Last week, Radiohead released a new album, entitled In Rainbows. While Radiohead fans were understandably excited by the band's first new album since 2003's Hail to the Thief, the rest of the online world was interested in the release's format: while a boxed set (with 2 CDs and 2 vinyl records) will be available in [...]
In the wake of what must be the world's least funniest April Fools joke, I have returned from my trip to Ghana. Expect multiple posts (and some pictures) from the trip, assuming that I get organized and actually construct coherent, non-rambling pieces of writing from my notes.
The picture at the left (or above, if you [...]
A review of the Arcade Fire's second album, Neon Bible.
Monday, February 12, 2007
From the list of this year's Grammy winners:
Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal: "My Humps," Black Eyed Peas.
Considering the list of nominees was comprised of songs by craptastic bands like The Fray, Keane, and The Pussycat Dolls, I am somewhat not surprised that the Black Eyed Peas won. I would have given [...]
Thursday, February 8, 2007
My thoughts on Steve Jobs' recent memo, "Thoughts on Music." While widely reported (and hailed) as yet another sign of the end of digital rights management systems as a way to control the use of digital music, it is clearly a public relations stunt aimed squarely at European consumers.
Seven songs I listened to during January 2007, and why. Includes thoughts about Last.fm, Iraq, and other sundry topics.
Over at Gadfly, Peter Mulcahy complains about Randall Stross' recent article in the New York Times, which rightly castigates Apple for the limitations of the FairPlay DRM with which it encodes audio and video purchased from the iTunes Store. While I think commenter Markus Kolic is right in noting that Stross seems to be misreading [...]
Sunday, December 31, 2006
A list of 10 albums that I enjoyed in 2006.
I have been listening to The Decemberists' latest album, The Crane Wife for a while now. Whenever I get new Decemberists music, I imagine writing the ridiculously long and detailed review that their lyrically complex music deserves. Reality always compresses my writing, but I think that my review of their previous LP, Picaresque was pretty [...]
Starting in June 2005, I decided that I would no longer purchase music from bands who released albums on record labels that belonged to the RIAA. I have broken that promise, mostly because the RIAA is everywhere.
Take Downtown Records. On the "About" section of their official website, immediately after claiming that they are an "independent [...]
An essay on why I am not going to buy another iPod in the near future. First in a series on the state of Linux support (or lack thereof) in the digital audio player market today.
A long post on WPLY, the Philadelphia radio station known as Y100, that was located at 100.3 Mhz on FM radio and its influence on me.
When I learned about Microsoft's plans to make a digital music player, I was generally underwhelmed. Several other companies including Toshiba, Sony, and Creative have attempted to challenge the iPod's dominance of the digital audio market with little success. But according to Engadget, Microsoft might have an incentive that could tip the scales in their [...]
Back when I was a senior in high school, I was naïve in many ways, including my determination of what was good music. Around that time, I recognized that my musical taste was less developed than those of many of my friends. This was not because I liked bad music, but because I had simply [...]
The New York Times sits down with Thom Yorke, lead singer of the popular British alternative band Radiohead. While a large part of the article focuses on Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, a significant portion of it deals with Yorke talking about Radiohead's next album. Since Radiohead is no longer signed to Capitol Records, Yorke [...]
The official Pitchfork RSS feeds that I previously reported on are back. I assume that they are a permanent feature of the website, so I am yet again removing my feeds. Unlike the previous iteration of the Pitchfork "redesign," the website now has permalinks (which work!) and categories (which do not).
Pitchfork Media introduces official RSS feeds. Martey rejoices.
The Decemberists' last blog post was in February, and while their message board does have RSS feeds, it is also members-only (thanks God for BugMeNot), so I do not visit it often. As a result, I must get my Decemberists news from Pitchfork, where I learned from their exclusive phone call with Colin Meloy that [...]
Tony Gambone's post about adapting my Pitchfork RSS feeds to work with their Best New Music section inspired me to redo some of the feeds. Since I previously changed the reviews feed to include an actual description of the review with its rating (thanks to Chris Thacker for suggesting this), it made sense to change [...]
Although Adlai Stevenson has been dead for more than 40 years, he came alive for me again earlier this week when I heard his song, named after the Democratic presidental candidate in 1952 and 1956. Although Pitchfork did not like it, I found it uniquely compelling. A relatively short track at just under two minutes, [...]
Pitchfork has an article about the fact the popular band Radiohead might be coming on tour to the United States. While the ability to see one of my favorite bands live in concert is pretty cool, I was even more excited to see that Radiohead is currently unaffilated with EMI, a member of the RIAA. [...]
This is why I made SleepTune - which really needs to be ported to Linux.
