fleet foxes on LP

i have been coming home and listening to fleet foxes for a week everyday (which has been absolutely wonderful). and prompted by my incomplete answer to my friend's question of kid A vinyl vs mp3, the difference is very clear with fleet foxes.

i listened all the way through with a decent playback device (cd player, to remove my my mp3 hate on the format or the computer) of the fleet foxes and then back to my LP. the difference its rather stark, and not in a good way for the cd. the cd reproduces the sounds extremely accurate, its easy to tell that each recorded sound was reproduced with surgical precision. but thats the thing, closing my eyes it felt like i was listening to six different sources for each sound, drums here vocal there guitar other there. it wasnt stage presence, that sounds good, this sounded disorganized, it was almost as if each thing was slightly out of sync with the other it was so separated. so in this case its not so much that the detail is better on vinyl, (though it may be debatable i contest despite wow/flutter/rumble that vinyl is still more faithful to the intended sound detail-wise) but its more that the sound with a detailed cd sounds like eating something with a metallic taste. yes- that works for me, cd's are like eating food with utensils with that metallic taste, vinyl is like eating with....a spoon that doesn't leave a metallic taste. wooden spoon. you can get used to the metallic taste, you might not even taste it anymore, but when you take away the metallic taste you notice that its gone and start to notice the food. hearing fleet foxes on cd is plenty great but LP has this warmth and musicality that i believe sounds a whole lot more like what it sounds like on stage. cd is good but has this aseptic metallic feel to it. where the sounds were so cluttered on cd, on LP they maintain their distinct clarity but blend better, more musical.

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mixes: knocking down the door

blast from the past, from the year 2006. started as a rock anthem mix, got distracted into more indie, my favorite cover is on it (track 18). i made a series of mixes after college for my friends, this one for the palest man i know.



the liner notes:

1. All Hands Against His Own - The Black Keys [Rubber Factory]
i think you might really like these guys, akron ohio blues rockers that channel hendrix and jimmy page

2. I'm Afraid of Americans feat. Trent Reznor - David Bowie
bowie, NIN frontman, bowie wrote it when he saw a macdonalds go up while travelling in java

3. Woodlands National Anthem - Arcade Fire [Arcade Fire EP]
underappreciated EP from the candian indie group, recorded in mount desert island, ME

4. The gloating sun - The Shins
a solid b-side from a solid group

5. Ordinary Night - The Mekons [Journey to the End of the Night]
punk rockers who listened to country music, dropped this on their comeback album

6. Found A Job - Talking Heads [More Songs About Buildings and Food]
consistently crazy lyrics from the revolutionary alt rockers

7. Tiny Paintings - Architecture In Helsinki [In Case We Die]
once the toast of indiepop, i love the string bass line on this

8. Diamond In The Back - Ludacris [Chicken & Beer]
hes got skills, but he hasnt dropped the john-blazin album i thought he would

9. The Fray Joanna Newsom Walnut Whales
harp + indie folk = magic

10. Double Rocker - Stereolab [ABC Music Radio 1 Sessions]
britpop guys banging on vintage moog keyboards

11. The dangling conversation - Simon & Garfunkel [Parsley, Sage, Roemary, and Thyme]
recorded before they began working on the soundtrack for ‘the graduate’

12. Hate To Say I Told You So - The Hives [Veni Vidi Vicious]
a great song despite it being overplayed on apple ipod ads

13. Hurt Like Mine - The Black Keys [thickfreakness]
this is the first song i heard by them

14. Harrowdown Hill - Thom Yorke [The Eraser]
bootleg versions of hail to the thief and eraser were leaked pre-release, and the bootleg versions are better

15. It's Over - The Beta Band [The Three E.P.'s]
a good hook from the ‘los amigos del beta bandidos’ EP

16. Shankill Butchers - The Decemberists [The Crane Wife]
morbid lullaby from the much anticipated album and i think worth the wait

17. See You Later - Heatmiser [Mic City Sons]
elliott smith when he rocked in oregon

18. Wish You Were Here (pink Floyd Cover) - Yorke, Sparklehorse [unreleased]
pink floyd, thom, heaven

19. Can't You Hear Me Knocking - Rolling Stones [Sticky Fingers]
the perfect rock anthem


'knocking down the door’ for squires 2006

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muzak

this may be interesting only to me, but theres a better music player. roll out implementing. now, something that might be mildly interesting to non-me, ting tings remix (could be a kings of convenience effect, great once remixed):



i take that back, i love kings of convenience pre-remixed.

