By the way, I have a draft on this blog that dates back to early August. It’s an outline. It was an attempt to “catch up” on our lives (for those that don’t track us via Facebook). If I find some motivation, I may dig up some pictures and flesh that draft out and post it. Of course, by then, it will be months and months out of date. C’est la vie…

Is That Music From a Video Game?

I’ve mentioned in the past that almost all of my original music sounds like video game music. To be more correct, it sounds like video game music from old PC titles or from old consoles – back when video game music was all synthesized. As mentioned before, it’s because I don’t really have good software and equipment for recording actual instruments (which could only include guitar or mandolin anyway), but I do have halfway decent MIDI composition software.

Well, I’ve written a few more songs recently. I always start on my guitar. But in order to flesh out the piece and add all of the layers together (without suitable equipment and/or software for recording and overdubbing), I type it all up in MIDI Compozer.

You can rummage through the two links above to hear some of the songs I’ve posted previously. And I now have three new tracks to submit for your listening pleasure:

1. Driving Through The Storm. No, this is nothing like The Doors’ Riders in the Storm. Don’t ask me how I come up with song names. It’s often random. Something pops in my head as I listen to the tune, and – boom! – there’s the song name. Sometimes it’s an impression I get from the music, and sometimes it’s just a reference to something I’ve had in my head recently (from reading, surfing, etc…). I can’t say for certain the source of this title, so don’t focus too much on titles.
2. Helios. This is actually the most recent tune I’ve written. I’m sure Malin is tired of hearing it by now (she probably hasn’t heard the whole thing through even once, but likely heard bits of it over and over as I was composing…).
3. Starry Void. This was something I wrote years ago (2002 I think?), but just now got around to completing it in MIDI form… I wrote it when playing around with a fancy digital effects processor I borrowed from my brother. I’ve recently purchased that very same effects processor from him, so I’ve been dorking around with some of the same sounds. The main effects that influenced the writing of this tune were in from a wicked-sounding preset featuring lots of echo.

Music Less Likely To Be Heard In a Video Game

Just over a year ago, I also posted non-MIDI tracks. The only ones I have are ones I recorded in high school (with the assistance of my then-neighbor and friend Keith Groover – who happened to have a four-track tape recorder/mixer).

In that previous post, I indicated almost all of them as “Untitled”. They now have names. Here’s a recap. (Same logic – or lack thereof – behind the titles as for the MIDI songs.)

1. Forward In Reverse – Take 1. Apologies in advance for the very poor recording quality. The backmasked voice is courtesy of Keith Groover. I think he’s saying something like “Drink milk. It’s good for you”…
2. Forward In Reverse – Take 2. No voice. Different guitar sound. Better recording quality, but less interesting performance.
3. This Saturday. The intro is slightly plagiarized. I’d give proper credits, but I can’t remember the guy’s name (he was in a guitar class of mine my senior year in high school). The vast majority of the tune, however, is all original.

And now – previously unreleased recordings! These first four are old (from high school, like all of my other recordings). Pretty much all of the original music I wrote in high school was hard rock / progressive metal (okay, maybe “progressive” is a little pretentious and arguably untrue). These songs are no exception.

1. The Conqueror Worm
2. The Ancient Mariner
3. Resonance
   
4. Long, Dark March

These next and final three were recorded with fellow musicians (a band per se) and played by a DJ at a “Casino Night” holiday party where I worked (at the time we were NewEnergy Associates, A Siemens Company). No, it’s not my voice. No, I do not play all of the instruments (unlike all of the other recordings above). Our band called itself many things. The NewEnergy Rockers might have been the most suitable name, but Artie Fufkin and The Dictator-Tots was always my favorite.

1. Siemens L3 Waffle House Club Band – sung to the tune of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
2. Jesse Davis – sung to the tune of Weezer’s Buddy Holly. Jesse Davis was the name of the President and CEO of NewEnergy when I started and when we recorded this. We had some other fun tunes that celebrated the CEO – like Rick Springfield’s Jesse’s Girl and Rock Me, Jesse Davis sung to the tune of Falco’s Rock Me, Amadeus. I’m still working on getting some video posted to YouTube of the NewEnergy Rockers’ live performances – which include these latter two JD tunes.
3. Cleveland Rocks (Daugherty, Humphries, and McNeil too) – sung to the tune of The Presidents of The United States of America’s Cleveland Rocks.

