The best thing you'll see all day is this video of Alex Koll, San Francisco's Regional US Air Guitar champion. He's headed to the nationals.
Best quote: "I play no instruments besides air guitar."
Oh, and while the video's good, it's rivaled by the front page of today's Chronicle Datebook section, which has an oversized, annotated photo of Koll doing his thing. Thinking of cutting it out and taping it up on my office wall.
How great would it be to play with the Skittle-based beat sequencer with the kids? How better to teach them about the near infinite glories of what you can do with sixteenth notes and 4/4 time than with a bunch of colorful candies. Make a beat, eat the beat. Yum. (Via Waxy, of course.)
(But you know, come to think of it, a simple sequencer like this would be a great iPhone app, even if you can't eat the Skittles after making your beat. Instead, you could share them online. iPhone as drum machine. See, I knew I had to have an iPhone 2.0 reference today somewhere...)
If you're a classical music fan, about this time every year you're probably jonesing for a trip to the Aspen Music Festival. I was lucky enough to be there for a weekend several years back, and the combination of the setting, the students and the stars turn it into something really special. (My sister is lucky enough to be there all year round, since she works for the festival as an admissions officer.)
Though it's not the same as being there, this year they're streaming a slew of concerts from this week's slate on medici.tv, which is a beautiful site from Medici Arts that offers a program of high quality video of concerts from around the world. Definitely worth checking out.
Liz Phair's made a new documentary about her 1993 landmark "Exile in Guyville," timed with a reissue of the album. New York Mag's Vulture has a great interview with her, and as the father of two daughters whom I'm doing my best to raise as strong, vocal and opinionated young girls (and me arguably being one of those "guys") I absolutely loved this particular bit...
It was interesting to learn from the documentary that you were pretty surrounded by guys on the making of Exile.
I really was in Guyville. When I went back to the documentary, the one unifying thing with the guys is, they all talk a really long time, and then I get a tiny little word in edgewise. They were all like, "This is what's good," "This is what you should like," and I was like, [sing-songy] "fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you."
The documentary's bundled with the CD version of the reissue -- you can pick it up at Amazon and other fine retailers, I assume.
Andrew Bird has a great post in the Times today about the process of recording music. It's a great look into the thousands of little decisions that go into making a great record...
We discuss a lot of things to help us get the songs just right — like not hitting cymbals because the crashes can be "cheap thrills." Instead we favored the dark, walloping sound of the toms. Often times the choice becomes: Do you give the song what it wants? Or do you go against its demands? "Oh No" seemed to be asking for a 1970s Jackson Brown or Fleetwood Mac type of dead snare drum sound. That "everything’s gonna be just fine" sort of beat. The pitfall of approaching it like this is that your song can get hijacked by someone else’s record collection. I personally feel that the world has had its fill of 70s light rock. So we’re forced to be more creative.
The post is a great reminder that everything you hear that comes out of a studio is the result of thousands of little decisions that build on top of one another. And that when the technology affords you the ability to do anything you want, you need a strong vision and sense of purpose to guide what you're doing.
I am an unabashed Jeremy Denk fan. Denk is an amazing classical pianist, but his blog, think denk, is brilliant. He posts reasonably frequent (but not too frequent), reasonably longish (but just long enough) items on music, travel, literature, performing, passion, Q tips and credit card offers. His post today is quite something; it will suck you in with its delicious title, "Betraying Bacon and Boating," distract you with a tale of an airport baggage carousel and then knock you sideways with a venture into Chopin's Barcarolle. Here's some of it, worth quoting at length...
The Barcarolle could be, if you like, a kind of essay in motion, in different kinds of motion (gliding, lilting motion...) Now, the speed of motion is expressed as the ratio of two different entities
distance / time
...so, one way to mix things up, to vary the speed (the normal way) is to increase the distance you travel per unit of time; but the other way (the freaky way) to get at speed of motion is to call into question the very existence of time itself, to try to alter or erode the parcelling of units, seconds, beats. When Chopin steps into this transition, into the ascetic single line, one feels the sudden shiver of a lack ... This shiver contains, I think, some sort of hidden imperative ... it is as though he shushes you, tells you to wait ... And then, by sticking to just the one voice (after all those luxurious voices) Chopin compels your continued attention; he continues to ask you to wait; he compels you to continue subtracting each moment, each note added to this chain, from the passage of Time, proper; he wants you to keep regarding each note as special, as suspended, as not-time, a process which extends not-time like a rubber band. Chopin says: each note that I add onto this chain I want you to subtract from time, and I want you, I expect you, to return to time only when I am done.
Go read the whole thing. Trust me on this one.
This one's for Ted Mico, who needs more music marketing and promotion on the Internet like he needs a hole in his head, Mark Paschal's guide to how to get him to buy your album. And to make it simple for Ted, Mark's laid out the easy method, the hard method, and the anti-method.
Via VSL, which means you're free to shout "Seen it!" with the best of them.
Fluxblog, my favorite music blog of the year, on Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, which has been in heavy rotation in our house since release: "Most of the worst reviews for the record glibly dismissed the music as 'dad rock,' which is sort of aggravating because I think that the epithet accidentally touches on the stoicism and maturity that is key to the record's appeal, but favors a kneejerk appreciation of less emotionally (or musically) complicated music."
I had the pleasure last night of seeing Glenn Kotche and the Kronos Quartet perform Kotche's new piece, Anomaly. Kotche's description of the piece in the liner notes is worth quoting at length.
After seeing a Kronos Quartet performance in early 2006, I got the idea to compose a string quartet. I wanted to do it from my perspective as a percussionist, treating the four members of the quartet like the varying relationships and roles of my limbs when I play the drum set. I also thought it would be interesting to arrange it with the addition of an optional drum set part. ...
My closest uncle, Eddie Kotche, died around the time of that Kronos performance. I went home and improvised a short melody on the vibraphone. This would become the dominant, recurring theme in what would eventually be titled Anomaly. ...
My uncle was an anomaly. He had an incredible zest for life and an uproarious sense of humor despite being severely challenged throughout his life by cerebral palsy. ... After losing him, I began to think about my reliance on physical motion and coordination for my self-expression and livelihood, and about the dichotomy between our physical circumstances. ...
Although the origins of Anomaly are deeply personal...I wrote the piece to be broad in its emotional range and appeal. ... I wanted the individual instruments to experience both freedom and restriction. I wanted Kronos to be dependent on each other for the execution of certain melodies and musical passages. The main motif that appears in each movement is, for me, symbolic of the love and experience that those dear to us leave behind. ...
As the first piece I've composed outside of the realm of percussion, it is for me also an anomaly.
If you're in SF, there is another performance tonight at Herbst Theater. If you're into this sort of thing, check out Kotche's album Mobile, on the Nonesuch label. And for those looking for context, I've posted about Kotche before, in his role as the drummer for the band Wilco.