One might think that the fact that I have become a member of the Sprint Ambassador Program (which entitles me to a free Samsung A920 phone and 6 months of absolutely free service) might cause me to blog about how wonderful the Sprint Power Vision network is. Unfortunately for Valentine, McCormick, & Ligibel, the marketing [...]
The popular video website YouTube is hosting a "Make Our Video" contest for the Seattle indie rock band Pretty Girls Make Graves in order to promote the band's upcoming album Élan Vital. Entrants are directed to download the album's first track, The Nocturnal House, and create a music video based on it. While the grand [...]
Friday, February 10, 2006
…walking into Broadway Market…
Friend: You know, I really like Neutral Milk Hotel. I keep listening to "Two-Headed Boy."
Me: I like "Communist Daughter" myself.
…watching The O.C., listening to Sufjan Stevens' "For the Widows in Paradise; For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" play as background music.
Other friend: This emo music sucks.
Me: It's not emo, it's folk.
Other friend: But [...]
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
A week or so ago, I switched from using Gentoo Linux to the latest devlopment version of Ubuntu Linux. Scheduled to be released in April 2006, "Dapper Drake" contains the latest "unstable" development versions of various Linux software. The music player I use, Rhythmbox, was updated to use version 0.10 of the GStreamer media playback [...]
Friday, December 30, 2005
From Pitchfork's "The 15 Worst Releases of 2005":
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: "Clap Your Hands!"
Some bands choose their most extreme, difficult, and uncharacteristic track as their album opener as both a paean to anticommercialism and a barrier to keep out…who? The impatient? Old people? It's a classic shitty underground rock pose, but not as shitty [...]
Friday, December 16, 2005
The Decemberists, a moderately well known indie rock band, have announced that they have signed a contract with the major recording company Capitol Records.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Apparently, the short letter I wrote in response to Wired's article "The Digital Audiophile's Toolbox" (part of a series on audiophiles and high-quality digital music) was worthy enough to be included in an article displaying some of the feedback that Wired Magazine had received. It is not as cool as actually being published in the [...]
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Since I have been waiting for this concert since it was announced back in July, I had high expectations for this concert. For a long period of time (July to late September), I assumed that I would have to go to the concert alone, since most of my friends are not interested in indie music [...]
Friday, September 23, 2005
This open source iTunes plugin adds functionality that I have been looking for a long while - notification of the track currently being played through a small popup window that automatically disappears after a short period of time.
Via Chris Gonyea.
Monday, September 5, 2005
The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes an excellent roundup of the most popular online music stores, identifying their flaws and explaining how they limit user freedoms. Of the four online music services that the guide suggests that users use instead, I take a look at Bleep and Audio Lunchbox.
Also tagged Apple, Audio Lunchbox, Bleep, downloading, EFF, EULA, file formats, FLAC, Free Culture, iTunes, iTunes Music Store, Napster, online music, RealNetworks, Technology
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It occurs to me that I promised to release a transcription of the lyrics for Tarkio's song "Eva Luna" back in January and again in April. Despite a small but steady stream of people visiting in hope of finding such lyrics, nobody had the guts to call me out on this oversight. As I noted [...]
Since I was already thinking about iTunes, this post on Engadget about slurping tracks from your iTunes library to a PSP through WiFi got me into a pensive mood. While the howto that Engadget linked to is centered around a Mac-only shareware application called Dot Tunes, it occurs to me that the Internet community would [...]
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Songs that I am appreciating this month.
Martey discusses Sufjan Stevens - with himself. In schizophrenic interview format.
Among the links I came acrosswhile reading about iTunes and COM was a post by Sahil Malik, complaining about the lack of a sleep feature in iTunes similar to that on the iPod. The sleep feature on the iPod saves battery life by turning the player off if no music is playing and the buttons [...]
I first came across John Vanderslice sometime during sophomore year looking for music about computers (you can stop that snickering now). The first song of his I heard was "Bill Gates Must Die." It is about computers (which is cool) but is also about child pornography (which is not cool). Despite the song's disturbing subject [...]
I sometimes wonder if my audience is divided. To put it simplistically, I imagine there are those who come here to read my complaints about Microsoft, and those who come to read my complaints about Bush. I sort of feel like Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg, which tells the story of how a minor [...]
Also tagged Apple, C#, COM, Cuckoo's Egg, Delphi, ITL, iTunes, Personal, Programming, Python, SharpDevelop, Visual Studio
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CDex is an open source application that rips CD audio to music files like MP3. M4A is a file format consisting of AAC audio data inside a MPEG4 container. It is supported by Apple's iTunes and the iPod. This is sort of a "note to self," since I have had to do this twice and [...]
In my opinion, one of the best albums in the entire world is Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Therefore, it is with some chagrin that I confess that I have never heard their previous album, On Avery Island. I have come close a number of times (it has been in my [...]
As I reported back in June, the BBC's Radio 3 offered 9 Beethoven symphonies for free download on their website in a staggered period ending early this month. This article from the British newspaper The Independent comes via Scripting News. This is why the Internet can't have nice things anymore.
Managing director of the Naxos label, [...]
In an interview with the Onion AV Club, Billy Corgan proves that my analysis of his full-page Chicago Tribune advertisment was correct:
[The Onion]: It sounds like you could see yourself going back with the Pumpkins.
[Billy Corgan]: No, I think the relationships with James and D'arcy are pretty poor. I haven't spoken to D'arcy in over [...]
In April, the Free Culture movement celebrated its one year anniversary. What is Free Culture, you ask? It is a college-based movement which wants to ensure that humanity's traditional values of innovation and creativity are not stifled. From their manifesto:
The freedom to build upon the past is necessary for creativity and innovation to thrive. We [...]
One of the more interesting items in yesterday's music news was the appearance of a full-page advertisement in the Chicago Tribune by Billy Corgan, lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins, one of the most popular bands of the 1990s. In the advertisement, he makes reference to his wish to "revive the Smashing Pumpkins." Several online [...]
If you read my previous post about boycotting the RIAA, you may have been confused by the music formats that the clip of "Let's Push Things Forward" was available in. I am sure that you recognized MP3, but what the hell is OGG? Since I now understand I am horrible at explaining technical issues (I [...]
While I generally consider myself to have eclectic musical tastes, the amount of classical music in my collection is very low. There is a bunch of Mozart, some Grieg, and a bit of Rimsky-Korsakov, but nothing to write home about.
This is one of the reasons I am excited about the BBC's Beethoven Experience (via Legal [...]
The New York Times write about three albums coming out today (Coldplay's X&Y, the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan, and the Black Eyed Peas' Monkey Business) and how they are symptomatic of the music industry's decadence:
The big record companies continue to insist that the only route to profitability is blockbuster sales of a few [...]
From Cringley's May 5 column (link mine):
And 10.4 gives us a peek at another evolution of iTunes, which is the inevitable expansion of the system to carry additional audio file formats. Looking at the unused iTunes icons that shipped with your new version of 10.4, you'll notice icons for currently-not-supported ogg vorbis and Windows Media [...]
An exciting snippet of news from Pitchfork:
With the success of the Decemberists, Kill Rock Stars will be releasing a complete and comprehensive set of Tarkio material. Neither a date nor a full tracklist is available.
Tarkio, if you did not already know, was the band Colin Meloy was in before the Decemberists. They released one LP [...]
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Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Since Picaresque was released eight days ago, and I made clear my eagerness to listen to it clear by writing two posts on the music video of "16 Military Wives" (here and here), you, noble reader, may have wondered, why haven't I posted about the album itself? Was it so mediocre I felt forced to [...]
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When I first noticed this, I assumed that I was making some sort of mistake. In the video for "16 Military Wives," we learn about the majority of characters through their Model United Nations affliations. As you can see from the picture on the right, one of the United States' three friends is the Republic [...]
My favorite band, The Decemberists, have a new album, Picaresque, coming out on March 22. As you might assume, I am excited. So excited that I pre-ordered the album on Amazon, using my Amazon Prime membership (extremely useful for textbooks) to get $4 one-day shipping.
I was feeling sort of depressed when I came back to [...]
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
From Matt Yglesias comes an interesting website on Pyongyang's subway system. While the public system seems relatively small (only 17 stations), there are indications that the secret military subway system is far larger:
The extent of the secret system can be guessed by the number
of trains purchased from Changchun, more than twice the minimum number
needed [...]
Thursday, January 27, 2005
While the iTunes Music Store recognizes that "Big Pimpin'" is not a track on 2003's The Black Album, but is actually from the 1999 album "Vol. 3: Life and Times of S. Carter", one must wonder where the young Apple employee who made the iTunes screenshot found on the Playlists page went wrong. I suspect [...]
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Intersession is a weird time at Harvard. Unlike the normal amount of activity that characterizes student life here, there is nothing important (at least, nothing important in the academic sense) that needs to be done. As a result, I am trying to get various other stuff done.
The modified CSS for this blog's theme is still [...]
Thursday, January 20, 2005
As I become exposed to more music, I become increasingly certain that one's personal experiences determine what type of music one likes. If I had not grown up in Willingboro, an almost stereotypical example of the American suburb, I think the fact that four of the tracks on The Arcade Fire's album Funeral contain the [...]
Saturday, January 15, 2005
The news feed needed no modifications, the size of the script grabbing album reviews actually decreased substantially, and the "We Are the World" feed (now pointing at the Track Reviews section) uses a hack, but they all work.
