favorite musical albums. [Link]

CHESS MOVES [27m14s] was a 1985 VHS release hosted by Sir Tim Rice comprising of the five music videos made to promote the 1984 album Chess. The individual videos are One Night In Bangkok (Murray Head), Nobody's Side (Elaine Paige), The Arbiter (Björn Skifs), I Know Him So Well (Elaine Paige & Barbara Dickson), and Pity The Child (Murray Head).

Chess was originally released as a double concept album as part of development of a musical, much like Jesus Christ Superstar or Evita. Created by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (the songwriting team behind ABBA) and Tim Rice (Andrew Lloyd Webber's former creative partner), it laid out a Cold War story of human relationships and political maneuvering surrounding two world chess championship matches. The album spawned hit songs -- One Night In Bangkok and I Know Him So Well (which was the highest selling single in the UK in 1984) -- and was a global smash which set the stage for a London West End theater run.

Chess, featuring Murray Head, Elaine Paige, Tommy Körberg, Barbara Dickson, Denis Quilley, Björn Skifs, the London Symphony Orchestra, and The Ambrosian Singers [some tracks may be blocked in some countries]:

Merano
The Russian And Molokov / Where I Want To Be
Opening Ceremony
Quartet (A Model Of Decorum And Tranquility)
The American And Florence / Nobody's Side
Chess
Mountain Duet
Florence Quits
Embassy Lament
Anthem
Bangkok / One Night In Bangkok
Heaven Help My Heart
Argument
I Know Him So Well
The Deal (No Deal)
Pity The Child
Endgame
Epilogue: You And I / The Story Of Chess / You And I (Reprise)

Ukulele Shaft

Right on.

Classic British Electron Synthesizer

The Oramics. [Link]

So there Dr. Mick Grierson was, wandering around a French barn, minding his own business when all of a sudden he happened upon an antique: one of the earliest modern synthesizers. Grierson, a professor at Goldsmiths University in London did what any expert in the field of electronic music would do, and whisked it back to the motherland for restoration. The Oram "Oramics" Synthesiser (sic) was built by Daphne Oram in 1957, a year before she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to research and develop electronic music. 

Oramics from Nick Street on Vimeo.

iTunes Genius playlists now working for recent releases

Updating this post here. I tried to make a genius playlist yesterday on my iPhone for songs that were not working previously. All previous failures now produce playlists.

iTunes Genius playlists not working for songs released after April 2010?

This is weird. After reading the article comparing Google's Instant Mix to iTunes Genius to a third I've never heard of (the article author works there), I decided to try the playlist feature again after not using it for quite a while. I followed along with the article, generating playlists for specific songs I had, but other songs didn't seem to produce a list whether they were obscure or popular.
Looking online, I found this discussion on Apple's forums and the consensus among these users is that Genius playlists stopped working for any song released after April 2010.

I tried the following songs that did not produce playlists:

• Come Together, Abbey Road, Beatles - Released on iTunes November 2010
• Perform This Way, Weird Al Yankovic - Released April 2011
• Black Sheep, Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, Metric - Released August 2010

Then I tried these that did produce playlists:

• Bad Romance, Lady GaGa - Released October 2009
• Crossroads, 2NU, This is Ponderous - Sometime in the 90's
• CNR, Weird Al Yankovic - August 2009

The common explanation for not producing a Genius playlist is that the song is too obscure or has not been included in other people's playlists. I don't think that's the case. I find it hard to believe that Come Together is in fewer playlists than Crossroads.

From the Apple discussion previously referenced:

I called Apple Support about it and got escalated one step up the chain.  The guy explained that genius works on a combination of local and global information, local being information from my computer, and it needs local information before it can make a playlist.  I asked him if that meant that genius could work for someone else, but not for me, on the same song, and he said yes.  He said I need to just keep playing the songs and updating genius.  Well I bought the Arcade Fire and The National shortly after release and have played them close to 40 times each, and have now even made special playlists to try to train my iTunes to know what I think goes with these songs.  I just can't believe there's not enough local or global information to make a genius playlist with these songs.  It doesn't explain why a song used to work but no longer does.  Plus the suggestion that I need local data before genius will work is not correct.  I just bought Jailbird by Primal Scream (a 1994 release) and before playing it I updated genius.  It then created a genius playlist just fine, despite it never having been played locally. 

Genius playlists are a good feature that need to be fixed.

Disco Inferno

Disco version of Sweeny Todd



Disco version of Alien theme.



Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind



Disco version of The Black Hole



KOTO - PLAYS SCIENCE-FICTION MOVIE THEMES Megamix



I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper (Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip)



Doctor Who Theme - Disco Version (Ron Granier)



Disco Battlestar Galactica album [Link]

Economic Rapping

Keynes vs Hayek Round 2

Heavy Metal Band Taxonomy

Covers all the bases. [Link]

The Sound of pi

The Sound of π [Link]

The end of car CD players

So soon after the end of the cassette player? [Link]

In what's likely to be the first stage of a drawn-out phase-out, Ford will stop selling CD changers for its vehicles at the end of the 2011 model year, and it's suggesting the single-slot CD player will follow. It's a sign of rapid changes in the in-car entertainment world, changes that are particularly swift at Ford, which is jumping on the connected bandwagon with vehicles like the 2011 Lincoln MKX.

