Posts Tagged ‘music’

Rare MP3

// June 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // diary

I attended a film workshop with Central School of Speech and Drama a short while ago, a rushed thing that was part of a staff ‘team building’ type exercise at work. The staff event was somewhere beyond odd. It was all designed to get everyone  in the office to express themselves, unleash their talents. There were moments awkward enough to make me want to gouge out my own eyeballs. Theatrical types with voices like warm chocolate make you want to listen to poetry. Muscular, athletic people performing interpretive dance are a pleasure to behold (if that’s your cuppa). IT professionals in jeans pushing office chairs round a stage or pretending to be trees just look like contestants on The Generation Game, however. Never again.

I digress, back to the film workshop. For inspiration, our Central dude played us a a stop-frame animation on YouTube made as part of a film project. The animation was nice enough, but I really liked the music. With nothing identifying the tune, it’s at times like this that Shazam comes into its own. I whipped out my phone, and Shazam tagged the track. It took ages to find it, partly because the album the track is from has been discontinued – even the band’s label couldn’t help. Eventually I tracked the music down on YouTube again, and stripped out the MP3 using an online YouTube to MP3 converter:

Homelife - Cho ChoHomelife – Tractor Chain (from the album ‘Cho Cho’)

I’ve written before about rare music – how MP3 files living on the Internet are preserving rock music from 1960s Cambodia that may have disappeared completely if left on corruptable, chewable tapes and scratchable records. Sublime Frequencies in Seattle collect and preserve music from all over the world, and raremp3.co.uk offers a stack of rare music in MP3 format.

Thousands of blogs offer rare tracks, B-sides, remixes and mashups, and rootling through them is nearly as enjoyable as flipping through scratchy-covered dusty LPs in an independent record store. Yes sir, authentic limited edition this one – embedded artwork by Warhol, no less. Only fifty ever encoded. 320 kbit/s? Pffft, that’s tricky. And as for FLAC, you’re having a laugh.

Some rare music online (recommendations welcome)

Radio Phnom Penh

// December 20th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // diary

Radio Phnom PenhRadio Phnom Penh is a compilation of Cambodian rock and pop, rescued from the airwaves and presented in the style of a radio programme from Phnom Penh. I only just found it a few days ago.

Radio Phnom Penh -- Synthesizers East of Siam

While the new generation of karaoke artists like Preap Sovath are flooding Cambodia with modern pop and Khmer covers of Western pop songs (there are Khmer covers of practically everything going) and Thai techno thumps out of wedding parties until 3am, older classic pop seems to survive on the cassette tapes in Khmer taxis, Cambodian radio stations, and obscure recordings floating around the Internet. I have no idea if anyone has done any work to safely archive the catalogues of artists lost in the Khmer Rouge period such as Ros Serey Sothea and Sinn Sisamouth. These older tunes are incredibly evocative, not least because they sound like they’re being blared out of a megaphone speaker at a wedding even listening to them on a laptop, but also because it’s difficult to listen to them without thinking about the recent history of the country. The trailer below from John Pirozzi’s documentary Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten gives a little background.

I don’t know how excited I might have got about Cambodian classic rock had I not gone there, but the story of what happened to the musicians and the culture is completely intertwined with the bombings and the violence, it adds another dimension to the story, a soundtrack. Cambodia’s musicians and artists were specifically targeted for execution by the Khmer Rouge, few survived, and Cambodia’s entire culture was nearly wiped out, a rich culture stretching back centuries to a time of great kings and incredible temple cities. I’m trying to think of parallels in other war zones around the world -- what impact has the ‘war on terror’ had on Iraqi culture, how has the culture of places like the Congo, Somalia or North Korea been affected by conflict or repression?

One band recreating the sound of Cambodian pop music from the 1960s and 70s is Dengue Fever, a Californian surf-rock band with a Cambodian singer. And they rock.

