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!
Flinging toast far to reach one’s plate,
Hopeful the distance is judged just so.
Butter prepared, sliced thick like slate
Angles precise, before my bread does bake.
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.
Overall, keyboard and case mods are not my thing. I used to be into building my machine from scratch, yet getting a Tornado case was about as “hip” as I got. It was all about processing power and memory, that is what mattered. There is a large contingency of modders out there, spending countless hours building custom cases, rigs and assorted peripherals. Steampunk is one mod community gone mad, but I have to admit some of the things that come out of from them is pretty impressive.
Speaking of impressive, check out this keyboard hotness:
Now that is a mod I can standbehind. Using scrabble (a game I despise since I can’t spell worth a shit) tiles as pure inspiration. Rad. Seriously, how cool is that? Eh, probably only cool if you are a geek or some strange subset of geek.
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