The champagne thing is just a way of saying he'll be performing drunk.
sand, huh.
hearing the record can have it's own mystery. In "Catfish Blues" done by Son Thomas and recorded by Axel Künstner in 1980, there's this great rumbling rhythm sound that's hard to pin down. Great but mysterious sound.
Turns out it's someone who threw a handful of sand on a wooden front porch and rubbed it with the end a broom handle.
(both the track, a very bawdy version of the song, and the collection it's on-- LIVING COUNTRY BLUES-- are highly recommended)
Künstner: Umlaut blues is unexplored territory. Soon we'll have Death Umlaut Blues bands burning down churches and worshipping Satan.
Is the jaw harp what some would [problematically, racistly, anti-semitically] call a jew harp?
When I was a little kid, I was in Brownies, and we had a guy show us weird folksy instruments that included the mouth/jaw/jew harp, and he insisted to us eight-year-olds that it was from 'juice-harp', because when you played it, you drooled a little.
I bought it when I was eight, but I think the explanation was for the moms.
ben, can you guys do podcasts?
I just clicked the comments to say that I'd never heard it called anything other than a jews harp or a mouth harp, but Cala beat me there.
It is, Cala. We don't do podcasts, unfortunately. I am going to be recording the show b/c I need to submit something for this quarter's application, assuming I actually try to get a show, so I thought I could just upload an mp3 of that. But it would be fairly degraded in quality, I think, plus you'd have to listen to me talking—ugh. So I might, as a one-time-only! thing, and partly because the times I'm broadcasting will be divided up anyway, just upload the pure music goodness beforehand. We'll see.
One of the annoying things about laptop music is that when you see it performed, the performers are just sitting there clicking at a computer
Are you fucking kidding me? I've never even heard of this.
The name has long puzzled me greatly. I have never known a person of Jewish extraction to specialize in the lamellaphone, though I'm sure there are such cases. Then again, there have occasionally been Jewish guys in the NFL, but nobody calls football the "Jew's game."
Laptop music. Don't pull a muscle getting your groove on.
More laptop music. Much funnier than the other one.
You laugh, but you can really hear the difference when someone is just turning knobs listlessly.
A conversation I had years back:
Me: The whole "Jew's harp" thing is so racist. It's like "Jews are cheap, so when they play a harp, it is just a little metal thing with one prong."
Friend: It's not racist at all--you just made that up. They call it a Jew's harp because it sounds Klezmer-y.
Only now do I realize that my friend was making up her etymology, too.
Oh lordy that link in 13 is good. What is that dude doing with his mouth? And that guy is world championship material?
I don't get it. What makes the music laptop music? Just that it is made live by turning knobs hooked up to a laptop? Is it a requirement to suck?
OT: You know what I hate? I hate when you have an argument, and you know you are right, but no one really has any evidence, so you let the issue drop. And then, like, five years later, you finally have the evidence so you go back to, for instance, you wife, and you say "Remember that argument we had five years ago? See, see, I was right!" and then the other person completely denies ever having said the totally wrong thing you know they said and now can prove they were totally wrong about.
I hate that.
Sometimes, rob, it's very obvious where you went to college.
What? Dude, have Ogged and I not both mentioned that claiming non obvious things as obvious warrants a punch to the face?
Luckily, I am now thousands of miles from both of you.
Perhaps it's only obvious to people who know many alumni of said college.
18: Dear god, it's the story of my marriage.
18: Dear god, it's the story of my marriage.
Maybe you should try being right more often.
18. people who bring up arguments from 5 years ago deserve whatever pain they get.
ATTN CALA AND THE STREAMING-AUDIO DEPRIVED: this file will be deleted on Saturday. It's big—95 megs—and contains some oggs amidst the mp3s. And if you listen to them out of order, I'll kill you.
Hmm. Error when trying to unzip the music.tar file? Hrmph. Only two mp3s came through.
Fuck! Everything works fine for me...
Oh, it must be because there are some characters that aren't allowed on windows (you're using windows, right?) in one of the filenames. I'll get right on that; won't be but a minute.
Of course, it will take a long time to upload the file again.
At long fucking last, it is uploaded. Hopefully I was correct in thinking that (a) it was a character issue and (b) the ampersand was the only offending character.
Hm, the ligature in that one filename is probably going to be a problem ... fuck.
Well, I'm going to bed anyway; if it doesn't work still, I'll try to get something working tomorrow.
I'll take advantage of this music thread to confess that I played a gig with a cover band tonight at a fratty bar, and we played Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" [sic], and I kind of enjoyed it. Secretly.
Am I going to hell?
That's what cover bands do, play popular songs. Watch that laptop music in 13. Makes "Since U Been Gone" seem like musical genius.
youtube's down for maintenance. But thanks for the vote of confidence.
Upon further reflection, enjoying it makes you gay. So yes, you're going to hell.
Ah, that'll be warm. We gays like warm things. Thanks, gswift!
Yeah, cover bands always play songs that at least one member of the band doesn't like. Or secretly likes, but claims not to.