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calling all remixOrz

radiohead makes the call (again) for the remix collab project on one of the strongest songs from in rainbows- reckoner. and in 4/4 meter!

"To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes...

...we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here

Sample, cut, take the sounds, whatever. Play it in a club. Or your room. Then if you want you can upload your finished mixes to http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged by everyone else. You can create a widget allowing votes from your own site, Facebook or MySpace to be sent through too. To start things off we asked James Holden and Diplo to do their versions."

anyone else think diplo is trying awfully hard? like the holden remix so far.

its a pretty fun experiment hearing all the stems and unusual (and novel to me) idea to send out the fragmented parts in absolutely raw form. it may breed some insecurity (vote for me! on my fbook/myspace! please!) but radiohead deserves plenty of benefit of the doubt here (starting with the way they released the album it seems to my naive perspective that theyre trying to get a lot more direct with the listener) and the project seems like a serious effort based on its format.

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and the spiders from mars

was listening last night to songs in the key of life (saturn, whoa!) but off topic, has there been a weirder concept album than ziggy stardust? as bowie explains:

"The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There's no electricity to play it. Ziggy's adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, 'cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. 'All the young dudes' is a song about this news. It's no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite...

The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I've made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage...

Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a Starman, so he writes 'Starman', which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately...The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don't have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie, the Infinite Fox...Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starmen. He takes himself up to the incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make them real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song 'Rock 'n' roll suicide'. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible."

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YT review: SKELETAL LAMPING

Skeletal Lamping Reviewed: surely this is not just freak funk psychodelic indie disco shock rock.

klaus nomi was kabuki makeup falsetto countertenor opera elfin peaked receding hairline and synthesizer blitz. he reveled in the freak identity and accented his peculiarities (charmingly displayed in his lime tart cooking demo), reaction to him was divisive- dismissal or fascination. bowie found him interesting before disposing of him and moving onto other fancies. but nomi was more than performance art, there's genuine pop tradition in its most bizarre perversion in his music and its got beauty. plenty of reasons to discount the band of montreal. insulting kevin barnes with his low cut frock and georgie fruit persona usually comes with a conciliatory admission that some of his songs are okay (which is of course misguided, of montreal is more than okay, theyre fantastic), but theres something unsettling about this white guy painted up and channeling his inner black shemale and cooing highly sexually explicit propositions in his latest offering. its not about being PC unsettling, its more bewilderment, 'whats his angle?' wheres the depth. of montreal fans would follow without hesitation, barnes could not embody the piper more, but surely this is not just freak funk psychodelic indie disco shock rock.

skeletal lamping picks up the shards and ribboned musical lines from hissing fauna's cathartic thrashing and could easily pass for a second installment of the turmoil dispensed at the end of hissing. despite barnes' explanation of musical exorcism, theres a settled calm and surprising amount of self-restraint (and not the good kind) in the electronic chaos. skeletal lamping leads us down a path to pulsing imaginative bat-crazy noise but withdraws and conservatively brings back the line. then he gets distracted into chorus and repeats its ten times. when it works its gloriously expansive and expressive, but they are flecks in a lot of confusion. somethings short here, its all hanging together pretty well but pretty passively, is it that the excitement over hissing fauna's novelty is wearing? those are damn great lyrics though, theres every reason to believe this album will be an immense hit with the of montreal fans and hipster literati but it might sadly be a bowie situation, passing fancy. its as if barnes extends his hand and reveals all the torment and fantasies and nightmares, but self-consciously withdraws into pandabear pop/fashionable synth and orchestra rock pop and you get no more than grasping at his fingers as they slip through (like the opening scene in jurassic park).

after nomi's death, a male painter who used to live with nomi recalls for a documentary his uneasy rejection to nomi's romantic advances. he confesses "i adored [nomi], but i just couldn't." nomi, beloved but not loved. skeletal lamping, lovable but not in love with it.