Before the show, we went to eat dinner at Holeman & Finch  Public House – a gastro-pub that cures their own meats. It was a good dinner, but a bit pricey:

• The cheese plate was good and reasonably priced. We had the plate offering five cheeses – a really nice blue, a somewhat-interesting cheddar, a mellow and very creamy goat cheese, Humboldt Fog (sorry, I only remembered the name of this one), and another creamy and soft cow’s milk cheese.
• The house-cured meat was very tasty – but incredibly over-priced. Before ordering, we asked how much would come, and the server said that it was a pretty good amount. I don’t know what he was talking about. There was very little meat. And for $15, I definitely won’t be ordering it again if I ever return to the place.
• We also had fried sweetbreads served over grits. This was a delicious dish – the highlight of the evening. The grits were very creamy, and the sweetbreads were good. We’d never had sweetbreads served this way: all in a big, fried hunk. Usually they are broken into morsels and then cooked, but this was a big ol’ hunk of ‘em. Yummy.
• The fried oysters weren’t bad. The fried pickle chips that came with them were probably the best part. They were very soft and gelatinous which I did not particularly like. I’ve had raw oysters and fried oysters in the past that were much more firm and think the texture is much more pleasant when it’s less mucilaginous.
• Another pleasant dish was the hen of the wood mushrooms with polenta. I don’t know if I’ve ever had this type of mushroom before, but they were good. The only regret: not enough polenta.

It felt odd coming home Tuesday night knowing that we had to return to normal life the next day. Midweek events feel kind of strange that way.

And then yesterday, Hump Day, was another highlight of the week. Will was well-behaved all day, so he got to take advantage of a special privilege reserved for well-behaved boys: video games.

A couple of weeks ago, he bought Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii using his allowance. He’d been saving up for a few months. We went to GameStop to look at used video games, and they were a complete rip-off: a new copy was $50, a used copy was $45. Will was very upset that he didn’t have enough money to buy the game, but we found a copy on eBay for a reasonable price that he could afford: $29. And for some reason eBay gave us a 10% coupon that brought the total down to around $26. Will had only saved up $22, but we gave him an advance on his allowance.

So yesterday while I was at work, Malin and Will finished the second of the three parts of the game: The Temple of Doom. After dinner last night, Will and I played a couple of levels of part three: The Last Crusade. For any that might be interested in the game, I highly recommend it. It is very fun, and knowledge of the movies can help you beat some of the tricky parts – which makes it feel authentic.

• The Best of Murray Hewitt

When we were in LA on vacation the other week, my sister brought up the same TV show. Unfortunately, her DVDs of season one were on loan to a friend, so I didn’t get a chance to see the show. But she showed me another YouTube video that was a sequence from the show:

• Foux Du Fafa

I’ve since bought their self-titled album (or rather I’ve bought the MP3s that constitute that album). Malin and I even heard this song in background music of a recent episode of Chuck. Were it not for our introduction to this tune in LA, we would have never recognized it or noticed it.

Since I don’t yet have the DVDs (though I put them on my Amazon.com wishlist), I’ve been substituting the real thing with YouTube videos – of which there are many.

The honors for most demented Flight of the Conchordes video goes to Albi The Racist Dragon.

I would say that pretty much every musical number they’ve done on the show is genius. To save you the effort of a YouTube search, you can just click the following links. The best ones (in my opinion) are at the top, but don’t dismiss the others in the list. They are all very funny:

• Mutha Uckers
• Rhymenocerous vs. Hiphopopotamus
• Ladies of the World
• The Humans Are Dead
• If You’re Into It
• Mermaids
• Frodo, Don’t Wear The Ring
• Prince of Parties
• Leggie Blonde
• Cheer Up, Murray
• Business Time
• She’s So Hot – Boomking
• Bret, You’ve Got It Going On
• You’re So Beautiful
• I’m Not Crying
• Think About It
• Inner City Pressure
• Bowie’s In Space
• A Kiss is Not a Contract
• Sellotape – Pencils in the Wind

I’ll definitely post links so you can download my MIDI software and the DOSBox configuration for it to run sweetly. I’ll try to do so before another month goes by…

Well, I didn’t get it out before a month went by – but I got it out before six months went by (that counts for something doesn’t it?).

Download your copy of Apriori Enterprises MIDI Compozer right here. See below the jump for more info on this little program.