I've never done it -- not really a good enough rock guitar player -- but mates play in cover bands and seem to quite enjoy it: it can pay well too. You could, if you were good, more or less make a living at it.
"Since U Been Gone"
Is that the one with teh chorus that goes "I ain't missin' you... I ain't missin' you... I ain't missin' you at all" or approximately so? If so, yes, you are going down.
Oh, no that one is apparently by David Wilcox. Since I have not heard the Clarkson sound, you can get by with a few millenia in purgatory for making me recollect the Wilcox beat.
Hm. Apparently a ton of artists recorded that execrable thing. I don't know whose it is originally -- Tina Turner did it, Tyler Hilton, Alison Krauss, One Tree Hill, John Waite,... and that's just on the first page of Google hits. I confess ignorance.
John Waite (formerly of the Babys and Bad English) did it first, released in 1984.
(The question remains, why would so many artists record such an objectively lousy song?)
I'd say I missed out by not reading Unfogged last Saturday night, but I was in a similar condition at the time, trying to push a car out of a snow bank in the middle of a frozen lake (our driver was sober, but inexerienced in winter driving). (And we were ice fishing, so the being on a frozen lake part was on purpose.)
I dreamed about Ben w-lfs-n's radio show last night. We were about to serve the gnocchi and saltimbocca for Catherine's birthday dinner when I remembered that Ben's show was going to air—which was the real reason for the party. We assembled at the table and ate dinner in silence as Benji played teh noise.
52: I grabbed them Cala; and can clean the names and put them somewhere for you temporarily if you'd like. You can mail me using this pseud at gmail, if so.
52: did you get any sort of error message? Are you extracting using `tar zxf' or with some kind of gui tool?
trying to push a car out of a snow bank in the middle of a frozen lake
I wore a jacket to take PK to school this morning.
The beauty was, after 10 minutes of trying, we just said "aw, fuck it" and went into the ice shack to sleep it off. We had to get 6 guys to help us in the morning. Turns out that spinning the tires on not-frozen-enough lake ice will dig you down through the ice pretty quick.
So you went and slept in a shack on a not-frozen-enough lake. Slept. In freezing weather. On a surface that wasn't quite frozen enough.
Yeah, that sounds like a blast.
55: the problem is the special character in track 06's name.
ah, ok. I realized too late that that was probably it.
In something like an hour a new version will be on the server, with no special characters anywhere.
53: I'm glad you brought this up, since I too wanted to defend some laptop music. I do know a lot of people who bitch about the lack of performance aspect to it though, which I found very weird when they were talking about a local celebrated DJ duo.
Ben, I'm extracting the files using the default Mac unzipper tool ("Stuffit Expander"), and it's unzipping the first three tracks, and then quitting with an error message ("Unspecified Stuffit Engine Internal Error")
64: Cala; if you run the `Terminal' app and go to the directory you put the file in (if it is the Desktop, then cd ~/Desktop will do it) then use `tar xfz files.tgz' you'll get a subdirectory called files, but it will be missing the one problematic track, I think.
Well, I was meaning to post over here that I had enjoyed my lunch today with Teo; somehow it wound up on the Failure thread, thus casting undue aspersions on my opinion of Teo (and of myself). FTR, I do not think either of us is a failure.
Anybody in the NYC region next Friday (the 19th) can come lift a cup with me to celebrate my departure from the city, and to pray for the war with Iran to somehow not happen (assuming it has not then already happened). I/we will be at Chumley's, on the corner of Barrow and Bedford, beginning around 6 or 6:30. If you will be there, let me know.
You sound really chipper, Ben. You guys that hard up for DJs?
I'm listening! There's actually a sweet little folk melody on right now, rather than the arrhythmic noise I was led to expect. Oh, there it comes.
The guitar and violin track (I think) that has come on after the impromptu sound effects workshop is pretty awesome.
I like the earlier stuff better. Where's that infernal playlist page? I can never find it from the main site.
Thanks ben!
All the files end with .mp3.wav or .ogg.wav. Really these are .mp3 and .ogg files, not .wav files, right?
I just renamed them all, chopping off the .wav. I think my iTunes screwed up the genre labels, though, because I'm listening to something that sounds like random sound effects but is labelled as rock.
death is only a dream...
Some of these tunes need more melody.
I like the earlier stuff better. Where's that infernal playlist page?
The playlist won't be up until later; we didn't have a computer where we were.
All the files are mp3 or oggs, not wavs---that's a side effect of a too-hasty script adaptation.
JM, the arrhythm was earlier in the show. This one wasn't that representative, I guess, so you'll have to keep listening.
So you went and slept in a shack on a not-frozen-enough lake. Slept. In freezing weather. On a surface that wasn't quite frozen enough.
It was more passed out than slept, but yes. In an 8 x 12 shack with 6 2 x 2 holes to and through the ice. I think we're going to make it an annual trip.
Goddamn you. Now I have Since U Been Gone in my head. AGAIN. After having it in my head for like a week after New Year's.
Who was the saw player on the show?
Was it her: www.SawLady.com ?