Joel likes Listen.com. Sounds like a good deal, but so far it’s Windoze-only.
Category: Flavors of the One Love
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Cycling Down the West Side
I saw helicopters, an aircraft carrier, and a woman on the trapeze.
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Hamza El Din at Lincoln Center
New York music lovers could do worse than check out Hamza El Din this Thursday at Lincoln Center.
Here’s an older piece, an excerpt from ‘Manami‘ (850K), in what amounts to late 70’s Egyptian pop music. The tempo and rhythm shifts just floor me.
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German Reference Tools
It’s a good thing the Germans know how complex their language is. They’ve invented two powerful tools to help learn it:
- The LEO English/German Dictionary can translate in either direction and the default setting is bi-directional, so you can type in either an English or German word and it’ll find the translation. This is only undesirable in the cases when a word is spelled the same in both languages but has different meanings, like bald. There’s even bookmarklets that can look up a word you’ve highlighted.
- The Morphology Browser let’s you surf info like conjugated verb forms, plus other info I don’t understand yet.
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Flamenco links, Summer 2002
On my list of big things to learn someday is Flamenco guitar. I could start with these resources, which are excellent (for example, the combination of transcription, tabulature, and mp3s of early 20th Century recordings). But I know I would just be reinforcing bad technique, never having learned proper classical finger picking. I’m guessing it’s something best learned from a teacher.
When I listen to the samples, I’m slack jawed at the speed combined with subtle stresses and powerful phrasing. And yet of themselves a writer says this:
For flamencos, it is the ability (at whatever level of skill) to accompany a knowledgeable singer (and knowledgeable dancer) who is performing one of the standard forms in a more or less standard way. You don’t have to be very *good* as guitarist to qualify. Many singers in Spain, for instance, knowing only two or three chords, and playing execrably by anyone’s standards, can crudely accompany themselves or someone else. Most wouldn’t claim to be guitarists at all. But they would claim that whatever they’re doing on the guitar is flamenco, not something else. They know the song, and they know what the guitar needs to sound like to go with that, even if they don’t know the guitar itself well enough to pull it off very well.
In this way it reminds me of vernacular architecture.
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Introduce me to that big blond…
she’s got a touch of Tuesday Weld.
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Silence Between Stations
…A silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protégés, the Planets, has enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992. The silence on his group’s album clearly sounds uncannily like 4’33”, the silence composed by Cage in his prime…. ‘As my mother said when I told her, ‘which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?‘.’
Thanks Adam.
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Training Down the Hudson
Heading north from New York City the rail line runs along the Hudson river and all sorts of mid-20th Century infrastructure. Just pointing my Elph out the window as it all sped by, and hoping Amtrak doesn’t collapse.
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No!
No! is a new album ‘for the whole family’ from They Might Be Giants. It’s a kid’s album. It’s fun.
Robot Parade (~500k mp3)
And sometimes it’s romantic, in that Narrow Your Eyes sort of way.
Four Of Two
And sometimes it’s scary, ’cause sometimes it’s fun to be scared.
The Edison Museum
In the end it’s very much a They Might Be Giants recording, but with a more simple, gentle approach, reminiscent of Apollo 18. They have a gift for melody that can be enchanting.
Sleepwalkers
The CD is enhanced with interactive stuff from the wizards at the Chopping Block, who also designed the packaging. I’ll be buying copies for all my nieces and nephews. You should too. Music rocks.
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1 + 1
Here’s a Philip Glass composition you can play yourself, as printed in Score: An Anthology of New Music (out of print I assume but probably findable in a university’s library):
Any table top is amplified by means of a contact mike, amplifier and speaker.
The player perfoms 1 + 1 by tapping the table top with his fingers or knuckles.
The following two rhythmic units are the building blocks of 1 + 1:
a) sixteenth note – sixteenth note – eighth note
b) eighth note
1+1 is realized by combining the above two units in continuous, regular arithmetic progressions.
The tempo is fast. The length is determined by the player.
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Book Fair
Wow, so many great books being published. Peter stopped by the other night with an actual hardcopy prototype of his user-centered design book. Owen and other luminaries lay down the CSS goods. Wert and company cough up a tome on Usability. And Rebecca’s Blog book is out. Don’t go crying that you’re bored this summer.
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Stock Trading Language
When shares of a company plunge on the New York Stock Exchange the trader responsible for that listing must buy into the selling, in their words, she must ‘catch the falling knife.’
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Female Voices
Finding wonderful female vocalists surfacing on my playlist these days. Here’s some mp3 snippets (all under 400K):
Pink A talent for syncopation (just try and sing along)
Patty Larkin Quirky and surprisingly addictive
PJ Harvey Dark, and surprisingly addictive
Amanda Ghost Imagine songwriting and production that mirror Natalie Imbruglia but with vocal chords soaked in single malt scotch
Audra McDonald One of the best voices in the world, my desert island choice
