So, Crystal Castles use bleepy chiptunes sounds, although apparently separately
from the chiptunes scene, just because they sound
cool, and because they grew up with those noises just like we did:
It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004
and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have
anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.
One time is, maybe, a careless mistake. Two, three, four times over is
kleptomania. The worst part is that they distance themselves — a ‘completely
different world’ — from the very same community that they are influenced by.
Chiptunes? Not cool. Asshole douchebaggery? Totally hipster!
As you may have noticed, we release all our music under a Creative Commons
BY-NC-ND License here at 8bitpeoples. What this means is that you’re free to
share it however you like, with whomever you like. All we ask in return is
that you credit it appropriately, do not use it for any commercial purposes,
and obtain permission before creating any derivative works (such as remixing
it or using it as the soundtrack for a video). Crystal Castles has violated
every term of this license in their use of Lo-Bat’s music.
If you’re going to sample from an underground scene, it’s only fair to credit and
be cool about it. wtf.
Finally, while I’m posting — classic 1978 epic Italo-electro mp3 over at xxjfg — Automat, ‘The Rise, The Advance, the Genus’. Imagine a 16-minute long Kraftwerk tune with massive bombastic build-ups and breakdowns; a favourite of mine…
Wow. US-based players of GTA IV can buy copies of in-game music, without leaving the game — cool. The more interesting bit is this, though — sounds like Rockstar might be doing a better job of tracking down rightsholders for the music they’re licensing this time around than they did last time:
[Rockstar] is one of the few game developers that actually creates and licenses its own soundtracks — a task often left to the game publisher — and the company approaches it with a passion close to music-geek-like obsession.
Consider the back story on how the 1979 cult classic “Walk the Night” by the Skatt Bros. came to appear on the soundtrack. Skatt Bros. member Sean Delaney — also known as the “fifth member of Kiss” for his writing and production work with the rock band — died in 2003, leaving his publishing share to a brother, a sister and a nephew living somewhere in Utah. They proved so hard to find that Rockstar went through the trouble of hiring a private investigator who flew to Orum, Utah, to locate them.
“It was just one of those songs we just couldn’t let go of,” Rockstar music supervisor Ivan Pavlovich says. “It fit the game perfectly, so we were obviously determined to track them down.”
When I heard about the “hiring a PI” story, I thought to myself, “why bother? just
pick another tune.” But they’re right — you couldn’t leave this one out:
Erykah Badu has always been the most interesting new soul singer, and her new album New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War is an incredible return to form after a long absence. It’s a mixture of social commentary in the classic 70s style of Gil Scott Heron or Marvin Gaye with the latest in leftfield hiphop production by Madlib and 7th Wonder.
The most conventional track on the album is Honey, but luckily the relatively innocuous music gets a syncopated tweak by Seiji of Bugz In The Attic
‘The experience [of Electric Picnic], when recounted second hand, never fails to sound like a slightly grubbier, slightly ‘artsier’, weekend health-spa retreat; naturalistic chill out zones, organic Fair Trade snacks, clean toilets, and a general ‘positive atmosphere’; indeed the whole thing is like a temporary realization of the contents of multiple broadsheet weekend supplements.’
So I went to the Crystal Castles gig in the Andrews Lane Theatre (now rebranded “ALT”) on Tuesday night.
It wasn’t great… I’ve been loving the album, so I was really looking forward to the gig. But the live format was a bit meh, as Nialler noted — their set was a measly 25 minutes long; the sound was a mess, making it hard to make out which tune was which; quite a few of their best tunes were AWOL, such as “Untrust Us”; and there was no encore. On top of that, the support DJ was shite.
Still, the gig was cheap — 13 squids, and the support band Ugly Megan were quite cute. And — megabonus — I finally got to meet up with Nialler in person! ;)
One thing that was a little disconcerting was the age/fashion profile of the crowd. It was overwhelmingly full of hip, angular-haircutted 18 year olds — much more than any other gig I’ve been at in Dublin recently. This has thrown up some great threads at On The Record and UnaRocks… plenty of old indie rock fans gnashing their teeth about these mysterious youngsters suddenly appearing at a gig, when they haven’t been seen before “on the scene”.
