Dustin LindenSmith

http://www.pitchfork.com/news/46600-listen-radioheads-entire-kid-a-and-ok-computer-albums-as-8-bit-video-game-music/

Surprising well-done recasting of Radiohead albums as arcade music from the 80s. Annoying after awhile, but engrossing to hear how faithful they were to the original recordings.

Was reading the New Orleans Jazz Festival line-up this morning, which is filled with a bunch of weird-ass shit having very little to do with jazz:

http://lineup.nojazzfest.com/

The Eagles, Tom Petty, The Beach Boys, John Mayer, Bon Iver, Florence and the Machine, Feist, My Morning Jacket, Steve Earle, Ani DiFranco, Foo Fighters, Bonnie Raitt... Some of those acts I wouldn't mind seeing, but only God knows why they're at the New Orleans jazz festival.

Anyway, I came across this cool video on Herbie's artist page for the site:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrgP1u5YWEg#!

I love bassist Dave Holland's facial expression around the 4-min mark; his face finally betrays what he's thinking: "Jesus Herbie, you're on fucking fire, man." Love it. Love that 1980s Yamaha DX-7 synth on stage, too. This must be an older video because Herbie mostly plays on a Yamaha Motif these days, I think.

Pat's solo is pretty inspired, too. What is that solar-panel-looking thing at the bottom of his guitar's body?

I just watched the Oprah episode from this week where she had Peter Frampton on, along with the Backstreet Boys and Shaun Cassidy. When I youtubed Peter Frampton, this fairly trippy video came up:



I thought it was really good. He looks so, so different now, too.

This is a pretty trippy experience. Plug in the address of your childhood (or current) home that can be mapped with Google Maps (and has been Streetviewed), and then sit back and watch the music video unfold with your home in it.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

It really throws you for a loop when you see your home incorporated into the video itself.

Goddamnit, I love this! New Lanois project, appearing at this year's Montreal Jazz Festival but sounding so fresh, so beautiful. And who in the hell is Trixie Whitley?! She's wonderful. And I think 22?!

I've just heard about this NY-based producer and rapper named Theophilus London. He seems to be unsigned at the moment, just spreading the word by word of mouth. I just downloaded his mixtape last week and have been enjoying several of the tracks quite a bit.

Here's the download link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?uznwwky4kkq

I first got turned on to him from a video of this nice and funky slow jam he does which features a girl dancing the audience that I sort of fell in love with (she reminds me of my wife, to be honest) and just couldn't stop watching:

Life Of a Lover from Theophilus London on Vimeo.

Damn. That track's on the mixtape, too.

I just read that Drake won the 2010 Juno Award for Best Rap Recording of the Year and Best New Artist. And... I don't get it. I find his most recent album, like most of his stuff, to be nearly unlistenable. Shitty, boring beats; overly breathy, pretentious vocals; nothing much of any value artistically or musically at all. I don't follow hip-hop enough anymore to make any alternative suggestions, but I can say that a couple of local artists from Halifax such as Jorun Bombay and Ghettosocks have produced albums that are orders of magnitude better than Drake's dreck. Classified also won the ECMA for best rap recording this year; I'm sure that his album would be better. And I say that without even having heard it, but I know his stuff generally and it is not anywhere near as bereft of musical content as Drake's stuff is.

This first is a music video of his tune, Hang Up Your Hang-Ups, which features fantastic film footage of New York City in the 70s:



The next one is one of my favourite tracks from one of my favourite albums of his, 1978's Sunlight. This track is called I Thought It Was You, which deploys his use of the Vocoder, a synthesizer voice patch. From the looks of the video, I have a feeling he wrote this song with the intention of it becoming a pop hit (Wikipedia says it was a hit in the UK).



One of my all-time favourite tracks of his is from the same album, Sunlight, but it's called No Means Yes. I can't find any video footage of it anywhere, but a YouTube video of the album recording is here, featuring the unbelievable album cover. Listen especially to when the entire groove unfolds around the 1:00 mark:



I have that record in vinyl, and the back cover features a photo of Herbie surrounded by all of his various synthesizers, with an inventory listing of all of them on the record sleeve. When I watched him interviewed by Elvis Costello last year, he laughed about all that and said that he runs absolutely all those old analog synth patches from his Yamaha Motif synth and a laptop today. Incidentally, I once rented a Motif for a recording session and lost about an hour of my life just playing with the bass sounds on it...

Okay, I'm sorry, but WHAT the hell is all the hype about for this album? Has anybody here heard it? It has been hyped as Lil Wayne's best album and as one of 2009's greatest rap albums, but really, I think it's mostly crap. By my rating system, out of 25 tracks in total, I've got seven 3-star tracks (which means it's listenable, but not very good) and two 4-star tracks (which means it's quite good). The remaining 16 tracks are all pure garbage. I don't see the appeal. I think rap music might be dying on the vine. At least the mainstream stuff. A new album from a band called The Knux is much, much better. It's called Remind Me In Three Days... and I've got one 5-star and two 4-star tracks rated out of the first four tracks. A world of difference, but it got like no notice aside from a mention in Rolling Stone's top 50 albums of 2009. (Or was it 2008? I can't remember now.)