Along with finally making this program available (not that anyone has really be waiting for it…), I also have some new tracks to share. The first is actually a new track: Gray. I composed it fairly recently (past couple of months). The second is an extremely old track: A Night in Giza. In fact, this is the first full song I composed digitally. I think I was in ninth grade (’round about 1991). By the way, I did not write my software when I was in ninth grade. I used other, much crappier software in high school. I wrote my program in college because I had “outgrown” the other program (which was shareware and cost me something like $3 for a 5.25 inch disk).

I also decided to post some other music I wrote back in high school. These, however, are not digital compositions. These were recorded with an analog 4-track tape recorder using real musical instruments and microphones. I’m posting the least embarrassing tracks, but keep in mind they were all recorded around fifteen years ago. I’ve grown tremendously in my guitar-playing skills and song-writing/composition. So one of these days I’d like to get my hands on some decent recording equipment (or figure out how to turn my computer into decent recording equipment, which is probably the better/cheaper route to take) so that I can make some more recent recordings that are more representative of what I write and play.

First up is a strange little number. The recording quality is pretty low (please bear with me). You could probably tell from the unreal sound of the guitar that this one is an exercise in back-masking. Just in case it isn’t obvious from the music, listen for the spoken word (which is my old next door neighbor, Keith Groover, saying something silly like, “drink milk because it is good for you”). Without further ado: Untitled #1.

Next up is, in fact, the exact same strange little number. The recording quality is better. I kept the older one though because I thought it sounded cooler. This version is missing something (something other than the backwards voice – which also happens to be absent): Untitled #1, Reprise.

Alright – now for some real music. Here is a brief snippet from a track I laid down with three other high school students at a place in Greenville, SC called The Fine Arts Center. I went to this place for a half-day every school day my junior and senior years of high school. My junior year was spent in visual arts. I went for drawing, but I had to take other visual arts classes there so I also took sculpture. While in the drawing class I was first exposed to Adobe Photoshop, and it was love at first sight – except for the icky, one-button mouse on that stinkin’ Mac… I still have some slides of original abstract works I created in Photoshop back then. Anyhow, my senior year I went for electric guitar performance and studied jazz improvisation. This effort was a group project to re-interpret Mile Davis’ So What. Our interpretation was a kind of dreamy, soft rock fusion thingamajig. The clip is very brief because my only tape of this recording was accidentally cut short (a friend of mine borrowed the tape and accidentally taped over part of this tune).

This next piece was a spin-off of another project from my senior year at The Fine Arts Center. When studying the seven modes, we were charged with picking a mode and writing a song. I was the only one brave enough to pick the unresolvable Locrian mode. The piece was well accepted, and I got a good grade on it. I later recorded it. I borrowed my neighbor’s acoustic guitar (Keith Groover again) for this track. The name of the track is Sleeping Alone.

For music theory geeks: It feels like it resolves to B minor in the end because I essentially “cheated” when writing this song. Although you’ll not here a single F# in the entire song, it is implied. When the tonic chords are played, the diminished fifth is intentionally absent (which tends to imply F#, the perfect fifth). So the song sounds less like B Locrian and more like B Phrygian that drifts in and out of F Lydian.

I will now leave you with a final track. I have to admit that the beginning, played by a clean-tone guitar, was somewhat plagiarized. There was another student at The Fine Arts Center (Joe something – can’t remember his name; he wasn’t in my class for very long) who had written something pretty much just like this. I dug it and worked it into a song of my own. Never fear: the vast majority of the song is all original. I never named this track, so we’ll just call it Untitled #2.

MIDI Compozer

Words of Warning

Keep in mind that it is a DOS program (hence the discussion of DOSBox in my last post about it), and it doesn’t support a mouse (all keyboard interaction). Ctrl+K is your friend until you figure out the keys (not that anyone is likely to actually try this out… but just in case). The ZIP also includes a Word Document that contains all of the directions.

It is pre-configured to use a General MIDI device. You don’t really need to worry about this if your are using DOSBox vs. actual DOS because DOSBox will use your sound hardware and emulate the General MIDI interface if necessary (it works like a charm under Windows anyhow, and I believe users with other operating systems should find it similarly great).

How to Run

You will find several ways to run this program:

• On Windows, you could double-click on either the COMPOZER shortcut or COMPOZER.EXE. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect this to actually work. The software won’t run if it doesn’t detect the right hardware, and it most likely won’t (it is trying to detect pretty archaic hardware).
• On other platforms, run it in DOSBox. You can use the provided compozer-dosbox.conf file for Windows. This configuration may need to be tweaked for other platforms.

Limitations

I wrote the software originally for a Yamaha OPL2/OPL3 synthesizer card (aka Adlib music card). The OPL2 only supported ten voices. The OPL3 was stereo and supported twenty, but each voice could only be defined as 100% left, right, or mono. So this program supports only ten voices on an OPL3 but provides full pan support from left to right. The General MIDI support was the last bit I wrote (once I finally got a General MIDI card for my computer). General MIDI supports sixteen tracks, each track with umpteen simultaneous voices (though actual hardware often limited total voices to between 32 and 256). I chose not to re-write the program completely for General MIDI, so you only get ten distinct notes total.

If you choose percussion then you only get six distinct musical notes at a time and four distinct percussive notes at a time. Again, this has its roots in OPL2 hardware limitations.

If there are any brave souls out there who try to actually tinker with this (I’m not actually expecting any), I can send you some sample music files so you can see what a song looks like without having to go through all of the trouble of writing one yourself. It may also give you some ideas on how to make “dense” music work with so few voices.

Starting over a week ago, our next door neighbor, Pat, has been having a six-foot privacy fence installed. This should prove to be a blessing. She has the most obnoxious pack of four little dogs – they bark at everything all day long. They bark at us when we are outside. They bark at our dogs when they’re out during the day. They bark at their own shadows in the evening sometimes it seems.

The fence encompasses a huge amount of land. Her house is situated rather off-center in her plot of land. With a fence all the way around, clearly delineating the property, it looks a bit lop-sided since the fence extends so much further to the east (to the left if you were standing at the street looking at her front door) than it does to the west. Unfortunately, despite the impressive perimeter, it fails to surround the mess in her yard. She used to have two big PODS next to her driveway, but there is now only a pile of debris. The fence does not hide it from our view. So we’ll be planting some leyland cypruses over there to shield us from the unsightly scene.

Pat is the nicest person next to which a home-owner could live. She has a garden and has been very helpful in the past, loaning us her lawn equipment from time to time. But she isn’t quite as chatty as of the last couple of years. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve done something to upset her, but perhaps she’s busy with other things. Despite her beaming generosity, we have still secretly spurned her annoying dogs and her less-than-beautiful yard. So the fence will be a welcome addition.

The Rain Barrel

Last weekend we built a rain barrel for one of the downspouts on the front of our house. We have one that empties by the front porch, behind a large bush. The bush makes the perfect cover for a rain barrel:

We managed to build one for only $20. Unfortunately, we didn’t take pictures when we were building it – otherwise I could show you the step-by-step to saving yourself a bunch of money (apparently rain barrels can sell for upwards of $100).

We started with a 32-gallon RubberMaid trash can – only $15 from your neighborhood Lowe’s or Home Depot. We then bought fittings from the plumbing aisle: one brass faucet threaded to accept a hose on one end. The other end of the faucet was threaded, too. The threads screw into a piece of PVC, which is then connected via PVC cement to another piece of PVC that has a large threaded tail with a large flange. We drilled a hole in the bottom of the barrel, through which the threaded tail fit. A little plumber’s putty around the threads, a rubber gasket, and a very tight nut securely fasten that piece to the barrel.

We had to do some surgery to the downspout to make room for the rain barrel. It involved removing one of the elbow ends, cutting the main line (since the barrel is several feet tall), and then re-attaching the remaining elbow. You can see from the pic that we also cut a hole in the plastic lid so that the downspout reaches right in (look to the left of the blurry face):

The weather refused to produce moisture for an entire week after we had the barrel readied. But Saturday it rained. It didn’t even rain that heavily, but the barrel filled up all the way nevertheless. It was overflowing Sunday. It probably overflowed a lot because it really rained on Sunday. It continues to rain today. Here’s the state of the barrel now – still full and overflowing:

The John Butler Trio

This past weekend we went to a concert with two other couples. One couple, Karen and Cliff Jones, accompanied us on the last concert we saw (you can re-read about those misadventures here). The other couple, Paul and Melanie Manning, are more friends of ours from my workplace. We met them in the evening at the Landmark Diner, down the road from the amphitheater in Chastain Park. From there were caravan’ed to a parking lot in the park and begun the tailgating festivities. The festivities mainly consisted of eating Chinese food (for us anyway – the Mannings brought sushi; the Joneses brought sub sandwiches) and telling tales of mischievous kids, of which we all get our fill.