7.0/10.0

oct7, polyvinyl

more tracks from previous post

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this in: diplo rolls out raging, MIA found

diplo with the black lips, freestyle outtake (via gvsb to diplo's own mad decent site) rolls with raw ironic southern gangsta that does have some sort of authenticity, kind of promising kind of gentrified.

diplo aka diplodocus aka wes gully aka wes diplo made his mark with brazilian baile funk and went wild working with MIA. now black lips (previous). track off mad decent, which also has another great track feat the retired MIA:
busy signal rye rye MIA tic toc

its great, uncomfortably too cool. still catchy.

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mixes: blast from the past

mixes, first in a series, this one's from years ago back in 0l' 2004 (cover art, track listing, and the liner notes all from back when), the space man mix:
[blast-off]
1. goodbye blue sky, pink floyd
2. all we have is now, flaming lips

3. space oddity (fade-out version), bowie
4. stars and son, broken social scene

[space travel is hard, goodbye milky way]
5. bows and arrows, walkmen
6. across the universe, beatles
7. run, snow patrol
8. rocket man, elton john

[captain! it looks like a planet]
9. every planet we reach is dead, gorillaz

10. space dementia, muse
11. planet telex, radiohead

[greetings, we come in peace...captain? do you copy?]
12. still missing (guerro remix), beck
13. spaceboy, smashing pumpkins
14. cover (version), belle & sebastian

[life is good, but i miss earth]
15. starman, bowie
16. things have changed, bob dylan
17. dead to the world, röyksopp


ah space, the final frontier. i hope i've avoided the temptation to turn this mix into a sampler and stayed true to the theme. so many great and underplayed songs but sometimes another song says it better. the captions and pictures reminded me what this was all about- space travel.





on the cutting board (honorable mentions):

supersonic rocket ship, the kinks
good title, good lyrics, good to start the mission, but a better fit for bonnaroo than here

wish you were here (cover), radiohead
my favorite covers: belle&sebastian doing pixies gigantic, cat power doing rolling stone's satisfaction, madeleine peyroux doing elliott smith's between the bars, and this- maybe for another mix

*2008 Ben talking here: this song is still one of my absolute favorite, favorite songs. the original is already perfectly made song, then the cover- acoustic and small, faithful but distinctly thom (feat sparklehorse), quick cut electronic sounds, thom's voice over the cello, geez its gorgeous. absolutely gorgeous.


approaching pavonis mons, flaming lips
a hard one to drop but 'all we have now' is more important

bloodflow, calexico
way underplayed band that teamed up with iron&wine, which i like a lot too. spaceman leaves his girl to charter the unknown "Just to see those eyes of her shine/ Is worth any sum or length of time/ That would fill that space where her love/ Once flowed." check out the 'black light' album for summer tunes that don't involve holla back girls

in space, royksopp
kind of a boring track, ambient techno, mum might have been a good choice

one in the same, my morning jacket
such a beautiful song, stayed until the last cut but not for a space voyage soundtrack. such a beautiful song though

wordless chorus, my morning jacket
this was my last cut to get it on a cd-length, i dropped my morning jacket twice but i really love their stuff, kentucky indie rock with pink floyd-like ideas

lost in space, aimee mann
a good song from the magnolia soundtrack singer-songwriter, loneliness and the great expansive skies like william h. macy's love but nowhere to put it

stars are projectors, modest mouse
modest mouse for nostalgia but we're about the future, not the past

into the void, nine inch nails
catchy, but repetition beyond reason. which one's a better bowie collaboration: w/ NIN singing 'im afraid of americans' or with bing crosby on 'drummer boy?'

da funk, daft punk
space techno orgys, daft punk
wanted to put them in but daft punk somehow wasn't fitting in

neither heaven nor space, nada surf
i'm not sold on nada surf yet, i like this song though

when disaster strikes, busta rhymes
busta is nuts and i love it. but he'd be alone in a string of alt indie rock, best to lead into him with a better mix

february stars, foo fighters
for laura. but she's heard this song so much, and we're all about "exploring" music here, space as a metaphor for exploring new music

parallel universe (live, slane castle), rhcp
a cool take on the rhcp classic, i wish i could keep it in but it was live so it had a lot of down-time, no good with a mix where minutes are scarce

little dawn, ted leo & pharmacists
group of rockers that everyone seems to like but not play. i cut this just to get the mix to fit on a cd, but haven't missed it too much

come home, the coral
one of my favorite groups, they had a hit 'dreaming of you' but i like their 'invisible invasion' cd better. i wanted to use this with snow patrol's 'run,' so the coral was the space voyager's nagging doubts... "Come home you've been gone too long...I see you swimming in the blackest seas/ With the magnets and the mysteries"

across the universe, beatles
imagine what it was like to hear this when it just came out

transona five, stereolab
the stars our destination, stereolab
wow and flutter, stereolab
pastorale of post-grunge synthesized indie britpop rock hinting at b-52s with a slightly campy feel. along the lines of ladytron. i checked out this cd with miles davis fusion and liked this one more

over and over again (lost and found), clap your hands and say yeah
really excited about this band, along the lines of arcade fire, modest mouse, ugly beautiful lead singing, if you're into that

subterranean homesick alien (acoustic), radiohead
a personal favorite in acoustic from their unplugged sessions, but i wanted to keep planet telex as the story arc climax

sleep, dandy warhols
i don't know why i cut it

space boogie, karupt
funky, too funky. smacking bitches isn't in line with the theme either

*2008 Ben here: catchy kitschy beat and has nate dogg, but really nothing to do with space and weak lyrics (other than "On fifteen shells, ducked and detailed, de-railed" thats genius, the rest not so much). props if the running line on this song influenced dre's 2001, shout out but no feat. dre in any of the cd's tracks- hard to say who came first, influence or poser.

flux=rad, pavement
this reminds me of an episode of mtv's "daria" when the holidays embodied as teenage rockers came to lawndale and jammed.


*2008 Ben talking: check out around 4:00 mark

if you find the earth boring, portishead
a better title than song, a good trip-hop driving mix selection

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hey! music!

Solid September:

Calexico: Carried to Dust (such a great album black light, ill always try out calexico. geez that song "missing" is perfect lonely summer night drive, matching set with bookend track 'bloodflow,' impeccable, heartbreaking)


Okkervil River: The Stand Ins (hesitant, not convinced on this one)

Fujiya & Miyagi: Lightbulbs (charming live show)

Girl Talk: Feed the Animals (tons of hype, burnt into the earth hype, following the hype)

Mogwai: The Hawk Is Howling (college nerd radio)


Then to October (MLB) and miscellaneous months:

Deerhoof: Offend Maggie (i hope it's perfect and becomes my obsession, because "believe ESP" was. they did a really interesting thing in taking pre-release to the extreme- releasing the song before it was even recorded. the sheet music was posted and open to anyone recording their own rendition)

The Sea and Cake: Car Alarm (great, great live show at Empty Bottle, laid back balding dudes playing pop rock)

Deerhunter: Microcastle (eh)


Still occupied with all the stuff from 2007 (hey, how about that burial?!) and overreacting to how great radiohead is (currently bangers and mash), but these 08 offerings look pretty swell.

by the way, do the music players work? they're key.

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lamping, the skeletal type

"hunters go into the forest at night, flood an area in light, then shoot, or capture, the animals as they panic and run from their hiding places"

though kevin barnes describes lamping to exorcise all the thoughts, nightmares, and fantasies from his crazy brain, of montreal's 'skeletal lamping' tracks themselves have been flushed out, making the rounds after an unusually early leak. another unusual move is releasing id engager, their final track, which i wouldve held onto as long as i could. well no matter, finally got around to playing through it now and it is definitely bat-crazy. and great.

more to follow

here's that single.


and the crazier first track.

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kid A on LP

"wow yoon, assclown? hardly necessary. i didn't explain myself well, i was honestly looking for details. appreciated the audio lesson, but i'd also be curious as to what specifically sounded different on kid a. is it just high/low ends, tinniness?" -from this earlier post


aside from the a-clown comment, i think my post was very courteous, apologies. im no good at describing sounds but you know the sound a cymbal makes? in person it has this really bright percussive sound at impact and then really slowly tapers into quiet. on mp3s it extinguishes pretty quickly, on vinyl less so. on the other side when you have a full orchestra making noise, its a lot clearer on vinyl to hear the individual instruments (picking out voices isnt what makes it good for me, it just happens that when sounds are less garbled and artifact is that individual voices are easier to discern). the biggest strength in vinyl ive noticed is that it handles really quiet and really loud layered sounds well.

kid a i guess is an unusual choice because its electronic instrumentation, but has a lot of quiet moments and build up to layered full sound too. in an album that has a lot of drawn out vocals over layers of electric piano drone, guitar riffs, some noise on loop, and bass drums, and when not of it is garbled, kid A makes more sense as music. i was sold on it with national anthem, all that stuff going on with the high hat going and big sound and grungy bass line. i guess when i say tinniness, i mean theres just more complete noise coming out of the speakers with a LP. and how to disappear completely with all thats going on there, its like hearing it new all over. theres so much subtlety that gets lost in the drone and ambience in kid A through all the tracks, its more interesting with dynamics, big sound, detail, more musical. and all this can be had in a relatively reasonable medium without a lot of fancy equipment.

also, the turntable dust cover, great for doing lines and other fashionable drugs.

