Tag: links

  • How To Destroy Angels

    In case all the hype had completely slipped past you on just about every social media, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, Mariqueen Maandig (also Trent’s wife) and Atticus Ross have been working together in a project called How To Destroy Angels. As of June 1st 2010, their first EP together has been released for free on their website. For an additional fee you can get even higher quality versions. Though fans of NIN are still in debate on whether this is a truely awesome release or a disappointing one, I’m in the first camp. I can recommend to just download it and give it a listen. It’s free.

    You can also check out the rather graphic video for The Space In Between:

  • Pearl Jam – Alive

    In this week’s Origin of Samples-post a classic case of who’s stealing from who. In 1991 a relatively unknown Seattle band Pearl Jam released an album entitled ‘Ten‘. One track from that album would go on to be one of the anthems of its generation at the explosion of the grunge hype: ‘Alive‘.

    Only a year later, on a proverbial attic, some guys got together and made hardcore gabber under the name Neophyte. Eventually a rock guitarist named Jarno Butter (whom I’ve shared some classes with in highschool, but that is a different story) joined their ranks to play with them during live sets. They released many tracks that gained international fame in an underground scene. One of the tracks, released in 1996 under their happy hardcore artist name Bodylotion, was entitled Always Harcore. Although in entirely different genre and not directly sampled from the original, it’s clear the vocal melody from Always Harcore comes directly from Alive.

    It’s not uncommon in the hardcore gabber scene to use tons of samples from other music and film quotes (especially if they contain the word ‘fuck’). What isn’t very common however to sample from their own ranks. And that’s basically what German Europop-band Scooter did in 2004 when they ripped the chorus from Always Hardcore and crammed it into their own hit single One (Always Hardcore). Even though pretty much every Scooter song is based on another song, you can still wonder if they knew the original original.

    To what extent Neophyte stole/were inspired by Pearl Jam and Scooter stole/were inspired by Neophyte or Pearl Jam, I leave you to judge. Here’s the original Alive:

  • The Swinger

    Tristan Jehan created an interesting bit of python code during Music Hack Day SF. It turns any song into a swing version. Example:
    Sweet Child O’ Mine (Swing Version) by plamere

    Read and listen to many more ‘swing remixes’  @ Music Machinery.

  • Brick-wallers in Disguise

    Brickwallers in disguiseToday at the subway station I was greeted by a poster of the band Di-rect. After the departure of the lead-singer, their record company art-director probably decided to change their image from “rock ‘n roll boyband” to “serious musicians”. Of course they had to do a photo shoot to stress this.

    On the surface they seem to have done an okay job. ‘Clever’ photography effect (holding up signs with their own face), trendy contrasting lighting and a style consultant fitted them colour-coordinated clothing. But as far as I’m concerned they violated one big rule of band photography.

    Do. Not. Ever. Stand in front of a brick wall. Even if it’s subtly painted white. Rock ‘n Roll Confidential has Hall of Shame of band photography and one thing that’s very common is the “brick-wallers”. People without any imagination in desperate need of a backdrop, who decide to ‘casually’ lean against a brick wall. Granted, most of the photography itself is far worse than this album shoot, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a deadly sin to ever pose in front of a brick wall. Click though the gallery linked above to understand why.

  • Led Zeppelin – When the Levee Breaks

    There’s a number of drum samples that are have become the grand daddy’s of entire genres and have been extensively used in hiphop, dance and such. I could talk about the Amen break, but luckily there’s an excellent documentary on that. There’s a more peculiar history surrounding the drum loop from Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks. Or more specifically, an old blues song called When the Levee Breaks.

    In 1927 the levee did break and cause the Great Mississippi Flood. Two years after, Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie wrote, performed and recorded a song entitled When the Levee Breaks. The lyrics deal with losing everything in the flood and having to move from South to the North (Chicago), thus also exporting many blues musicians and blues lovers there.

    More than 40 years later in 1971, Led Zeppelin dusts off the original and makes their own reworked cover version, in essence ‘sampling’ it and making it into something new. On drums as always is legendary drummer John Bonham. The track opens with just a few seconds of his drums.

    The fact that it’s just the drums however makes it ideal for sampling and when sampling takes a rise starting in the late 80’s Bonham’s drums end up on many, many records. Not just whole but cut up as a breakbeat as well. Just to name a few where the drum loop is intact: Eminem’s Kim, Coldcut & Steinski’s Beats & Pieces and Enigma’s Gravity of Love.

