By now, pretty much most meme-aholics have heard the vocal isolation track of Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil” featuring the crazed wails, screams, whistles and OH YEAH’s of David Lee Roth. The song was included on the seminal 1978 release of Van Halen’s self-titled debut. Due to the release date and the extreme rock qualities of the album, this clearly makes the album “Van Halen” Classic Rock.
Jump ahead to 1979, barely a year later, another great is born. Black and white line graphics represent your ship as it blasts and drifts through monstrous rocks in the darkness of deep space. Asteroids is considered by many to be one of the great games of the past arcade mania, a legend that still lives in our hearts today. Truly a Classic game.
Due the close proximity of time, there is a good chance that many Asteroids players listend to “Running with the Devil” while blasting rocks into smaller and smaller bits, while difting, ever drifting. Thanks to the boyz/girlz at shitbagz, you can now play Assteriodz, The Diamond Dave Edition featuring Van Halen. A true classic paring, like fine wine and cheese. If the wine is a Flash casual game and cheese is the over the top stylings of Diamond Dave. Good times.
There has been many-a-time where I read about a band (new/old) and wonder what they sound like. Usually, I search for a MySpace page or a Imeem page, but I just found a new way to find music called Just hear !t
Just Hear !t is a music oriented search/aggregator that finds music videos and tracks from sites like YouTube, Seeqpod, etc. Its a simple and fast Adobe Flash UI that plays the music and video’s within the site. I am impressed by its simplicity and it turned up some pretty amazing results. A great resource for SXSW too!
South By South West (SXSW) is the annual interactive/film/music conference & festival held in Austin, Texas. This year is the 22nd annual conference and it will be Niki and my 4th year in a row. To say SXSW is awesome is an understatement. Its has been one of the best and most amazing music experiences I have ever had, and each year gets better. As my friend Cyrus said: “Its like the Disneyland of music. You can see a year’s worth of shows in four days”. And he was dead-on.
One of the challenges of SXSW is preparing for it. With 1500+ bands playing at 70+ venues over four days and nights you have to have a gameplan. Who are you going to see? When are they playing? What day shows should we hit? Can we get in for the show? You have to ask youself all of this to achive the best SXSW musical experience.
SXSW posts a band list, which is daunting in itself, to help you find out who is playing this year. Seeing that many names on one page, its really easy to lose your place and everytime you re-read it you see bands you missed last time. Luckily, some people over at Sun are hosting a SXSW Artist Catalog with band notes, pics, links and a tag cloud. Its a great tool and really helps you see who is attending. Expect to see more on the blog about SXSW over the next month as the March 13th kick-off is rapidly approaching!
It seems that Animal Collective (AC) has become the 2009 music blog darlings. Everywhere you look AC’s new release “Merriweather Post Pavilion” is already being called the best album of 2009. Pretty strong comments for the 28th day of the year. Recently, Spinner.com streamed “Merriweather Post Pavilion” in its entirety and by the second song “My Girls”, I was sold. I passed the link to Yap, and around the same part of the album he was sold. It really is an amazing album, just for the fact that it got me in two songs. Its been a long time since a band made me want to go out and buy an album after hearing a just song or two, one time.
Last week, AC played the legendary NYC venue: The Bowery Ballroom. NYCTaper was there with an amazing portable rig and recorded the whole show. The fact that they use a pair of Neumann KM-150’s says a lot right there. You can listen to and download the entire set.
Back in my day, MTV played music videos nearly 24 hours a day, not this glam-ality TV crap we have now… and we liked it. Red Fang’s “Prehistoric Dog” reminds me of the mesmerizing times we used to have sitting around drinking Dr. Pepper (later on Beer), watching videos and waiting for Liquid Television. Ahh… the days of high school.
“Prehistoric Dog” is a well shot and great sounding rock video, with a nice nod to the Monty Python boys.
Parks on Fire is a new piece of video art by Scott Pagano. Mr. Pagano, with his fancy-pants RISD cred, has done a lot of amazing work with a large list of world-class electronic musicians. Seeing him live at the Recombinant Media Labs (R.I.P.) in San Francisco as visual counterpart to Speedy J (oh, don’t get me started on him!) was inspirational. This particular piece is set to the chilled-out sounds of Trifonic.
Parks on Fire is the latest short graphic film creation of digital artist Scott Pagano. It is an exploration of the complex, interpenetrated, and reflective relationships of structure, form, and motion that both bind and conflict the natural and manmade worlds. The experience is a visual and aural expedition through a series of uniquely explicated environments. Stunning synthetic worlds of micro precision evolve and meld in to landscapes of natural forms evoking the achingly unknowable sublime that is here captured, redefined and expressed via intensive digital reprocessing. Sound and image drive each other to create the uncanny sense that both are emerging from the same dammed-but-divine ethereal engine. The lush cinematic soundtrack is by Trifonic, and is available on their debut release Emergence.
I’m a big fan of my boys Ed and Joshua, who together form electronic music act Time Slips By. Between the two of them they have over 35 years of experience in the crafting of awesome, highest-quality electronic sounds. Techno, drum n’ bass, ambient, electro, hardcore, breakcore, IDM, drill n’ bass, dubstep, early “rave” etc etc and on and on, together and separately, they’ve done it all. Except maybe big club trance, maybe not that so much. And wasn’t there some club affliction called “handbag” at one point or another? Maybe not so much that either, but they’ve covered a huge range of music either way.
In their current incarnation as Time Slips By, Ed and Joshua create lush ambient soundscapes, while at the same time staying true to their darker, harder instincts and pasts. Rather than trying to fill up every moment, however, TSB uses the silences to express feelings as well. Here’s a link to their latest live PA, which took place on a beautiful night in the Northern California forests at Cloudfactory Collective’s Chillits campout. The guys put many hours of work into creating a full environment experience: the audience was surrounded by MIDI controlled LED lights of various shapes and sizes, all precision controlled for maximum effect when viewed in concert with the audio.
Its AM here in the Bay and I am catching up on my RSS feeds for the morning when I stumbled onto a link to a new National track via Stereogum. From there I went to the MySpace page hosting the track and I found the “Dark Was The Night” project, which is working in combination with the Red Hot Organization to help support treatment for HIV/AIDS patients. The “Dark Was The Night” is a 32 exclusive track compilation coming out on Feb. 16th 2009. This list is amazing, as Niki put it a “who’s who of indie darlings.” Here is a list of the acts:
I pretty much own albums from every artist on this list. My god I am a “Indie pop” whore. I need to spend some time getting away from “known” bands so that I can refresh my hipster cred.
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