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giving them another listen

the heavy
shout out louds
fujiya and miyagi (great live shows), their 07 album
shortwave set



spent this summer really into a dc punk band called black eyes, self-titled album and cough












also some stevie, songs in the key of life

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vinyl vs mp3

recently some assclown commented unimaginatively on one of my posts. well, here's what i can say.

i wasnt a believer until i tried it out. i actually started vinyl with classical music because the library never had a shortage of classical LPs but few cds (probably because its collection was donated by the old people). and jazz, always a lot of jazz LPs. and if you're playing a LP that hasnt been abused and the needle isnt ancient pops are rarely an issue.

theres a technical answer about analog and digital thats not the whole story. but its a good place to start- digital converts any soundwave into steps that closely confrom to the wave but not exactly. so digital recorders break a second into thousands of parts and sets a certain audio snapshot for each part. kind of like a film, frames for the action. LP avoids the issue because the sound is cut into the vinyl in a groove that is the same shape as the sound wave. so its not frame by frame imitation, its closer to the real thing.
mp3 gets worse because it takes the data off a cd and drops out the high and low ends of the frequencies and compresses everything and gets rid of any data that a programmed formula thinks might be irrelevant. and then finally, all my mp3s come out of a shitty stock sound card in my laptop. we're not talking audiophile, its more like $1.

i used to dismiss this explanation because i didnt think any human ear could detect the difference in frames like our eyes cant really detect the frames in a movie. well, its true you can't tell the frame by frame changes, they blur beyond recognition. but hearing vinyl compared to mp3 revealed how tinny my mp3s were. i could hear a lot more stuff going on that got washed out (details i'd guess were lost in the sound to digital to compressed process). i mean, what would you expect- using the visual analogy, imagine taking a picture of something with a digital camera. each beam of light is translated into a number to represent a color pixel. the picture isnt exactly the same but looks pretty close to the real thing. then take that file and compress it so it's 1/10th the size it was originally. and then look at that picture on a cheap display. vinyl i guess would be taking that picture with color film and developing that, its fewer steps separated from reality, and it doesn't take a magnifier to see that its a better option for detail, color, everything.

for me vinyl isnt as much about accuracy or "warmth" or "richness" (which are all attributed to vinyl) it just sounds a lot better with new details i hadnt heard before. its not like theyre really expensive, $12 or less, i wouldnt look for new music with vinyl, id only get the albums you want to hear over and over. its kind of hard to fully explain it, but vinyls are definitely worth checking out.

finally, it forces you to listen to albums. id been disappointed with a lot of recent music maybe because i heard it all on shuffle, not really giving the album a chance with its track ordering and as a set. but thats personal, you could just as easily force yourself to do that on a mp3 player. listening to a LP is more like an event, takes more of your attention and sounds better. whats to lose?

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today's pretty exciting. i got the Kid A record and am playing it through right now. i saw it on my doorstep and only had enough time to get first track on before i had to go to work. whats that you say, that lps go with designer drugs and ironic tshirts and tight jea- i dont care. its really making music, firstly a small wonder that my hookup is actually producing more music than hiss, that the needle is actually pulling music off of bumps, and finally, its more than a novelty, it actually does sound really good.

plus liner notes with the fleet foxes record! how cool is that!

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redux

hey, how about that fleet foxes, how great is that! hey, when your speakers arent muddy and emit a steady hum you dont have to turn up the volume to hear the music. its not audiophilia, its courtesy to my neighbors. (which its not really in the first place because i didnt break the bank, didnt get anything with "vacuum tubes"). listening to miles davis with the new setup and have a lot less interest for sketches of spain. changing top ten to a more beloved but legitimately great 'porgy and bess.' also rethinking the smashing pumpkins selection, may change to something else entirely.

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