Introducing the Room 34 Music Player

OK, I didn’t create the music player myself. It’s the freely available, Flash-based XSPF Player. But it’s a pretty slick tool to create a custom music playlist on your own website.

So now I have a convenient link you can click on to open up my music player in its own little pop-up window. It’s preloaded with all 23 tracks from the five LP/EP releases I’ve put out this year. (Yes, five! I’ve been quite prolific. I’ll leave it to you to weigh the “quantity vs. quality” issue.) And, for future reference, there’s a link to it right under the “Room 34 CDs and MP3s” heading in the sidebar on every page.

Enjoy!

Introducing the Bee LP

My latest full-length album project is going to be entitled simply Room 34 but, honoring some of my favorite bands that have released self-titled (or untitled) albums, such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and Weezer (and probably others I’m just not thinking of at this second), it has an unofficial title, based on the cover: The Bee LP.

For the first time since I began recording music in 1990, I’ll be putting out a release with cover art not designed by me. The cover art was drawn by my five-year-old son, Fletcher. It also serves as inspiration for the music on the album… or at least for the titles of the songs, each of which will be bee-themed.

Learn more at the album’s official page!

Something to counteract jazz violin

OK, first off let me say that I have finally arrived at an age where I can honestly and without shame say that, no sir, I just don’t really like A Prairie Home Companion that much. And that’s a tough statement to make as a born-and-bred die-hard self-styled intellectual liberal Minnesota DFLer. (That’s Minnesota’s slightly-more-liberal-and-even-more-union-friendly flavor of the Democratic party.) And I think the thing I dislike most about the program, more than Garrison Keillor’s meticulously cultivated faux-folksiness is the nauseating preponderance of jazz violin in the featured music. I hate jazz violin. (And I love the fact that it has yet to earn its own Wikipedia entry.)

Well, I’ve been working on some new music. In the spirit of the title of a track from the latest Joe Satriani album, I’m currently calling it “Dun Dun Tsh.” And right now I am really enjoying it because it’s drowning out the jazz violin that’s currently playing at the Caribou Coffee where I’m sitting as I write this. I’m not really sure how I’d classify this music, but it’s definitely inspired by the “electronic breakbeat jazz” work of Revolution Void.

Once I have a finished version I plan to release this as part of a new series of free downloads distributed under Creative Commons licensing.

For now, here’s a rough mix for you to enjoy. I said enjoy!

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/dun-dun-tsh-03.mp3]