356 posts tagged with music.
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Clearing the Neighbourhood
A very small project: A ten-minute instrumental song about a planetesimal becoming a planet.
Some background here.
Apocalypse Pickin' Party lyric videos
I made lyric videos for all 12 songs on my band's new album. I used it as a way to force myself to learn the basics of Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop.
We play apocalyptic roots music and it was surprisingly fun to make these simple videos - curious what folks think!
Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts at Bridge City Sessions
Live in studio recordings of original junkyard jazz, jangly jive, and ragtime residue. Featuring four brand-new tunes: "Hold on Tight" (a screwloose comedy heist), "Minneola" (a loving tribute to any city or town that happens to be named Min[n]eola), "Paradeiolia" (the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern), and "Mrs Johnson" (a western klezmer veterinary odyssey). Recorded spring 2024 at Bridge City Sessions. [more inside]
My photos from Sidmouth Folk Festival 2024.
I spent all last week at the excellent Sidmouth Folk Festival in the English county of Devon. I didn't manage to attend all of the 624 events on offer there, but I did manage to see three gigs a day and photograph many of the performers involved. You can find 88 of my better pictures in this Bluesky thread. [more inside]
Tulip Creative Computer
Tulip is a cheap (US$59, basically the cost for parts/assembly), simple and overall FUN portable computer for making things. music, animations, writing. It boots right into a Python prompt, no other OS. No AI, no ads, not even Wi-Fi unless you type in some stuff. Tulip comes with a really good synthesizer and a lot of music stuff (MIDI, CV, sequencer, sampler, drum machine, DX7, Juno-6). Purely open source, the point is to gather a community of like-minded people that love this sort of thing to make it even better.
The Queer Medieval with Nicola Griffith - In Conversation with María Bullón-Fernández
Video of a talk at Seattle Town Hall, includes live musical performance. For Pride month, join celebrated historical fiction author Nicola Griffith for a conversation about queer representation in medieval history and fiction. The acclaimed author of Hild, Spear, and Menewood will explore how fiction can create belonging and challenge narratives about who belongs in history. In a conversation with Professor of English at Seattle University, María Bullón-Fernández, Griffith will tackle questions like: How are current ideas of queer identity similar or different to those in the Middle Ages, and those represented in historical fiction? How can fiction help us re-see the past, and thus re-envision our future? [more inside]
Lost Notes: Season 4
KCRW’s acclaimed music documentary podcast, Lost Notes, is back for its fourth season! Co-hosts Novena Carmel (KCRW) and Michael Barnes (KCRW / KPFK / Artform Radio) guide you through eight wildly different and deeply human stories, each set against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of LA’s soul and R&B scene of the 1950s-1970s. (The fifth of eight episodes releases this week on Wednesday.) [more inside]
In The Name of the MOON
For those who are interested, I have an album out recently. It's best described as "experimental ambient electroacoustic long-form sounds with a vague Sailor Moon theme" which doesn't boil down to a single tidy hashtag. [more inside]
The End Of Suffering (Album)
I finally got around to putting my 2009 full length album up on Spotify. Until now you had to own a CD - no longer! Stream away. [more inside]
Bottlecap Mountain - “I Guess It's Christmas” - Official Music Video
I made this animated video for my band's new Christmas song - "I Guess It's Christmas." I also played bass. [more inside]
Jazz!
This past summer, I took on a fill-in show at our local campus/community radio station. A traditional jazz show, but I decided to only ever say the station's call letters, frequency, and the word "jazz". Over and over and over again. [more inside]
Mahnawhgads
Do you like the Muppets? Do you like Homestar Runner? Then you might enjoy this mashup tune I made.
A song (and music video) about a satellite
I first got interested in music many years ago and played in a band but never quite learned how to write songs. I spent a lot of time learning theory but still never quite understood how to apply it but then I gradually just started writing as much as I could over the last year or two. This is my first song I've ever released and I really had to stretch to do everything! The song and production are mine but the hand printed animation is done by an artist friend of mine. [more inside]
Sleep Funnels
New EP about sleep. It's mostly ambient, with some intense swells. One of the tracks is procedurally generated phase music, and the others are traditionally composed. I wrote a bit about its making, if you're interested in that sort of thing. [more inside]
The Dark Forest
A 6-track dungeon synth album. Dark, whimsical, and a little cinematic. [more inside]
Sight Snap - a new game to speed up identifying notes on the staff
I built this simple browser-based matching game as a less boring way of building note recognition speed compared to the simple question and answer format found in most music theory apps. It should work on every device but will be more enjoyable on a touchscreen. [more inside]
Back to My Dreams
For a birthday present for my wife, I commissioned two musicians to each create a pop song using lyrics generated by ChatGPT AI, album cover art generated by AI, and an AI generated music video. I made this website to present the songs to her as a surprise and explain the process of getting this project made. [more inside]
Terminal Evening podcast/mix series
Monthly thematic mixes of music, sound and text, intended for active, immersive listening. [more inside]
Infinite LP records from the Boston Public Library via archive.org
This LP player streams an endless loop of songs from the Boston Public Library collection on archive.org. Choose from dozens of stations or create your own stations. Discover and enjoy classic music! [more inside]
The Dalai Dalí Dolly Folly (Super Deluxe Edition)
Do you have 5 minutes? Do you want to hear 13 songs with rhyming titles? Have I got the album for you! [more inside]
AODY Music, text-to-speech
A new music project, under the artist name AODY.
