Category Archives: Music

The Bee Gees/Kraftwerk connection… courtesy of Mattel

This is certainly old news, but it’s still news to me.

I’ve been on a big Kraftwerk kick lately, having recently purchased all of their old albums and featured them frequently on my Hall of Prog blog.

I noticed, in the video for “Pocket Calculator” (below), that Ralf is playing a humorously tiny keyboard instrument. But what I didn’t know until I was reading about the album on Wikipedia was the exact identity of the keyboard.

The keyboard is, in fact, a “Bee Gees” branded toy made by Mattel:

Mattel Bee Gees Rhythm Machine

Sweet. You can read more about it here. And, just in case you were doubting that it’s really the instrument used by Kraftwerk, here’s a video of someone playing the melody from “Pocket Calculator” on one. Any Kraftwerk fan will instantly recognize the sound.

09 14 08 00 41 00

09 14 08 00 41 00“09 14 08 00 41 00” is 10-plus minutes of down-tempo, chill-out electronica for a rainy summer night. Composed, recorded, mixed and mastered in less than two hours, it’s fresh from my brain to your ears. Enjoy!

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/room34_091408004100.mp3]

Download MP3 10:20 • 19.3 MB
Right-click the link above and choose “Save as…” or some such.

Coming soon from Room 34: Rubbish Bin Salvage

Room 34: Rubbish Bin SalvageAs I’m looking forward to some exciting new music projects (including some multimedia and live performance possibilities), I’m also looking backwards — to a growing pile of abandoned musical ideas, some of which are nearly complete, some of which are just the roughest of rough sketches, but all of which I put some time into at one point or another, but never finished… and probably never will.

I’ve decided to bare my soul and put these unvarnished (well, mostly) musical efforts out into the world, to see what comes of it. I’ve identified 22 tracks, 65 minutes of music, or at least music-like sounds, and am in the process of assembling them, warts and all (or sometimes just warts), to be released as a free download here. That’s free as in beer and as in speech. I’ll be releasing these tracks with a Creative Commons license to encourage anyone who might find even the slightest shred of a worthwhile musical idea in these tracks to take them and run with them.

I’m calling the album, such as it is, Rubbish Bin Salvage: Rough Mixes, Outtakes & Other Detritus. I even spent nearly five minutes designing cover art for it using a nifty and appropriate stock photo I found.

All that’s left to do is zip up the MP3s and post the file for your downloading pleasure. But since I am also inclined to write copious liner notes no one will ever read, that part will have to wait until at least tomorrow. So for now, enjoy the cover art.

New Coltrane site launched

John Coltrane, Avant Garde Jazz and the Evolution of "My Favorite Things"
I’m pleased to announce the launch of a brand new version of my John Coltrane website.

This is the first step in an ongoing process of splitting my currently mammoth website into distinct, separate websites tailored to specific content areas. Basically, each of the top-level navigation items you see at the top of this page will eventually become its own site.

For now there’s not a lot of new content on the Coltrane site — the big “draw” is the redesign itself. But I’ve added a blog to the site, and eventually I’ll also be adding a multimedia section where I’ll be featuring audio and video clips. Check it out!

This site design was also an opportunity for me to test the effectiveness of my new Room 34 Baseline WordPress theme. Believe it or not, that barebones theme really is the foundation upon which the new Coltrane site is built. So it works!

This site also takes advantage of some cutting-edge web design features: it’s built with HTML 5 and the Blueprint CSS framework, and it uses the emerging @font-face CSS method to render text in a custom font. I am using the free Museo font family throughout the site.