Update: Official Pitchfork Feeds
For my birthday, I decided to buy a MP3 player. After much consideration (I considered Neuros' strange dual player combination, as well as the Rio Karma), I finally decided on an iPod. The fact that part of my digital music collection is in AAC format was the biggest draw. While I did have fifty of [...]
On Pitchfork's home page, Ryan Schreiber notes that the Pitchfork website is undergoing a redesign, which will be completed next Monday.
I've been designing the site myself since starting it up in 1995, purely out of necessity. It's been functional, but otherwise not much to look at. This time, we've actually hired an honest-to-god design team: [...]
Saturday, January 1, 2005
From TalkLeft came a link to this disturbing New York Times article about the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Nestled on page 2 was this paragraph:
Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in [...]
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
From Pitchfork's listing of Bright Eyes' tour for their upcoming album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning:
01-24 Cambridge, MA - Sanders Theatre, Harvard University
The perfect concert for the day before the end of final exams - I envision a horde of teenage girls screaming for their "Conor!!!!11"
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Pitchfork:
For Garden State, drugs are clearly not the key to a better life; Natalie Portman is. Barring that, try music.
Everything I have heard about the film suggests that I will love it (New Jersey, Natalie Portman, The Shins, that snarky guy from Scrubs; it sounds like Paradise in film format). My only question is whether [...]
The story: Boy sees movie. Boy falls in love with character from movie. Boy buys DVD of Japanese movie that inspired character boy loves. Boy realizes that DVD is Region 3, since there is no Region 1 DVD. Boy gets angry. Boy gets even, by constructing an extremely funny dialog between "DVD Jon" (famous for [...]
Well, not quite yet. An article in today's New York Times (which does not actually use the phrase "astroturfing") details music conglomerate Warner Bros.' attempt to ingratiate itself with MP3 blogs in order to promote a band called The Secret Machines (who, incidentally, have 2 albums with 8+ ratings on Pitchfork) - with disastrous results:
"I [...]
The Crimson reports that the eminent Mark Zuckerberg, author of thefacebook.com, has a new project, a file-sharing site entitled "Wirehog:"
The Wirehog software will be downloadable to a personal computer from the website www.wirehog.com. When the software is initially launched, it will search the user?s computer and upload certain default files like music to a user?s [...]
Yesterday, http://del.icio.us/hublicious and the Waxy.org link blog linked to my RSS directory, which contains the "bootleg" (their words, not mine; I contacted Pitchfork earlier this year about adding RSS feeds and received no response) Pitchfork RSS feeds. While I wish they linked to an actual post (instead of an directory listing), I am still happy [...]
Pitchfork has reviewed the Conet Project, a collection of recordings from "numbers stations" - shortwave radio trasmitters used by the world's intelligence services to send coded messages. They gave it an 8.0, which in the old Pitchfork ratings key, means "very good." I disagree.
I first heard of the Conet Project when I read a Wired [...]
As all of the tech media websites have been talking about, Amazon has changed its review system to include "Real Names." They explain their rationale thusly:
In general, we believe that a community in which people use their Real Names will ultimately have higher quality content, since an author willing to sign his or her real-world [...]
General
Unique visitors: 809
Average number of (non-unique) visits per day: 103.77
Most popular day: 28 July 2004 (see Search Queries)
Stereogum posts a link to a Rolling Stone article on the possible return of the lead singer of the band Weezer, Rivers Cuomo, to Harvard this fall. You can read Cuomo's readmission essay on myspace.com:
After the initial failure of my band?s second album, Pinkerton, I decided not to return to school in the fall of [...]
Just finished a RSS 2.0 feed for Pitchfork's music news, as I talked about doing yesterday. I also changed all of the Crimson feeds to RSS 2.0; the change should take place when the feeds next update. The URL has also changed, but I made symbolic links in order to make it transparent.
Update: Official Pitchfork [...]
I was reading today's music news over at Pitchfork (regrettably, they never answered my query about RSS; I might want to look into doing a screen-scrape, as the only other RSS feed I could find seems to be broken, despite being active not two months ago). The top story is about the Decemberists' heading back [...]
Friday, February 27, 2004
This Register article talks about the Apple vs Apple case. I personally love this quote:
And the judge, Mr Justice Edward Mann, surprised the assembly by admitting he is an iPod user. He wondered if this disqualified him from judging the case. Lord Grabiner QC, representing Apple Comp., told him he was not. "I'm delighted [...]
I am going to avoid commenting on the content of this site (found on Boing Boing). I am also not going to comment on its shameless attempt to co-opt youth culture through corrupted slang like, "What's the Download" and "There's more to music than meets the ears."
In this letter to the editor, the Executive Director of the Canadian Music Publishers Association, attempts to defend the standpoint of songwriters, who are apparently the "real victims" in the music wars.