Dengue Fever -- One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula

It wasn’t always iPods and dull vocalists, son…

// February 2nd, 2008 // 4 Comments » // diary

There’s been a lot about Adele in the paper and how she is an up-and-coming star, so I downloaded her debut album, and discovered it was as about as fulfilling as chewing pith while watching ITV. After you get past the fact that she’s got a good voice, there’s nothing much there, nothing to make the hairs on your neck stand up or make you think you’ll listen to the album again. She was being interviewed on Richard and Judy the other day and said she had in fact had her heart broken once, as if that gave her some points towards her NVQ in songwriting. I’m buggered if I know what everyone’s got so excited about – maybe a lot of music journalists and daytime TV producers think everyone is clamouring to hear yet another catatonic coffee-shop soundtrack from yet another young solo songstress with all the spark of a warm bottle of Fanta. Bugger. That.

I remember a time when I was thirteen or fourteen and I went from listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, Pet Shop Boys’ Actually and Michael Jackson’s Bad to discovering album after album after album that actually gave me a physical reaction – prickles, an involuntary grin, the urge to shout very loud and jump off beds. It is rare nowadays that I get the same reaction I did the first time I heard Appetite for Destruction, The Bends, Angel Dust, Maxinquaye, Blood Sugar Sex Magik or Disintegration.

If you’re feeling jaded, it’s easy to imagine that genuinely exciting new music is near-impossible to find. You have to wade through tonnes of detritus. Mika (oh, holy damp Christ in a rusty bucket I hate Mika), soporific Katie Melhua clones, and a recent spate of guitar bands that appear to be completely interchangeable are so thick on the ground it’s like running through wet cornflour. I sometimes wonder if music is going to get more and more boring until it completely flatlines, each song becoming more derivative and less exciting than the last. A lot of music is already there. I could listen to Radio 1, but only Mika irritates me more. One of the best ways of finding new music was Pandora, but that has been shut down outside the US now, leaving a few services like Jango.com or Last.fm for exploring new music, or just downloading something you never heard of before for the hell of it.

Maybe new music is just less exciting when you’re all grown up. Maybe swirling hormones are the key to getting worked up.  In the early 90’s I used to shout and jump off beds to some songs I’d rather forget, and I’ll never forget that in school discos, when James sang Sit Down, we actually used to sit down in the middle of the dance floor. This was the time when Dolby noise reduction on your tape deck was cutting edge, iPods were an insane dream, text messages were written in biro on a torn-off piece of A4 and Twin Peaks scared the shit out of us on Tuesday nights.

So I have found myself diversifying, and looking backwards. When I used to think my tastes in music were catholic, they really weren’t. A copy of the 1812 Overture and the African music from the baked beans advert did not make for an eclectic selection. Now I’m enjoying French-Algerian pop, Californian-Khmer psychedelic rock, Irish folk music, prog rock, much more classical music, and some oldies that had been off the playlist for long enough to feel new again. Despite Adele and the like, music isn’t getting boring any time soon. Even if I am jumping off beds less.

Summertime

// March 25th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // diary

Suffolk

The clocks have gone forward, it’s British Summer Time. The last few months have been a real mixed bag – crap, crap, and some more crap – for a whole bunch of people. You get comments like “What is going on this year?!”.

Roll on summertime. I’m not even talking about the weather, rather that version of summertime that doesn’t even exist, but where everyone’s really happy, like the one the Fresh Prince sang about. The tune below isn’t the Fresh Prince, but for a mood-lifter, it was a toss up between that, the one below, or Here Comes The Sun by the Beatles.

Ella Fitzgerald – Summertime

Eleanor Rigby

// May 25th, 2006 // 2 Comments » // diary

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Beatles – Eleanor Rigby

I always think of this song when I see people talking to themselves, and yesterday I saw three or four. Railway stations are a natural home for middle-aged men who seem to be ranting at the skies. A couple of men at Ipswich station and one at Liverpool Street were pacing up and down the platforms, chuntering away to themselves, occasionally breaking out into a fit of tics, words that may or may not have been profane. People walk around them, past them, circle and maybe stop awkwardly if they find themselves in their path before carrying on, eyes not meeting. The strange thing is, all the men I saw yesterday had smiles on their faces. I sometimes get the impression that they see the station as their dominion, and they are serving some kind of essential function by wandering the councourse, keeping errant commuters in check and shooing pigeons away.

I can’t help but think of stories for people I don’t know, and these people always make me wonder what their stories are – how they got here, where they live, who they know, who they’ve known, whether they were always barking out loud. I don’t know them, and I’ve certainly no right to sit in judgement on their lives - they may be very happy, but they always seem to be the loneliest people in the world.