There’s an easy answer as to why this happened — there aren’t many bands playing Dublin on the nu-rave end of the spectrum. The Dublin gig scene is still pretty rockist.
This would be all well and fantastic — except that’s just two days after Crystal Castles play the same venue. wtf! Unfortunately I’ve already got my Crystal Castles tix — and I’m looking forward to that gig anyway. But I would have loved to hit both, and it’s just not possible with only 2 days between ‘em.
So, went to see Holy Fuck in Whelan’s on Thursday.
It was in the company of a (very) pregnant friend, which assured us early
access to the upstairs level, with seating. Maybe I’m getting old (maybe?!),
but turns out this was great stuff — seats! no queues for the bar! no queues
for the jacks! a great view of the band! Really, I must go to more gigs with
pregnant ladies. Not very rock and roll, but there you go.
The Fuck have a very impressive range of crappy Bontempi toy keyboards — we
counted 11. Great array of effects pedals and custom electronic noise boxes,
too. Reminded me of Black Moth Super
Rainbow a little. The only thing that
let it down was a little lack of volume — it could have been louder. still
– good gig! recommended!
Also, I came across an interesting idea — Fustar is running a
“Dreadful Thoughts Story Club”, an intriguing kind of interweb-based mini-book-club project revolving around horror short stories, and
as part of this, Niall Munnelly set up a
collaborative mixtape as described here. Here’s the results so far:
Dreadful Thoughts Muxtape.
(including Suspiria and Wendy Carlos tracks from yours truly.)
I love the idea of a collaborative mixtape run through Muxtape.com,
very nifty.
Finally — occasional Undersea Community contributor Eoghan is now blogging
about serious stuff over here at The Colour of
Memory. Go subscribe.
The Jimmy Cake are the Kevin Bacon of the Irish music scene, except you are typically just one degree of separation from them. This track is one of the highlights of their new album, Spectre & Crown.
What have I been listening to? Well, top of the playlist has been the Hercules
and Love Affair album, with Pilooski’s two D-I-R-T-Y edit collections from last
year close behind. But coming up fast is the new Crystal Castles album.
‘Untrust Us’, the opener, is a new one on me and is beautiful:
I remember hearing a story about a legendary Dublin music obsessive who had two enormous piles of CDs in his living room towering like monoliths. He would take one from the unlistened pile, give two plays all the way through - “I think two is fair” was the quote, and then stick it in the listened pile.
He may or may not have made some notes in a ledger as he did so.
Well, I sniggered to myself when I heard this story, but these days, thanks to the magical internet and a busy schedule, I find myself in a similar position. Luckily an iTunes playlist called ‘Intray’ is a lot less hassle than a ginormous pile of CDs.
So I thought I’d stick up some randomish selections from my intray.
Never really got stuck into the whole alt.country/TexMex indie rock thing but I’m making up for lost time now. This is from the soundtrack to obscure indie flick Committed.
Erlend Oye and Kings Of Convenience were always a bit too fey IMO, but the Vs. remix album and Oye’s classic DJ Kicks were pretty tasty. The Whitest Boy Alive is his new project, started as electronica but turned into a normal band, and so far, they see much less drippy than Kings Of Convenience. This rocks in a slightly Thurston Moore style.
OK, since Ian is threatening to remove “inactive blogs” from his blogroll, I should pipe up with some news.
My blog motivation is back, I just haven’t had any time for it at all. I haven’t found much particularly interesting music recently — Hercules and Love Affair being the exception — but there are a couple of gigs upcoming: Holy Fuck, April 10th, and Ladytron on May 16. Looking forward to those.
Oh yeah — Irish readers, be sure to vote for Dustin tonight! When po-faced “professional songwriters” like Frank McNamara think something is “absolutely disgraceful”, you know it’s a winner.
McGuinness targeted makers of devices that have been used to play copyrighted content [... saying] “Hardware makers should share with the content owners whose assets are exploited by the buyers of their machines”.
As Techdirt noted — ‘The oil industry’s success is built on the backs of the automobile industry, but does the automobile industry demand that oil companies have a moral obligation to pay them? Computer makers have built a multibillion dollar industry on the backs of the internet and software companies — yet, no one says they have a moral obligation to pay those companies anything. Travel guides have built huge business based on hotels and restaurants around the globe, but does anyone think that those travel guides owe the hotels and restaurants money for doing so?’
He argued that the recent Radiohead release of a download priced on the honesty box principle had backfired. He said: “It seems that the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire even though the album was available for nothing through the official band site.”
The majority were through torrents? That’s not what Forbes.com says: ‘more than 500,000 total illegal downloads [... is] less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com.’ Also, going by these comments, it looks like a fair few of the torrent downloaders were doing so because the main site was so hammered they couldn’t get through that way — even though they wanted to.
“Notwithstanding the promotional noise, even Radiohead’s honesty box principle showed that if not constrained, the customer will steal music.”
Yeah! Fucking customers! I’m sure the world would be better off without them,
allowing U2 to get on with the job of making $355 million per tour, without these thieving
scum getting in the way. ….oh, wait…
More money is being made on concert revenue than ever before. More artists are making music than ever before. More music is being heard than ever before. Even more musical instruments are being sold than ever before in the past. Yet, because one segment of the market (the one selling plastic discs) is unwilling to take some simple steps to change its business model, everyone else has to pay up?
I missed out on the first three of this French label’s compilation albums and though the fourth one has copped a bit of flak from the blogorati I reckon there’s plenty of good stuff on there, mostly in that Ed Banger/DFA indie meets electro style.
Highlights include a vocoder heavy fuzzy remix by Boyz Noise of Feist’s My Moon My Man which sounds pretty sweet and a song by twitchy Britindie hopefuls Foals which I saw on Channel 6 last night (the leader singer has got a catastrophically bad hairstyle bless him.)
‘Many fans came to know [Scientist's] music due to half of his album ‘Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires’ being used on the soundtrack for the popular videogame Grand Theft Auto III. The tracks on the fictitious radio station ‘K-Jah’ are composed entirely of songs from this album. However, Scientist received no royalties for this, and sued Rockstar Games unsuccessfully in a US court. The court ruled that according to precedent a recording mixer was not considered the author of a musical work, and so Rockstar were correct to treat the producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes as the copyright holder of the album.
This ruling could be argued to neglect the fundamental difference between dub-reggae and other kinds of music - after all, the album is marketed as ‘Scientist rids the world of the evil curse of the vampires’: so the publishers and self identified licensors are prepared to attribute authorship to Hopeton Brown when it suits them, but not when it comes to paying him royalties. It can, however, be argued that Scientist was introduced to a much larger audience as a result of the licensing of his album to Rockstar, in which case he may have sold more albums as a result.’
Scientist is a fucking genius, and ‘Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires’ one of the best dub albums recorded. What a scam.
I’ve been remiss in blogging here — new job (in an office rather than working from home) and so on, means less opportunity to listen to music. Hopefully I can remedy that soon.
Still, while I’m here, let’s enjoy this fine anti-acid lecture from the ‘Big Lebowski’ soundtrack:
Also, I’ve heard a leak of the new Hot Chip album. I have to disagree with the occasional bad review I’ve read on the blogs — I think it sounds fantastic, and I’m really looking forward to it dropping in Feb.
I’ve been hearing more and more ELOish sounds about; I heard an indie tune on the radio that used a reminscent synth swirl, and of course, the fantastic ispydiamonds posted
Starlight a few weeks back. So it’s about time for a revival post…
This tune was what got me hooked in the first place, part of the brilliant “GTA: Vice City” soundtrack:
But the real gems (IMO) are on their “Time” concept album. As Wikipedia describes it –
The album tells the story of a man, circa 1981, who is taken away by time travelers to the late 21st Century. Once there, he marvels at the wonders that the future offers, but is also increasingly amazed to find that he longs for his own time (the past) and the woman he left behind because of his journey forward. Although he has been provided a robot woman, who obeys his every command without question, he quickly realizes that this is a poor substitute for his lost love: the robot companion can never love or be loved by him.
Also, “Here Is The News” is cute — filled with samples from a supposedly late-21st-century news broadcast, but recorded in early-80’s Britain, it has a kind of “Blake’s Seven” dated scifi feel with talk of strikes in space and so on:
I watching Liverpool on the telly the other night, they were playing Marseilles in the Champions League. I was in Marseilles for a Liverpool match a few years ago (the French team won 2-1) but i was blown away by the attitude of the fans, who were really friendly and incredibly noisy in the stadium. At halftime they played poppy French hip-hop and the whole stand jumped up and down, it was brilliant. There was one song that they were all really going nuts for and I asked someone what it was. He told me is was “Diam’s”
Diam’s is a classic tough lass from the suburbs with cropped hair and mad jewelstudded hoopy earrings…she looks well hard. She’s also gone up against Le Pen and Sarkozy in the papers. Definitely a bit of a character. I like the idea in this video as well.
To prove my love of all things Daft Punk, check this. It’s a remix by Digitalism, who are the German Daft Punk, so the result is a kind of Daft Punk squared. I love the epic indie guitar riffing about two minutes in.
Myself and Wooder went to see Of Montreal last Saturday at the Button Factory.
What a fantastic gig! That was my concert of the year, hands down.
Their last Dublin show
was pretty good, but this was much better. The entire band were in attendance
this time around (last time they had to “borrow” a bassist), and they had the
luxury of the Button Factory’s stage, much bigger than the titchy Tripod one.
New set order, too — last time around, ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ was
buried in the set’s middle, and a little out of place; while it’s a fantastic
song, it’s got such a different sound and tempo from all the rest of their
current tunes. This time, it was the opener, waking up the crowd with its
driving sound, and things felt a lot more coherent as a result.
Every single one of our London cabbies played
The most truly repellent techno music ever made
But they’ll drop you without hesitation
if you try changing the station
There were a couple of new songs played; “Our Last Summer of Independence”
sticks in my memory. (It didn’t sound great on first listen; could be a
grower though.)
The crowd were up for it, the venue was great, the band were well into it and
we got to check out some truly awesome costumes, particularly The Late B. P.
Helium’s new rather Christoper-Walkenesque getup. Afterwards, Kevin came down to the bar
and was still there, mobbed by adoring fans, when we left. He was well on
for a chat — Wooder got to give him a few Dublin tourism tips ;) A great night.
The cover of Time Magazine caught the eye during the week. It read something like:
“Name a significant contemporary cultural figure from France”.
The idea being that you couldn’t.
I was with Leon at the time and we both agreed that Michel Houellbecq and Daft Punk both sprung to mind immediately. So the cover didn’t exactly work as they planned.
Houellbecq’s novels are JG Ballard respun with the all the modesty and prudishness of Serge Gainsbourg on a Viagra binge.
And Daft Punk just rule - even if their last proper album was a bit of a dud. The best bit was Robot Rock, and the best bit of Robot Rock came from this banging bit of psychedelic funk.
I’ll just grab a few seconds to note that I went to see Go! Team play Tripod on wednesday, and they were amazing. They really rocked. Amazing backdrop visuals, amazing stage presence, jam-packed venue with an up-for-it crowd… really good gig.
‘Good news for those based in Dublin (as if we needed any) there’s two DFA nights in quick succession on the way. The first of which is T&T aka Tim Sweeney & Tim Goldsworthy at Ri-Ra on the 30th November and the following Friday (7th December) Shit Robot & Juan Maclean bring their acid/disco chaos to Crawdaddy with our good selves on warm up.