Including text-to-speech vocals feature, from VoxBox.
Three new albums created using this feature so far. AiODY 1, AiODY 10, and Wind Rhapsody. [more inside]
Let's Have Fun Why Not
Five buoyant tunes! [more inside]
Sunny Disposition
Sunny Disposition is the latest EP from Corwin Bolt & the Wingnuts. We also recorded a Tiny Desk Contest video for one of the songs, "Pile of Diamonds". [more inside]
Bandcamp Tempo Adjust
Bandcamp Tempo Adjust is a web extension that allows you to detect and adjust the tempo of tracks on Bandcamp. Available for Chrome and Firefox
lowercase t: A Very 8-Bit Christmas
I just released a mini album just in time for Christmas. I take some traditional Christmas carols, then arrange and filter them through 8-bit chipsets, and then sprinkle in some of usual gitchcore sounds. It's free to listen as much as you want, and PWYW starting at 5.
Microvague made a record
Back in February I made a record under my Microvague pseudonym. I have demos of a couple more songs spinning up now for a new album this winter, so this is probably one of Red Shadow's last moments in the sun.
For a quick taster of the kind of [twangly/singer-songwritery] thing what it is, here's Lazy Jayne on bandcamp to stream.
Immune To Consequences
Over the last year and a half I wrote twelve songs about twelve Blaseball players on the Kansas City Breath Mints. I commissioned cover art and compiled them into an album, which is out today on Bandcamp. Each song's page has background information about the player, for those unfamiliar with Blaseball in general or the Mints in particular. [more inside]
This is a Recording
In the depopulated wasteland that is blogger.com, a blog bringing together some brief reflections on random records from my collection. [more inside]
Trey Fontaine II
At the beginning of 2020 I collected some instrumentals I'd been working on under the name Trey Fontaine (an imaginary guitar player I pretend to be sometimes). I just released a sequel, imaginatively titled Trey Fontaine II. The link above goes to one of those aggregators that leads to all the streaming services.
Alternatively, here is the first track, This Is a Map, on Youtube.
Solfetta: a free web-based ear training app
I created Solfetta because I wanted a convenient way to practice playing by ear on my phone that could help build associations between the music being played and Solfa symbols (you can also display intervals, or note names in any key). You can play what you want or use a library of well-known melodies to get started. The tuning can be changed to match any recording. Code (VanillaJS) is on GitHub.
"Still Me," my latest music video
I wrote the music using some Apple loops and original stuff too. I used GarageBand for iOS. And iMovie for iOS. My partner did a lot of the video-ing. I love the old French doll and the bluejay finger puppets.
Aura
Aura is my latest album. It's a jazz album featuring me on bass with three great musicians playing songs I wrote. I don't know what style I'd call it, but it's definitely influenced by various artists on the ECM label.
Reunion Tour
I contributed three songs to a collaborative Blaseball album, Reunion Tour, the fourth in a series of "Away Games" albums that collect songs about teams other than the Garages. [more inside]
Brass sextet for 6 trumpets and epic digital signal processing
I haven't been able to make music with my brass quintet since the start of the pandemic. I ended up redirecting that grief into a 10-month quest to use extensive digital signal processing to transform live trumpet audio into realistic horn, trombone, and tuba, so I could play a sextet with myself.
Le Grand Tour (Echoes from Jupiter)
My band's (post-rock, from Québec, Canada) third LP, a 42-minute journey through space and (hopefully) time. For this one, we chose to tell a story through a kid's point of view.
Kool
I made this video for my band, Bottlecap Mountain, and our new song, Kool. I play bass on the song, and did everything on the video. [more inside]
Dang Blues: The return of Jawbone.