    The ultimate bit of irony is that while all the music I linked above is on YouTube, the YouTube video containing the original 1929 version of When the Levee Breaks has been pulled due to copyright claims by Sony, despite it being way pas it copyright date. So for now, here’s the sampled ‘original’ by Led Zeppelin:

  • David Bowie – Crystal Japan

    David Bowie’s instrumental track Crystal Japan has a rather odd history of how it slipped into the public attention. When it was written and recorded in 1979 and still had the title Fuje Moto San, it was intended for the album Scary Monsters, but was discarded. Instead it was used in a Japanese commercial for the sake Crystal Jun Rock which also featured Bowie himself.  As a result, the track was released as a single in Japan and mostly forgotten about afterwards.

    Then in 1994, Nine Inch Nails’ ground-breaking album The Downward Spiral comes out. On it is a beautifully haunting instrumental track titled A Warm Place. The main keyboard motive isn’t just similar (as Wikipedia puts it), it’s identical to parts of Crystal Japan. And even though it’s not a direct sample from the original track, it’s clear where the melody came from.

    So is this blatant stealing? No, it turns out, Trent Reznor (the man behind NIN) is quite the David Bowie fan. So much that he doesn’t just sample Bowie’s voice for a remix of that album (at 4:29), Bowie and Reznor were working together on multiple projects. Nine Inch Nails goes on tour with David Bowie. There’s multiple tracks floating on the web of Bowie and Reznor playing songs of both Bowie and NIN together live. Reznor remixed the track I’m afraid of Americans. Ironically for the video, Reznor plays a creepy stalker who follows Bowie. To top  it off in 1997 Reznor puts a track of Bowie on the soundtrack of the 1997 film Lynch film Lost Highway. If you want to know more about the influence and their views on how everything’s connected there’s a 4-part interview with Bowie and Reznor on YouTube that starts here.

    David Bowie’s Crystal Japan can be heard here:

  • “Buy me a drink” explained

    You may have noticed the “buy me a drink”  link that shows  below every post (also in all the places besides b-sting.com where it is crossposted, like Livejournal and Facebook). Two people now have asked me what that’s about. I’ll explain in case it leads to misunderstandings.

    B-sting.com is my music website where I not only talk about music, but also plan to release my own stuff some day soon. A lot of the music will probably be given away for free (partially at least, with an option to ‘support the artist’), so as a business model for my ‘internet venture’ that’s kinda sucky.

    “Buy me a drink” is basically nothing more than a donate button. The cap a street musician puts in front of him where you can toss in a coin if you like it. But “donating” sounds like I’m a starving artist, a charity in need of financial help. I don’t need money, I have a well-paid day-job and this is blogging/musician thing is what I do because I love doing it. Any artist with stars in his eyes dreams of one day ‘living off art alone’, but I’m realistic, so for now happy with just a complimentary drink. And who knows, maybe one day all the drinks combined make up for a bit of the expenses I make to do what I love doing.

    So I liked the idea of the “buy me a beer“-plugin for WordPress (except that I don’t like beer, but luckily you can customize the plugin). It’s like saying “hey, I like what you’re onto there, let me buy you drink, my friend!”. Just like in real life. For those familiar with Facebook, it’s sort of the ‘like’-button of my website.With the difference that you can buy a drink and you decide what you pay. Two cents, 2 euro’s, doesn’t matter, you can toss a Zimbabwean dollar in the hat if you like. You can even buy me a drink irl, if you want.

    Let it be clear no one needs to press that button and buy me drinks. It is completely optional. It’s not like when every one buys a round and you have to too. And even though I do admit I greatly appreciate the gesture if you do, I won’t like you any less if you don’t. To be quite honest, so far no one has bought me a drink at all. So no, I’m not raking in big dough. But that’s to be expected since there’s no music yet, only blog posts for one and a half months. And if you don’t want to give money, a “great post!”-reply or a “Like” on Facebook every now and then suffices too. Not that lack of replies has ever stopped me from blogging either though.

    P.S. Has any one ever spotted a street musician who plays Gimme Some Money? They totally should.

  • Even the Zombie Dance Parade is dead

    Even the Dance Parade 360 has been killed off now. A press release was issued stating that the due to disappointing pre-sales the event was cancelled. In other press releases it was made clear that the event will no longer be held in Rotterdam. Though it’s not clear whether they mean “ever at all”, it also implies they’re thinking of organising it elsewhere. The question is: who will have them? Then again, the North Sea Jazz festival was once persuaded to leave The Hague and come to Rotterdam, so who knows.