As the whole music industry shifts from "hard" digital delivery to "soft" delivery through networks like iTunes and Pandora and less legitimate outlets, automakers are faced with a choice--to adapt audio systems and to put portable players foremost in their product plans, or to deal with the legacy formats like CDs in other ways to hang on to more Luddite users.

In many ways, it's shaping up exactly as did the end of the car cassette player, which Ford dropped from most cars by 2005. A group of potential buyers don't want to abandon significant, expensive music libraries. On the other hand,playlists are the new mix tapes, and the world has clearly moved on from CDs, as it did with tape and vinyl.

There's incentive to move away from CDs quickly. As with cassettes, eliminating CD players from the standard-equipment list will save money and build complexity for automakers. But even more importantly, the move will free up space on the middle of the dash-- "Manhattan real estate," according to Ford'sdirector of electronics engineering, Jim Buczkowski--in favor of more expressive styling and for other features, like larger LCD screens.

Fringe:Seven Suns - Violet Sedan Chair

This is neat. The producers of Fringe made an album, Seven Suns by Violet Sedan Chair that is Walter Bishop's favorite band and seeded it in used record stores around the country. It apparently has some clues about the show's mysteries. It's also pretty listenable. [Link]

Fringe co-creator J.J. Abrams first name-checked faux band Violet Sedan Chair in Wired magazine nearly two years ago.

In the issue, which Abrams guest-edited, an article titled “Musical Mystery Tour: Messages Embedded in Your Favorite Album” listed Violet Sedan Chair’s recording Seven Suns and said the mythical album contained a song “rumored to produce hallucinatory effects when played on multiple turntables.”

The long-gestating viral prank pays off Friday when Fringe returns for its midseason premiere. In the episode, Christopher Lloyd plays Roscoe Joyce, Violet Sedan Chair’s keyboard player, who was once idolized by the sci-fi series’ guilt-ridden mad scientist, Walter Bishop (played by John Noble).

When word leaked earlier this month that LP copies of Seven Suns would soon be popping up in indie record stores, the Fringe faithful began combing through vintage-vinyl outlets in search of the album. This week, Kiki Kane discovered a copy of Seven Suns, pictured in the gallery above, in the used-vinyl section of Seattle’s Easy Street Records.

You can listen to the album here:
Violet Sedan Chair Seven Suns Side One
Violet Sedan Chair Seven Suns Side Two

Smooth Criminal

Mixed Emotions

Pro: Cake's new album is number one.
Con: It got there by selling the least of any other number one record. [Link]

The year is off to a rotten start for the music industry, with the new No. 1 album setting a new record for the smallest sales total.

Alternative rock band Cake debuted at No. 1 for the first time in its career after selling just 44,000 copies of its new album "Showroom of Compassion" during the week ended January 16, according to Nielsen SoundScan data issued Wednesday.

It's the smallest week for a No. 1 album since the tracking firm began recording point-of-sales data in 1991, and beats a record set only last week when Taylor Swift's hit album "Speak Now" led the field with 52,000 units in its 11th week of release.

Violet Sedan Chair on Fringe

The producers of Fringe seeded vinyl records of a fictional band, Violet Sedan Chair in record stores across the country. [Link]

The next episode of Fringe, airing Jan. 21, features Walter meeting his musical idol, Roscoe Joyce, who was the keyboard player in the 1970s band Violet Sedan Chair. (And he's played by Christopher Lloyd.) To tie in with the episode, the show's producers created an actual vinyl album by Violet Sedan Chair called "Seven Suns," and shipped copies to record stores around the country. (And now we're dying to hear what this thing sounds like!) Apparently the records have been sitting in stores for a couple of months already.

But each copy of the record is unique, containing its own set of clues and spoilers about the show hidden in the lyrics and liner notes, and possibly elsewhere.

Related video



Related Blog post. [Link]

I think it says this:

"I guess somehow through playing the keyboard you can tell that I had a great voice even though we never heard it, so i went for about a year and people would ask what are you gonna play for us and my my my favorite track on the record was violets slow vibrations because it dealt with topics that were real..."

That's what me and my cousin got out of it.  Also check out the rest of MIKELEEPSYCHS videos.  they were all loaded after this one and they are all kinda strange.  See if it is anything.  

Awesomeness.

Wired has a reference as well. [Link]

1971   The liner notes on Violet Sedan Chair's albumSeven Suns list a missing 11th song, and the penultimate track is rumored to produce hallucinatory effects when played on multiple turntables.

Best Fictional Bands

Daft Punk's helmets

A visual history of their helmets. [Link]

I've liked them for years with Technologic, One More Time, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, and now the Tron: Legacy soundtrack.

The Wall Live

We went to see The Wall Live. Awesome.

Pictures

It may not make you happy, but it will make you feel better

Handling money. [Link]

Money can't buy you love, happiness or even respect. Cash, however, might provide some relief from pain.

In a series of experiments, people who counted money felt less pain when their hands were dipped into scalding water. The soothing power of cash also helped them shrug off the emotional pain of social exclusion.

The findings might offer an easy way to ease life's stings and hurts, from painful medical treatments to social ostracism: Simply flip through a bulging wallet before enduring a painful experience.

"When people are reminded of money in a subtle manner by counting out hard currency, they experience painful situations as being not very painful," said lead author Kathleen Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the University of Minnesota's Carleton School of Management in the Twin Cities.

Cyborg Composer

Fascinating article on computer composed music and how people react to that. [Link]

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.

This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,” the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.

He is the Taxman

Be happy he doesn't tax it all.