We’ve been given a discounted guestlist at 10eu so anyone that wants to come along just drop us a mail to info@stateofshock.net and we’ll sort you right out.’
wow, it’s like buses. You wait for ages then they all turn up at once…
There are also certain lwa who are mute, who never speak under any
circumstances. One such lwa, in the Rada group, is Dambala. Dambala is a
serpent, and as such he does not speak. A person possessed by Dambala
immediately falls to the ground and crawls, like a snake. The possessed
person may climb trees, or the centerpost of the peristyle, without using
their hands, because a snake does not have hands. Like a snake, too, Dambala
will eat a raw egg, and sip milk.
Check out these lyrics:
You slavers will know
What it’s like to be a slave
Slave to your mind
Slave to your race
You won’t go to heaven
You won’t go to hell
You remain in your graves
With the stench and the smell
Oh Dambala come Dambala
Oh Dambala come Dambala
Our love goes under the knife /
Nothing is taboo /
Here on the cutting edge of science
Impressive background for this album: according to this
post, the
music was ‘written and played by Air, produced by Nigel Godrich. The string
arrangements are by Beck’s dad, David Campbell. The drums are played by Tony
Allen, one time drummer for Fela Kuti, now in Damon Albarn’s The Good The Bad &
The Queen. Oh yeah, and Brian Eno called him one of the best musicians on the
planet. Lyrics are also collaborative, with Charlotte and the Air boys joined
by the witty, sharp pens of Jarvis Cocker and The Divine Comedy’s Neal Hannon.’
Blimey.
This mix of songs contributes to the film’s atmosphere, contrasting rabble-rousing songs that depict the island’s community like “The Landlord’s Daughter” and the child-sung “Maypole” with the sinister “Fire Leap” and the erotic “Willow’s Song” before culminating in the islanders’ chilling rendition of the profane Middle English “Sumer Is Icumen In”.
Chilling is the word — every tune laden with a hefty dose of pagan terror. It’s great.
I recently came across Pinglewood, a London-based blog posting some great stuff. It was there that I found this post, with my tune of the week — the electro-rocking Adventures Close To Home remix of Never Hear Surf Music Again by Free Blood. go listen! recommended!
For a bit of a change of pace… over the past few years, one guy who’s been quietly putting out consistently great laid-back singer-with-guitar tunes has been Iron and Wine.
A couple of years back, he collaborated with Calexico on a superb folky, country album, In the Reins, which provided this beautiful soundtrack for me on a drive up to Yosemite:
Tomorrow, the new album comes out — The Shepherd’s Dog. Believe me, it’s just as good — and this time loaded with a bit more of a psychedelic-tinged country/folk sound. Check out this beauty:
Brilliant! Resurrection Fern, Boy With A Coin are also well worth a listen; check them out up on the Myspace.
He’s playing the Ambassador theatre in Dublin on the 27th of October; unfortunately I won’t be able to make it. Shame; I’m sure it’ll be a fantastic gig. Book your tickets pronto…
(PS: also playing Dublin this winter are Fujiya and Miyagi on the 2nd December. I may try to get to that one at least ;)
Hmm, long time no post. Here’s one really great tune I’ve been listening to a lot recently; thanks to 20jazzfunkgreats, and the brilliant ispydiamonds for posting it.
Listening to it, it’s extremely reminiscent of Lindstrom’s “Contemporary Fix” — similar repeating synth-stabs motif, and a similarly laid back rhythm. In fact, I’m amazed it’s not by Lindstrom, it’s got exactly the same cosmic disco vibe… anyway, pick it up, it’s fantastic.
This
isn’t the first time McGuinness has foisted consumer-hating crap on us. Check
right for a photo of himself and Bonio grinning in support of the extension of copyright
in the UK — presumably he’s worried that 
