ldopa.net

I always suspected Carl Orff had hid some meaningful English false cognates in that Latin; and now, proof. Make sure you crank up your speakers, especially if you are at work.

Side note: it’s been a while since two ldopans posted in one day. Hooray!

Somehow, if you combine Alanis Morissette and The Black Eyed Peas you get awesome.

…by Dan Le Sac.

If you like Pandora, but wish for a bit more control and range, you might just dig Musicovery. Similar concept, but a very different interface, which brings with it a whole new set of advantages and failings.

A few years ago, L-Dopans Jon, Jeff and I went to see the world premiere of the Ballet Mechanique in Lowell Mass. It was a particularly Modern piece of music, interesting and intellectual, and honestly no worse than anything composed by the archvillain of music composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I suspect that these scores aren’t much better in implementation, but they sure are fun to look at.

(Thanks to the eversoawesome Music Thing)

Well, Dubya’s at it again. Whenever given the choice, he’ll opt for corporate warfare over human welfare, and his primary method is to silence all opposition irrespective of its rightness. His certainty is sure indication of his contempt for the truth.

In this case, he wants to eliminate public broadcasting. That’s right, the people who brought you Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and the Electric Company, because they teach people to read, must go. This follows his attack on NASA where the administration changed the mandate of NASA so that it is officially no longer concerned with the health of the Earth. It follows his attack on the US school system — terrible though it is — by slashing funding to the poorest districts.

The Republican goal in this country is to eliminate all thought. If you’re anything but a corporate-funded billionaire, it’s in your interest to stop these people. If you are a corporate-funded billionaire, well, hi there, thanks for reading our blog, and could I have a million dollars? It’s only .05% of what you’ve got and I’ve got some causes I’d like to fund.

Fortunately, there’s something, however small, that we can do. MoveOn is having a petition signing so you can show your disapproval to your congressfolk.

(If this works, maybe NPR could grow a second testicle and give us some punchier news. I’m lucky enough to get some Pacifica Radio programming where I live. If you don’t know what they are, check it out.)

This piece by Steve Jobs is a fascinating and frank look inside the big business of selling DRM (Digital Rights Managed) music. In it, he admits that DRM is an encumbrance and maintains that Apple would sell unrestricted music files if only the record companies would agree to it — a reasonable stance. I found this part fascinating:

…a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

Wow. I do find it disappointing that he doesn’t mention DRM in the context of video, and why that would be any different (it wouldn’t) but still: this is like GM saying they’d ditch gasoline engines, if they could.

~jeff

	Jarvis Cocker	Damon Albarn
Member of:	Pulp	Blur
Born in:	1963	1968
English:	Yes	Yes
Also in Gorillaz:	No	Yes
Wrote song “Common People”:	Yes	No
Wrote song “Clint Eastwood”:	No	Yes
Related to Joe Cocker:	No	No

I once worked a job where I got to read Naughty by Nature’s concert rider. Oh, the booze they requested; cases and cases and cases of beer and booze, a tall order as they only had the one song anyone was interested in. In 1999, you could ask two questions of a Naughty By Nature show: Have they played “O.P.P.” yet? and Now what are we gonna do? and encompass the entire event. In any case, long story short: they didn’t get the booze.

Iggy Pop, on the other hand, knows what he wants and he knows how to get it — via 18-page, over-the-top parodies of concert riders. It’s unclear after reading this if Iggy expects to get anything at all, but good for him and Jos the roadie (who wrote the document) for going way over the top on this one. And I am so with him regarding the cauliflower. (Via Valleywag)

~jeff

Damn, the MIT media lab people do such cool work — “Ambient Addition” is Noah Vawter’s thesis experiment with sound; it’s a iPod-sized device that records and loops the sounds of the world around the listener. Watch the video, it’s like a much more useful Bhudda Machine, a gizmo which (much like the Thingamagoop) I always liked in theory but not in practice.

~Jeff

The Conet Project is a really creepy collection of number stations, which they’ll be happy to explain to you and I posted about a couple weeks back. I was sufficiently charmed by their sinister strangeness — enhanced by the use of music boxes and toy pianos — that I made a piece of music to go with one of them, Swedish Rhapsody. Give it a listen. It’s part of a larger music project I’m doing in my noisy basement studio. Some of it’s noise, some of it’s trancy music.

Here’s the first track good enough to show around the neighborhood, Mädchen, Endut.

(This was crossposted to Monkey Do, Monkey See)

I’ve been beefing up my playlist at work, but I keep turning back to the Bret Turner songs I ganked more than anything else. Who is Bret Turner? Just some guy my friend went to school with… and his music is actually pretty good. And damn funny. “Juan Santos” and “The Perfect Time to Take a Crap in the Sink” pale only in comparison with “The Stupid Song” (this excerpt under the photo fails to capture its comedic brilliance). I thought at first his music was one of those ‘guy in college’ effects where, since you know the guy, you give it half a listen and think since it’s better than you expected it’s OK but you’d never actually listen to it again. But 5, 10 years later the silly songs he recorded then are still in my head. And they’re still good. Did I say brilliant? Maybe that’s a bit overstepping. But they are good. Which song reminds me the most of ldopa? “Oh Thank God for Amateur Recording Equipment”.

I was wondering if y’all had a good way to get itunes to act more like a music server. Want I really want, is for it to auto update the iTunes music library folder, and update the library according. Either the library itself, or, a watch folder that it checks, and move the files according into the library, or copies them and then labels them (using finder labels or something like that).

Or am I trying to push iTunes too far, and is there an iTunes compatible solution that’s vastly better? Ideas?

~ jesse

From the wildly talented production team that brought you the video for “War Photographer“, it’s “Chinese Translation” — the new video for the single off the new M. Ward album, “Post-War“. Needless to say, it’s fantastic.

~jeff

“If your lungs and stomach start talking to each other in cartoon bubbles, stand with your arms akimbo and think about chemistry”

Dear ldopa,

I read your article on band webpages but it still isn’t coming out right. I’m not that witty. What should I do?

Don’t worry about it. Here, have some recipes.