    Still, my previous statement still stands: there’s no use keeping it on life support. The Dance Parade is dead.

  • Quit MySpace Day

    Quit MySpaceIt’s not just time to not log into MySpace any more, it’s time you delete your account.

    Let’s be honest. Despite MySpace having just about every band you’d ever like on there, the website itself is a piece of crap. Always has been. And so is it’s functioning as a social website. Nevermind that the design still looks like someone hand-coded it in his mom’s basement, nevermind the fact that whoever designed it missed Interface Design class 101, nevermind that there’s better social sites and music related sites to be on. Those are not the reasons to leave MySpace and never have been, else you would have done so long ago.

    Let’s look at the reason you are on there. All your friends are on there and so are all your favourite band, sharing their scoops and music. That’s about it. So you are there too. Understandable. You can handle the  add-requests from random idiots you never met before who then continue to spam your list with their new releases and parties you’re never goin to attend. But there’s something bigger going on. And it affects you.

    Obviously already knew that media mogul Ruport Murdoch (also launched Fox News, just saying) bought MySpace years ago for $580 million and he intended to make billions with it. And you’ve probably already experiencing that you’re Facebook account is more active and interesting than your old Myspace account you hardly ever log into. And you’d be right, several sources already made pretty graphs of the steady decline in MySpace’s market share and user base. Despite them desperately launching new gizmo’s like a ticketing service and a music subscription service (not yet, but ‘soon’). Also, MySpace has made a $150 million loss and Rupert Murdoch calls it a big mistake. But that’s business, that doesn’t affect you, the user, right? Wrong.

    A Financial Times article from December last year entitled The Rise and Fall of MySpace, though lengthy, paints the picture clearly. Behind the scenes, the ‘financial people’ and the people who created MySpace (Tom, you probably know him cause you never deleted that first friend who automatically added you) have always argued. But MySpace is on a short leash from its owners and they are not interested in rolling out new features and improvements. They are interested in profit, or at the moment, not making a loss. Which means ad revenues need to go up and spending on ‘hip new features’ down. They’ve already admitted defeat in the race against Facebook and in June last year fired 30% of its staff. My prediction: more ads on MySpace and stuff you need to click through and don’t want. In short, it’s not going to get better, not on the user-side any way.

    And that’s exactly what Andrew Dubber demanded in his post Happy ‘Quit MySpace’ Day. In October 2009 he summed up what was wrong with MySpace and demanded it would be remade from the ground up to utilize its ace card: the fact that the website has every band in the known universe on it. Although he is in no position as a single user to make demands, he declared the 24th of October ‘Quit MySpace’ Day. If MySpace is the same piece of crap by then as it was a year ago, he (and I) would like to ask you to quit your account on Myspace. Because that would take away MySpace’s biggest asset: you, the user, the customer. All your favourite bands and friends won’t die, they’ll just go elsewhere. To some place better.

    Don’t just stop logging into MySpace, but delete your account completely. Of course, you’re completely free to do that right now if you have no hope left, but if you have a flair for the dramatic do it on the 24th of October. Mark your calender, don’t forget to celebrate Quit MySpace Day.  Even if you have already quit.

  • Ray Brown Orchestra – Go down dying

    An interesting story surrounds the soundtrack of the otherwise rightfully forgotten film The Adventurers (1970). The music for the soundtrack is by Antonio Carlos Jobim and is arranged and conducted by Eumir Deodato (remember this name!).  In the same year famous producer/composer  Quincy Jones decided to re-score the whole thing and produced his own funked up version of the album. It was recorded by  the Ray Brown Orchestra, featuring Tom Scott and … Eumir Deodato. On that album is the the track Go Down Dying, which you can hear in the YouTube clip below. You’ll instantly recognise the intro as the main theme from Björk’s 1993 track Human Behaviour. Even though apparently there was some initial fuss about the usage of the sample, things seem to have been straightened out fine. Cause guess who ended up remixing the Björk song Isobel from her next album and did most of the orchestral arrangements for the album she did after that; Homogenic ? Yep: Eumir Deodato. Coincidentally the songs Human Behaviour, Isobel and Bachelorette (from Homogenic) are part of a trilogy of songs spanned over three albums. In a way Eumir Deodato has contributed to all three songs.

    Enjoy the original Go Down Dying: