Category: Music - Page 38 - UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

New Mars Volta album out today

I haven’t even listened to it yet (ripping the CD now), but I just wanted to draw attention to the new Mars Volta album out today, The Bedlam in Goliath.

These guys are quite possibly the most adventurous band out there in the “mainstream” today. (Whether or not their music is what you call “mainstream,” it’s certainly no sign of obscurity to have your album featured in Target’s Sunday circular.) It’s progressive rock for a new generation. But call it what you will; how can you not like a couple of guys who look like this?

NPR has a great review of the album.

Proof that music and techno-geekery go together (or, Why Paul Slocum is my hero)

I’ve been a fan of Paul Slocum‘s various projects for several years now, but this takes the cake. From his blog post about a new project:

The program generates house music by progressively calculating the digits of pi and feeding them into an algorithmic music generator that I wrote…

The song is infinitely long and static. Every byte of the audio output is predetermined, even though only a small amount of it has actually been listened to. So you can jump to any measure in the song and it will always play the same music for that measure.

And it gets only more delightfully geeky from there.

The vocals just aren’t there, dawg! (For that matter, neither is anything else)

Yikes. I just opened up the iTunes Store and was confronted with the new Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul single, “Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow.” Yeah, that’s just what the world needed. Actually, it’s pretty instructive for American Idol contestants in terms of not taking Paula’s (or Randy’s, for that matter) opinion too seriously. Paula’s voice is so pitch-corrected that she sounds like one of the text-to-speech automatons built into Mac OS X. And the arrangement and production are so blandly unoriginal that… well… honestly, it’s hard to even describe them because, how do you describe “nothing”?

Let’s just hope Simon Cowell didn’t have anything to do with this.

Magma iss de Hundin!!!

OK, I don’t actually know what “iss de Hundin” means, but it’s a phrase that seems to come up a lot in Kobaian. At any rate, Magma is a legendary French prog rock/avant garde jazz band, led by drummer Christian Vander, who made up his own language for the band’s Coltrane-meets-Wagner post-apocalyptic jazz-rock-opera concept. (And now I’ve reached my per-post hyphen limit.) They beat Coheed and Cambria to it by three decades, and did it in an incomprehensible Germanic Esperanto to boot.

I used to have a Magma tribute website, back in the days before blogs and Wikipedia and YouTube. I took it down years ago, but fortunately the band has kept up playing. I saw them in Chicago in 1999 and it was a highlight of my musical life. They’re still going strong, as evidenced by this 2006 video. Check it out!

Of course, the truly indoctrinated will probably prefer this clip from 1970. Lip syncing on French TV, “American Bandstand”-style. “Stoah” of all things. Imagine the trauma of an unsuspecting viewer, just tuning in for the supersonic screeching at the beginning. The world’s collective tolerance for the bizarre was certainly much higher back then.

Division by Zero is possible after all!

OK, it’s not. But my latest musical creation, the 3-song EP ÷0 [Division by Zero] (Volume One), now has an official release date of January 15, 2008, and I’ve submitted it via TuneCore for online distribution through iTunes and a few other services. It will probably begin to show up in their catalogs sometime in March; I’ll post more about availability as I learn about it. In the meantime, you can read more about the project (and listen to medium-quality streaming versions of all of the tracks) here.

Also, special thanks to my spitting-image son for acting as a stand-in for my 1978 self in the cover photo taken (last summer) in one of my favorite places from that time, Two Harbors, Minnesota.