music
pontiff | September 15, 2008For many years, and in particular during my college years, I was a huge Pink Floyd fan. Indeed, I suspect the first trace of me on the internet probably involves a post on a Pink Floyd newsgroup of which I am now quite embarrassed (but my ideas was sound, damnit!). Thus it is with great sadness that I learned today via Quantum Moxie that Richard Wright, keyboardist for the Pink Floyd, has passed away due to cancer.
In honor, why don't you check out "The Great Gig in the Sky":
I can see the tornado now...
And I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do; I don't mind.
Why should I be…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2008
With kudos to Mattias who sent me the link, here are Stephen Lynch & Mark Teich performing a fine song about being a 14-y-o D&D-playing young man. To those of our readers who currently fit that description, let me say that just a few years from now you will no longer have the least interest in sneering high-school jock girls. Instead you will attract the intimate affections of bright college freshwomen, some of whom will demand to do some pretty wild things with you, including but not limited to the playing of D&D.
goodmath | September 12, 2008 My apologies for how slow the blog has been lately. I've been sick with a horrible
sinus infection for the last month. I saw an ENT on wednesday, and with massive doses of antibiotics and steroids, I'm finally on the mend, so hopefully things
will get back to normal soon.
Marillion, "Thunder Fly": For those of us who pre-ordered Marillion's upcoming album, they just made mediocre-quality prerelease copies available for download. Overall, I'm very happy with it. It's quite good; I can't wait to listen to it in its high-quality CD form. This is a fun track; it's got a nice bounce
to it, but…
grrlscientist | September 12, 2008tags: Mackenna's Gold, Jose Feliciano, music, film, movies, streaming video
Really amazing footage and wonderful music by José Feliciano about turkey vultures, from the movie, Mackenna's Gold -- is this a film I must see? You tell me! [5:24]
"There's an old story.
The way the Apaches tell it...
...a man was riding in the desert
and came across a vulture...
...the kind they call turkey buzzards
in Arizona, sittin' on a rock.
"Hey", the man says, "how come you
old turkey buzzard's sittin' here?
"I saw you flying over Hadleyberg,
and I didn't want to meet up with you...
"...so I turned around…
ddobbs | September 4, 2008Alex Ross, the New Yorker's wonderful music critic, on the strange and amusing history of how the classical music concert assumed its present form -- which, as he notes, often seems to constrain rather than unleash the music.
terrasig | September 4, 2008Today is the second anniversary of the passing of Steve Blackwell, a Midwestern transplant who came to the Sunshine State as a high school English teacher and became a fixture in the Florida folk music scene. My path crossed with Mr Blackwell in the months before his untimely departure from melanoma at age 58.
I detailed my connection with Mr Blackwell in this repost of my thoughts from the day of his memorial service. Mr Blackwell's daughter and other former bandmates continue performing as Still Friends. Steve's memory was also honored musically this past March with SteveFest '08 in Port…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2008Lately I've been listening to the following albums:
Apples in Stereo -- New Magnetic Wonder (2007)
Delays -- Faded Seaside Glamour (2004)
Funkadelic -- Funkadelic (1970)
MGMT -- Oracular Spectacular (2007)
Motorpsycho -- Let Them Eat Cake (2000)
Sleep -- Jerusalem (1999)And podcasts:
Digital Planet
Escape Pod
Podcastle
Planetary Radio
Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
SkepticalityAll highly recommended! Given that I like this stuff, do you have any suggestions for more ear-bud fodder, Dear Reader?
[More blog entries about music, podcasting; musik, podcasting.]
awild | August 31, 2008This video clip looks like it is straight off cute overload, but the sweetness is offset by Of Montreal's dark sense of humour and heavy bass-line. This song is Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games), from the album The Sunlandic Twins.  I wonder if somewhere a student writing a thesis on their song titles...
Have a great weekend!
-J
goodmath | August 29, 2008 I was away on vacation this week, which explains the near-total
silence on the blog. But at least you'll get a FRT from me. And some
nice posts on cryptography and game theory coming next week.
Gogol Bordello, "Dub the Frequencies of Love": Eastern
european gypsies meet punk meets reggae.
Hawkwind, "Urban Guerilla": A live recording of a rather
catchy tune by Hawkwind. Personally, I prefer their spacier stuff.
Porcupine Tree, "Glass Arm Shattering": Porcupine Tree is
always great. This one starts off slow and quiet, and then builds.
IQ, "Harvest of Souls": Peter Nichols, the leader…
neurophilosophy | August 24, 2008Here's some awesome footage of the one and only Jimi Hendrix performing at Woodstock. At around 11 minutes in, he plays the guitar with his teeth. Yes...with his teeth. And it still sounds great.
Some of the hippies at the event take a much-needed dip in a lake, so the film does contain a tiny bit of nudity, as well as some drug-taking.
goodmath | August 22, 2008Solas, "Darkness, Darkness": One of my favorite Irish
bands doing a great cover of an old song.
A Silver Mt. Zion, "Goodbye Desolate Railyard": a decent
ASMZ track, but not an outstanding one.
Mogwai, "Acid Food": Anything by Mogwai is terrific. This
is no exception.
Kansas, "Myriad": One of my favorite tracks of the latest
from Kansas.
Metaphor, "Stella Maris": I just got this album today, and haven't even gotten to listen to it all the way through yet, so I haven't really formed a strong opinion yet. But it sounds like Metaphor, and that's a good thing.
Rush, "The Enemy Within": A…
terrasig | August 22, 2008As a former resident of The Queen City of the Plains, my goal today was to write some travel tips for those bloggers attending the DNC in Denver next week.
However, I got a bit sidetracked by the case a couple of weeks ago about the gentleman who died of cyanide poisoning at a hotel near the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. You'll recall that "a pound" of sodium cyanide was also found with his dead body in room 408 of The Burnsley Hotel at 10th Ave. & Grant St. one needs only 50-100 mg of sodium cyanide to kill oneself so I still don't know what the other 453.9 grams was intended for.…
oracknows | August 16, 2008Why? Because I love Doctor Who and Benny Hill (although I was never much of an Eminem fan) and because it's funny, that's why. Besides, it's a beautiful Saturday, and I'm feeling too lazy to post anything substantive this morning. That's all the reason I need.
goodmath | August 15, 2008 One of the things that I always like to talk about is how a natural
expression of randomness will periodically produce something that appears
non-random - and in fact, if it doesn't, then it's not really random!
This weeks friday random 10 is a great example of this. In the past, when I've been in a mood for a particular kind of music, I'm done random shuffles within a playlist containing the stuff I feel like listening to. I didn't do that this week. I let iTunes randomly pick out 10 things, and these are the first ten from the list. It
turned out to be a nice week for progressive music.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2008This is creepy (italics mine):
Pigtailed and smiling, Lin Miaoke, age 9, stood in a red dress and white shoes during Friday's Olympic opening ceremonies and performed "Ode to the Motherland" in what would become one of the evening's most indelible images: a lone child, fireworks blazing overhead, singing a patriotic ballad before an estimated one billion viewers.
Except that her proud father, Lin Hui, noticed "that the voice was a little different from hers." On Tuesday, Mr. Lin said in a telephone interview that he had assumed "the difference might be caused by the acoustics."
Acoustics had…
neurophilosophy | August 2, 2008Here's Isaac Hayes performing his extremely funky rendition of Burt Bacharach's The Look of Love.
goodmath | August 1, 2008Kansas, "Byzantium": an example of why Kansas fans waited so long for
Kerry Lofgren to return to the band. The guy's a brilliant songwriter. Even with
Walsh's voice clearly aging and suffering from abuse, this is fantanstic stuff.
Isis, "Wrists of Kings": Fairly hard post-rock. I like Isis a lot, but one thing
about them that takes some getting used to is the "lead singer". In general, Isis has a sound
a lot like Mogwai, but they do use vocals. And their vocals consist of a guy screaming
hoarsely in the background. This track doesn't have the really awful vocals; in fact, the…
goodmath | July 18, 2008The Flower Kings, "Underdog": a neo-progressive track with the lead played by a bagpipe and a steel guitar. How can you not love that?
Broken Social Scene, "Ibi Dreams of a Pavement": A post-rock
track with vocals. Very good stuff - very dense. Like I said it's got vocals, but they're not the dominant part of it - they're actually almost in the background.
Marillion, "Heart of Lothian": a track off of my favorite Fish-era Marillion album. It's hard to take this in isolation - the whole album is really one continuous piece of music - with recurring themes, lyrical motifs, etc. This is…
terrasig | July 17, 2008Arachnologist and diplopodologist Dr Jason E Bond at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, is most recently well-known for naming a spider (Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi) after Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Neil Young.
Kristin Day of The Daily Reflector is now reporting that Professor Bond has agreed to name a spider after Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's host of "The Colbert Report."
When news emerged in May that Bond had named a species of trapdoor spider after Neil Young, the biologist could not escape Colbert's web:
"Where's my spider? I have lots of animals named after me: turtles,…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2008Today we dug and sieved our 33rd and last square-meter test pit at Djurhamn, and I took the gear back to the County Museum's stores. Unless a colleague with better early-modern pottery skillz than mine provides any surprises, it seems that we have not found any of the evidence for 16th/17th century harbour life that we sought. We do however have quite a bit of 18th/19th century household and tavern refuse. And it seems unlikely to be pure chance that the single pit that yielded any bones was the one nearest to the abandoned cemetery depicted on a 1630s map of the area. Osteology will tell.
I…