Category Archives: Music

Room 34 music now on ReverbNation and SoundClick

I’ve recently set up pages on the musician sites ReverbNation and SoundClick. (Basically, these sites are what MySpace was supposed to be, and they don’t suck.)

I’m presently working on a major redesign of this site to make it more portal-like and less generic-WordPress-blog-like, and once that’s in place I’ll integrate ReverbNation and SoundClick content more seamlessly into the site (plus I’m planning to set up some PayPal-Kunaki integration to handle sales of my CDs directly from this site), but in the meantime, here are the links:

http://www.reverbnation.com/room34

http://www.soundclick.com/room34

How did record company consolidation come to this?

For reasons I don’t care to get into, I was singing Leslie Gore’s modest ’60s hit, “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” (best known to Simpsons fans as the “chase music” Chief Wiggum and Homer play in the squad car as they chase Marge and Ruth Powers in the classic episode, “Marge on the Lam”), and as usual when I get a random song in my head, I wanted to crank up the audio clip of it from the iTunes Store for the amusement (or annoyance) of everyone within earshot.

As I was listening to the clip, I noticed something odd. The CD it’s currently available on is from the 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection series, easily identified by its distinctive black-white-and-gray cover designs. I believe these originally featured artists from the A&M label, but eventually expanded to include other artists currently distributed by various labels under the (very large) blanket of Universal Music Group.

And that, I guess, is how ’60s bubblegum pop like Leslie Gore (originally released on Mercury, I believe) ends up being distributed by the same label as Ghostface Killah.

Leslie Gore, now distributed by a rap label

My two RPM projects are both now available on CD

Unnatural Disasters (front cover)Technetium (front cover)In a rare bout of overabundant creativity (or inadequate self-restraint), I have finished not one but two CDs for the RPM Challenge. They’re available now on CD from Kunaki.

The first project, Unnatural Disasters, is a more traditional album of 9 tracks in styles running from straight-ahead rock to prog rock to Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis electric jazz to electronica, and running a little over 36 minutes. The music could serve as a soundtrack for a world tour of the strange places I’ve written about in my blog.

Also unnatural but less of a disaster, the second project, a single 38-minute track, is a piece of minimalist electronica with a structure based on the composition of a technetium atom. It is, appropriately enough, entitled Technetium. Up close, the music is ever-changing, yet on a large scale it is completely static; it doesn’t really go anywhere, but it also never precisely repeats in its entire 936 measures. It went from concept to completed album in about 6 hours, which is the half-life of technetium’s least-stable isotope.

You can learn more about the two projects, and listen to streaming versions of all tracks from the albums, by clicking on their respective covers to the right.

Fall Out Boy falls into GarageBand

Geez, writing headlines like that I could get a job at Entertainment Weekly.

Anyway… although I would not consider myself a fan of Fall Out Boy (in fact, I’ve never even knowingly heard any of their music other than that snippet of the song that plays on the annoying workout guy’s cell phone in the commercial that seemed to be all over TV at one point last year), I can definitely get behind their lead singer Patrick Stump’s embrace of GarageBand. I’m not a pro musician, but I do have a B.A. in music, so I know a thing or two about it. I spent several years doing home recordings with Pro Tools LE (which, as far as I know, is limited from the full version only in the models of Digidesign hardware it accepts as dongles), and I hated how it broke with every OS update (because it was “breaking the rules” of how software should interact with hardware) and how ridiculously convoluted it was to do things as simple as set up a click track!

GarageBand has revolutionized my music making (including my latest project which I just finished as part of the 2008 RPM Challenge, and as Apple’s profile of Patrick Stump shows, it’s had a similar impact on how Fall Out Boy records.