I attempted to encode a movie from the European format PAL to our NTSC, using an elaborate work-around in Final Cut. For some reason, after 12 or so hours of chewing on the file, the audio came out cut up and loopy.
The movie was The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, with Slovene philosopher and writer Slavoj Žižek. It’s a great movie about the collective dream factory we call cinema that is sadly available in the US (Do you hear that, Netflix?)
What’s cool with the loopy audio is that it repeats the words Pervert and Desires at regular intervals. I didn’t do any editing of the audio or otherwise treat it with effects. I only removed one silent bit where Final Cut choked during playback into the recording software.
Pep EP7 (Can. Mint) 1992 Betti-Cola (Can. Mint) 1993 Hot Dog Day EP7 (Can. Mint) 1993 Come Out Come Out (Can. Mint) 1994 Box of Hair (Mint/Lookout!) 1996
Cub formed in ‘92 in Vancouver, just across the Canadian border from the gravitational pull of Olympia, Washington’s K Records/Beat Happening scene, and first appeared on a pair of pleasingly amateurish six-song 7-inchers. Genial, sweet, simple and sturdy enough to rock away the coyness that could ruin guitar-pop tunes like “A Party” and “My Chinchilla,” the self-declared cuddlecore trio proves that cute can be differentiated from cutesy. (…) Read whole entry.
Since 1974, Trouser Press has been covering the Other Music beat and currently resides on the web at www.trouserpress.com
I will be posting a random link from Trouser Press on every Tuesday until I just flat out forget.
I just got around to watching The Future is Unwritten and remembered how much I appreciated Joe Strummer’s music and cultural/political outlook throughout the years. He was the person – via The Clash – that made me aware of the world at large and what was going on in it as a teenager. I probably wouldn’t have known anything about what was going on in Central America if I didn’t become obsessed with the album Sandinista! after my Mom bought it for me for Christmas one year (I begged her, thinking she’d take one look at the cover and buy something safer instead. Thanks, Mom!). I wanted to know what the songs and liner notes were about and it led me down the garden-path to leftist politics, at the tender age of sixteen or so. Take that, Tipper Gore!
It was a punch to the gut when he died. Even though I hadn’t followed his latest musical projects that closely, I became a fan of his radio stints, where he would offer these free-wheeling excursions into music from all over the world. It made it obvious that despite his aspirations to rock stardom in The Clash, he simply loved music and its ability to give voice to people and their struggles the world over. It made some of his global hodge-podges on Clash records and subsequent bands – some more successful than others – make much more sense. He saw music as a unifying force and the people’s megaphone for change.
Enough sermonizing…
Here’s an open dex of his BBC radio show London Calling, reprised in 2007 with intros and outros mentioning the five year anniversary of his passing. These shows are great. Joe plays music from all over the world and across timelines. They’re rather brief, but he talks about why the songs matter to us.
A mix of speakers on the economy and its supposed recovery.
What’s to come? Will the economy recover under the Obama adminstration and it’ll be back to normal again? Will we be free to use our home equity to leverage essential purchases like Wave-Runners and 100 inch televisions? Or will it lead to economic chaos and – hopefully – small, local cooperative economic systems?
We hear Douglas Rushkoff on capital and where it came from and maybe where it’s going. We hear Socialist professor Mike Davis speaking on Obama being called a socialist by the mainstream punditry and – of course – MIT Professor Noam Chomsky in a freeform mix-down. Spend twice as much, get half as much.
We also heard some John Zorn, some new material from No Soap Radio’s Jim Larrance, learn more about beef and bacon than we need to and we pay homage to Satan with Camille Sauvage and Anton LaVey.
First up, from 5pm to 7pm (PST), I am streaming from WSU’sKOUG.
Stream available here (RealPlayer, VLC).
Unfortunately snafu’d. Maybe next week.
Then, at 10pm (PST), I will be on KBOO (90.7 FM in Portland and on the web at kboo.fm/listen ) for two hours, spinning strange sounds for night owls and insomniacs.
SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS
Voodoo Beach Party EP7 (Lloyd Street) 1985
Southern Culture on the Skids (Lloyd Street) 1985
Too Much Pork for Just One Fork (Moist) 1991
For Lovers Only (Safe House) 1992
Santo! Sings EP7 (Zontar) 1992
Peckin’ Party EP (Feedbag) 1993
Girlfight EP10 (Sympathy for the Record Industry) 1993
Ditch Diggin’ (Safe House) 1994
Dirt Track Date (DGC) 1995 (Telstar) 1995
Santo Swings/Viva Del Santo EP (Estrus) 1996
Girlfight EP (Sympathy for the Record Industry) 1996
Plastic Seat Sweat (DGC) 1997
Zombified (Aus. Monkey Dog Music) 1999
Liquored Up and Lacquered Down (TVT) 2000
Mojo Box (Yep Roc) 2004
Doublewide and Live (Yep Roc) 2006
Since 1985, Chapel Hill singer/guitarist Rick Miller has been leading his merry band of North Carolina trash merchants, dressing up in hillbilly threads but playing bugeyed rock’n'roll, instrumentals, R&B and country swill with a lurid sense of humor, abundant skill and true historical dedication. The trio takes a loose and evidently well-meant minstrel-like approach to its Appalachian heritage, walking a strange line between the poles of taunting and exploiting a widely disrespected people. Southern Culture on the Skids’ records do neither, but simply take what they know and bend it into a cheerful caricature of a colorful personality.
As Rights Clash on YouTube, Some Music Vanishes
In early December, Juliet Weybret, a high school sophomore and aspiring rock star from Lodi, Calif., recorded a video of herself playing the piano and singing “Winter Wonderland,” and she posted it on YouTube.
Weeks later, she received an e-mail message from YouTube: her video was being removed “as a result of a third-party notification by the Warner Music Group,” which owns the copyright to the Christmas carol.
Hers is not an isolated case.. Countless other amateurs have been ensnared in a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube, which is owned by Google.
The conflict centers on how much Warner should be paid for the use of its copyrighted works — its music videos — but has grown to include other material produced by amateurs that may also run afoul of copyright law.
“Thousands of videos disappeared,” said Fred von Lohmann, staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group that asked affected YouTube users to contact it.
“Either they turned off the audio, or they pulled the video.”
A spokesman for Warner Music said that YouTube’s system for identifying copyrighted material does not distinguish between professionally made music videos and amateur material that may include
copyrighted works.
Like a bad horror movie franchise, the saga of my undying iPod chugs along…
…Turns out a new hard drive was relatively cheap and I had the patience and means to do it myself.
So now, I am randomly shuffling weird music on the go again. It’s nice too, as the selections on it before the final meltdown were getting somewhat stagnant.
Nice to have it back, even though not having it forced me to explore my physical music library in a deeper manner than I had been lately.
My first of what’s planned to be my weekly slot on WSU’s The KOUG.
No real planned show. I simply played some things that have been on my player and in my head this week. Seemed to play a few things from around 1980 or so.
DON CABALLERO For Respect (Touch and Go) 1993 Don Caballero 2 (Touch and Go) 1995
Given indie rock’s need to scream, its reliance on simplicity and accessibility, its proponents’ burning itch to express personalities, perambulate through obsessions and point fingers at various targets, instrumental music has rarely been the sound choice of the new generation. Outside the sphere of surf-rock nostalgists and space-rock prog noisemakers, the census of groups who make music that could support lyrics but choose not is growing but small. But it does include this Pittsburgh quartet named after Guy Caballero, the sleazy station owner Joe Flaherty played on SCTV.