When Bob "Jawbone" Zabor, a one-man blues band from Detroit, played a 2004 live session on John Peel's BBC radio show, the DJ declared him "almost a definition of what I would like this programme to be about". Peel played nearly every track of Jawbone's homemade CDR on the show and immediately invited him for another live session - but died before that offer could be made good. Jawbone, who still struggled to find gigs in America, released a couple of official albums here and remained a cult favourite on the UK circuit until 2008, when he suddenly dropped out of sight. Now he's back with his first new songs in over a decade and this exclusive PlanetSlade interview telling the full story. [more inside]
A fictional band + real music
I've been writing about a fictional band for nearly two years. I've written up fake song names, put the band on a made-up tour around the world, and I've written stories about their time on the road. But I don't have any music to go along with the stories, and I'd like to change that. [more inside]
A channel vocoder walkthrough
It's an interactive explanation of a channel vocoder. (Homer Dudley's original vocoder from the 1930s was channel vocoder.) It let you perform all of the steps that the vocoder goes through to analyze a music signal and a voice signal and synthesize them together.
Hot Dad Summer
My high school band is now my middle-aged band, and we’ve just written the jam of the summer (to be modest). Now streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and anywhere you stream music!
The Sound of the Far Future
This is an ambient concept album that tells you about events that will happen in the far future. You can listen to the recording, or you can have your browser play it "live" with accompanying visualization. [more inside]
Quarantine Happy Hour concert archive
Between April of 2000 and July of 2021, the Quarantine Happy Hour Facebook group hosted a livestreamed concert of mostly roots/acoustic/americana/bluegrass/folk music nearly every single night. Hundreds of artists gave concerts, and around 20,000 people joined the group. Facebook's interface for finding and watching the concerts after they were over is terrible, so I built a searchable and (hopefully) easier to use page linking to all of them. [more inside]
Harry Pace & Black Swan Records - new book
Exactly 100 years ago, Harry Pace founded America's first Black-owned record label. Black Swan Blues, my 2014 book telling his extraordinary story, inspired Jad Abumrad & Shima Oliaee’s new Radiolab series The Vanishing of Harry Pace. Over the past 12 months, we've been able to gather a lot of fresh information about Pace and Black Swan, so I've produced a expanded edition of my book which you can buy here. As a little bonus for PlanetSlade readers, I've also posted a new website essay called A Georgia Lynching, which tells the full story behind an incident Black Swan's Ethel Waters mentions in her autobiography.
Good Moon: Still Delightful
A little indie pop/folk/rock album release! My friend Molly & I have founded a little quarantine band called Good Moon, and just released our pandemic project - an EP album of original songs, called Still Delightful. A little bit Lake Street Dive meets a little bit Sara Bareilles, maybe? Would love for you to check it out!
An electro cover of Laurie Anderson's "From The Air"
During the horror show that was 2020, I sometimes felt like a passenger on a plane flown by a madman. Then it hit me... I'd heard that story before. I ended up doing a cover of a classic, prescient song by my ultimate art hero Laurie Anderson. It's the first song I've recorded under my Maxx Klaxon moniker in some years. (Longtime MeFites might remember my contribution to the MeFiComp back in 2006... but I can't find a link to it.) Check it out on Bandcamp... and remember, it's Bandcamp Friday today (May 7), so for all purchases before midnight, 100% of the money goes directly to the artists.
Music Video and Vinyl!
I'm excited to share my first music video and vinyl release, featuring incredible puppets and miniatures by my talented friend Jon David Russell (who also recorded and produced the album). The vinyl can be pre-ordered at seththomas.bandcamp.com. [more inside]
A make-believe band
For about a year I've sent a fake band around the world on a fake tour with fake songs. Each performance gets a score, which leads to some songs being more popular than others. Now I'm looking for help from people who love Taylor Swift, The Grateful Dead, or King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard so I can map my fake songs to their real ones. People like you, maybe! [more inside]
A video for our quarantine style song recording
Hi! This is a cover my over-60 amateur musician buddies and I (The Busted Bones) created using a small Zoom recorder... sent between us - quarantine style! [more inside]
Needledrop
Needledrop is a skeuomorphic vinyl turntable interface for listening to music on YouTube. Use it with your favorite albums and share with friends. Try it out for good vibes.
The Manual, by The KLF, cleaned up and proofread
There’s a cult band from the late 80s onward called the KLF (and other names); they made a step-by-step guide to achieving a number one single with no money or musical skills.
Legitimate copies of the book are hard to find, or priced for collectors.
Released in 1988, though copies are around on the internet; based on the same source version, there are many typos and OCR artifacts.
I decided to clean it up and share. [more inside]