I’ve talked about clone songs before. Sometimes it’s obvious a clone song tries to rip off the original, but sometimes you can wonder whether it is meant as a tribute to the composers favourite music or simply that they didn’t even realise they were using a melody of their favourite artist. In the case of Shine a Little Light by Dutch artist Van Velzen it might be the latter. The song’s vocal line strikes a remarkable resemblance with Raise Your Hands by Bon Jovi. The most obvious clue there was no ill intention when writing the song is that in 2008 Van Velzen performed as the opening act for Bon Jovi (source in Dutch) when he performed in The Netherlands.

Homage or Fromage? You decide:

If there’s one bit of solid advice I got in 2012 that I would like to share with you in 2013, is that you don’t have to chase dreams to be happy doing what you do. The advice was given in a comic by Maaike Hartjes (she makes great comics by the way, check out her stuff) that I’d like to share here:

One of my currently favourite toys is Infinite Jukebox by the people at the Echo Nest. The Echo Nest is a spin-off from research done at MIT Media Lab. They analyse music and music contextual data and make programs and intelligent services based on that.

The Infinite Jukebox is a simple, but brilliant example of this. You can upload an mp3, their tool analyses the song, finds the beats and notes the similarities on those beats, which are essentially ‘skip points’. Once you press play, the song will play and seamlessly skip back and forth through the song on those skip points, creating an infinite length version of your favourite song. In case you hadn’t heard Gangnam Style enough yet.

More on the workings of the Infinite Jukebox on Paul Lamare’s blog. Note: it does require Google Chrome or Safari to work.

I got this in the mail today:

In October 2010 I posted about Mid-Town’s Rotterdam shop closing on my personal blog. Last week however, the curtain dropped permanently for what was left of Mid-Town (the labels and webshop). They went bankrupt.

What’s kind of interesting to see from the official papers, is that with Mid-Town some infamous labels also cease to exist: Rotterdam Records, DJ Paul Elstak’s Forze Records and Terror Trax Records.

It’s sad to say but it’s the last in a long string of ‘gabber landmarks’ that have disappeared: the demise of the FFWD dance parade (also in 2010, while not strictly hardcore, usually had a large hardcore following), the radio program Turbulentie on the also bankrupt radio station Stads Radio Rotterdam over a decade ago and the infamous Parkzicht club. Like it or not these things were part of Rotterdam’s cultural heritage and something that gave Rotterdam a voice in the rest of the world.

While a common slogan among gabbers is “hardcore will never die“, it can be concluded that gabber is dead. In Rotterdam at least. Or that it’s least a spirit without a body.

As a theremin owner and user (well, if you considering making those alien noises all day and giggling about it as being a ‘user’), I can recommend this tutorial which is absolutely true! No really, would I lie?

I’m the proud owner of a Weird Sound Generator, produced by Sascha Neudeck. The musicians from Rooie Waas own one too, plus a Cacophonator II also by Neudeck. In their latest video Rooie Waas gives a great impression what you can do with those horribly beautiful pieces of machinery:

On the 14th (Amsterdam) and 20th (Rotterdam) of September 2012, you can see Rooie Waas and the machinery in action at their album release double party.

Die Antwoord has a new video out: Baby’s on Fire. Besides it being an awesome piece of work, it also contains a very old school rave sample in there. Does any one recognise Anasthasia by T99?

Honestly though, the sample in T99′s track is a sample too. Where the so called ‘Orch Hit‘ sound came from can only be answered by the producers behind T99; Patrick De Meyer and Phil de Wilde. You may that last one under the name Phil Wilde (whom I mentioned before), one of the two producers behind 2Unlimited.

There’s another sample in Anasthasia by the way; the “Music, maestro! Please?” comes from Bring It On Up by Love Unlimited Orchestra

Swwweeeeet! Check out the classic Moog Google coded and put up on their front page for Bob Moog‘s birthday! Wish he was still around to see that.

If you’re late for the party, you can find the synth on Google’s Doodle page.

I moved the site to a new server! B-sting.com has been kindly hosted by Jocelyn of Sugarcube.net for a few years, but since I got my own server at Pretty Hate Machine (not-related to the NIN album), I moved all my sites there. This one has been last to move, because migrating WordPress was a new challenge to me.

Yesterday the booking form for a gig couldn’t be filled in and e-mail sent to any address on the domain wouldn’t arrive for a few hours. Woops! But that’s fixed now.

Now that that’s out of the way, maybe I should get back to what I was planning to do, namely get EP02 out that I promised in my New Years post? About that: three tracks are pretty much done and might need a bit of tinkering before I’m completely satisfied. Then there’s also the issue of track 4. Every EP needs at last 4 tracks.

So right now the main obstacle is to create track 4. Granted I have plenty of half-assed ideas and experiments lying about, but stomping an actual track out of it is easier said than done. Wish me luck!