New Website!
I’ve moved this blog over to its own domain: http://www.thegreatestconversation.com. Please check it out and update your RSS feeds, because I wont be updating here anymore. Thanks for reading.
Bicycle Owners’ Manuals Used To Be Good
A beautiful owners’ manual from an old Raleigh. The information in it is actually good too, unlike modern bike owners’ manuals. More photos after the jump. (more…)
Links
{Photo is a beginning of the roll accident from Montreal last year}
The guy who runs Moonscape is a friend of a friend. He has great taste in music and apparently he’s “really into pirating,” so the site is a really good resource for full albums.
If you live in Victoria and are into drum and bass, my friends Greenlaw are having a CD release party on December 4th at Lucky Bar and you should go. Vid of their latest single/mix here. Tickets are $8 I think.
Just in case you haven’t heard about the new Yeasayer album, Odd Blood, its coming out February 2010. They’ve done some really cool 360° interactive videos and their new single is available for free HERE. Oh yeah there are boobs and peens in those videos, so don’t watch them with your grandmum. I’ve always thought Yeasayer might be a band that will survive the exploitation and subsequent abandonment of its genre; they write really good shit.
Defgrip‘s Harrison Boyce put up some great photos of Dave Emmens and David Lang on his blog a while back. Random.
Hurrah For Little Cameras
A quick video of things I’ve been up to these days, like destroying my camera and falling in the ocean. Also, sorry for the lack of music updates. I have a giant folder of tracks I’m loving and want to share with you, but I’m too busy to write anything coherent about them at the moment.
Sausage Links 2
Again, fun things from the internets:
I’m glad I’m not the only person who was bummed about Little Boots’ new sound. Maybe this signals the end of the honeymoon for me and synths.
Dutty Arts posted a great song by Washington Phillips, a 1920s gospel singer. I love the sound of whatever the instrumentation is, very cool. There is a great looking release called Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music (1924 – 1940) and Photography (1890 – 1950) that features some of Phillips’ music. I want. Also, I tried my hand at cleaning up that Phillips track; download here if you like. Sorry about some of the artifacts, but I like it better than the original anyway.
The BBC has this annoying habit of taking down their content, but they’ve had two great programs on recently. The radio show The Great Bleep Forward, and the TV documentary Synth Britannia are both interesting looks at electronic music and very worth trying to find through legally ambiguous means on the internet. (via Wire to the Ear)
When Flying Lotus has a birthday jam, you know it’s going to be good; or, as he described it, “surrealism, structured to bug-out and back.” The jam is a really fucking cool mix of electronic and traditional instruments, and thank god they recorded it: listen here. This is what I want my jams to be like. (via David Lang)
A Pretty Bicycle
Today I built a pretty bicycle at work; figured I’d share it on here as well. The customer was a really nice girl who wanted a pretty, functional all-weather bike and basically told us to do whatever we thought was best for her. I think it turned out really well. EDIT: I guess I should also say that it’s a Soma Buena Vista Mixte frame, with a Nexus 8 speed internal hub.
Nokon cable housing to solve a difficult routing. In the interest of clean lines we decided not to run full housing for the Nexus hub.
Volume From the Brits
First off, the picture has nothing to do with anything; I couldn’t find a Brian Eno or Guy Harvey shot I liked. It is by Vitas Luckus, one of my favourite photographers. His book is out of print I think but goes for dirt cheap used these days. Highly recommended. But, I digress; listen to some music.
Brian Eno’s music is often pretentious. Still, I love his work when he writes pop. This song is pretty cheesy when it’s quiet, but really fucking good when you have headphones on late at night and it’s loud. The production on it is amazing, which isn’t surprising; what is surprising is what he’s chosen to do with that production. The whole album, Another Day On Earth, sounds like arse on my computer/iPod/car stereo, but through proper speakers, when everything is coming through, it’s amazing. The heartbeat sub bass with that amazing piano line over it (2:02-2:25) is perfect.
Changing gears, this is what rock and roll should be. I’ve rediscovered this album a few times this year, and I never get tired of the guitar sound on this song. Great lyrics too. Their liner notes say that there is little to no compression on this album. That means that the album—called The Seldom Seen Kid— is going to suffer if you’re playing it through your shitty iPod speakers too. Still, the production on this is a little more accessible than Eno.
{Audio may not play in some RSS feeds, visit site instead}
Sausage Lynx
Take that title how you will. Here’s some cool shit from the interwebs.
1. Waxy has an amazing analysis of a few Beatles multitracks. Via the Listenerd.
2. The Tequila Mockingbird Orchestra is a local gypsy/folk band that just sent over a link to a video of them recording. Also I think the bass player is naked.
3. To promote their Chipsounds softsynth (which sounds fucking awesome), Plogue put together an EP of chipsounds music. Some of the tunes are great, some of them not so much, but it is all fun, and they released the album for free so I’m all for it. Get it here.
4. On a totally non-music note, Riley McMaster has largely taken over Gnarwhale.com, and since he has it has gotten so much better than when Andy and I ran it. There are a ton of new edits and other content; go see!
Mona Monella
I saw this clip a while back and it has everything that the internet thrives on: a hot girl, cow shit, and priests sniffing a bike seat. It also has a ridiculously fun song; I’ve been trying to find a version of the song that hasn’t been ripped from the film, but haven’t managed it. Anyone out there have it? It is actually sung by the girl in the film, Anna Ammirati, and it’s catchy as fuck.
PS. A sniffer of bicycle seats is a snurge, making the act itself snurgery.
The Žižek Experience
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian theoretical psychoanalyst, Marxist political thinker, film theorist, and cultural critic; he is also batshit crazy in the best of ways. My brother introduced me to him, and ever since I’ve been oddly fascinated. I stumbled onto an excerpt of his on the very odd Turn On The Lights blog, and I think it is a good introduction to the strangeness that is Žižek:
Let us recall the example of a (’straight’) sexual relationship. The success of Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape indicates that sex with an animal is today’s predominant form of fantasy of full sexual relationships, and it is crucial that this animal is as a rule male: in contrast to cyborg-sex fantasy, in which the cyborg is, as a rule, a woman (Blade Runner) – that is, in which the fantasy is that of a Woman-Machine – the animal is a male ape copulating with a human woman, and fully satisfying her. Does this not materialize two standard common daydreams: that of a woman who wants a strong animal partner, a potent ‘beast’, not a hysterical impotent weakling; and that of a man who wants his female partner to be a perfectly programmed ‘doll’ who fulfils all his wishes, not a living being? What we should do in order to penetrate the underlying ‘fundamental fantasy’ is to stage these two fantasies together: to confront ourselves with the unbearable ideal couple of a male ape copulating with a female cyborg, the fantasmic support of the ‘normal’ couple of man and woman copulating. The need for this redoubling, the need for this fantasmic supplement to accompany the ’straight’ sexual act as a spectral shadow, is yet another proof that ‘there is no sexual relationship’.
(Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? p. 59-60)
Now, what does that have to do with my blog? Very little, but I have a sound experiment for you to try. Žižek has a speech impediment that may or may not be intentional, but anyway it is hypnotic and almost soothing; I suggest you get relaxed (pot or scotch), and press play on both the video and the audio below. Adjust the volume ’till it sounds right; stop trying to understand the words, and just listen to Žižek as an auditory anomaly. Fuck you, do it.
Okay fine, if you aren’t going to do it, at least listen to Keith Jarrett’s Last Night When We Were Young/Caribbean Sky from the album Tokyo ’96. It’ll do you good.
1 comment