After a dinner in the parking lot, we meandered to the amphitheater. The John Butler Trio was the act that Malin and I were most excited about seeing, and they did not disappoint. In fact, they were awesome. They played a good set of songs, a long set, and were really fun to watch. John Butler makes his acoustic guitar spit out truly unreal sounds with the occasional aid of a slide and an overdrive pedal. They had one of the members of Arrested Development join them on the stage during one of the songs. They rocked the house. The only regret was that they didn’t play one of my favorite songs, Daniella.

After the trio came G. Love and Special Sauce – the same act as our last musical outing. This time G. Love played a slow and sleepy set. A highlight was when he drifted into a rendition of Jack Johnson’s Rodeo Clowns. We left a little early because Malin got really tired and wanted to go. We had already seen G. Love and knew we’d survive if we missed the last few songs. Karen and Cliff also had to go to relieve their baby-sitter of duty. Karen is a huge G. Love fan, so she was more bummed to have to take off early. After speaking with Paul this morning at work, I learned that we only missed three songs. And, due to the curfews they have at Chastain Park (it is in a very ritzy neighborhood that doesn’t like loud rock’n'roll concerts going on late at night), there were no encores. When G. Love left the stage, the night was all over.

We arrived home at a reasonable hour and went straight to bed… (I’m still recovering from a cold that I’ve been fighting for over a week now)

The Lord of the Rings

Last night, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy could be seen on network television. We weren’t sure how much of it would be suitable for Will to watch, but he was too excited by it for us not to try. It was quite a choppy evening. Even being “edited” for network television, it has still has more than enough violence in it (including the occasional beheaded orc or impaled villain). Luckily we’ve seen all three films (and even own them on DVD), so we knew what was coming. Our frequent changing of channels right when the action started going seemed to really frustrate Will, but we assured them that they were fighting too roughly for him to watch. The second film, The Two Towers, was the worst. He saw considerably less than half of the film due to the constant battling with Orcs and the long battle of Helm’s Deep.

He did not get to see the end of the film – partially due to the violence and scary sequences but mostly due to the fact that it did not end until 11:45pm.

And to think that today he didn’t want to watch 102 Dalmations (which was playing on some channel earlier today after he got home from school) because – get this – it was too scary. Wonders never cease…

This past weekend we saw crazy storms here in Atlanta. Friday night saw a few funnel clouds that wrecked random parts of town, including (oddly enough) parts of midtown and downtown. The next day saw more bad weather with more tornado warnings and horribly-sized hailstones. Luckily, down here in Fayette county, we avoided all of the bad weather. It was wet on Saturday, but absolutely awesome yesterday. We spent most of the time on the deck under a big umbrella. Malin was apparently not completely under the umbrella since she turned red on her shoulders. Luckily for us, Will and I completely avoided oversunning.

Work has been very busy for me for the past month, and it has been picking up for Malin over the past few weeks. That is the main reason I haven’t posted in over a month. That’s what I tell myself anyway. Other reasons are that there hasn’t been a lot going on lately… Will’s addiction to Lego Star Wars has not abated, so we’ve decided to cut him off from XBox for a while. We’re interested to see exactly what Will will be like after he gets through this painful period of withdrawal.

We had thought about getting a Nintendo Wii. In fact, we still are thinking about it. They are still hard to come by, however. I figured the lack of availability was limited to Christmas season, but here in March they are still hard to get. We ventured out last weekend, determined to purchase one, but the Toys’R'Us had just sold their last one. They directed us to another location in Morrow that still had two more in stock. But, alas, by the time we got to Morrow (about a 15-20 minute drive from Fayetteville), they too were sold out.

We will not be getting the Lego Star Wars game for Wii (despite the fact that it includes the original trilogy and looks really cool…). We’ll try to stick with games that are more interactive from a physical perspective. You know, swinging-the-controller-around-like-a-crazy-person kind of interactive – like sports. These should help him outgrow his addiction to Star Wars (he even dreams about it lately). I’m almost afraid to ever show him the movies – afraid that he’ll become so unhealthily engrossed in it again. We’ll see. He’s about at an age where Malin and I would be comfortable with him watching the first movie (the original from 1977, not Episode I) – were it not for his current obsession anyway.

So lately we’ve been trying to find other things to keep his interest. Luckily, he likes reading (or rather being read to – he’s not reading by himself yet). He also likes Webkinz: simple online games, completely absent of light sabers, Jedis, and Jango Fett (Will’s favorite character). Plus there are interesting ways to interact with the Webkinz pets – like helping the pets brush their teeth, build a vegetable garden, eat food, go to work, and go to school. You can even direct the pets to go to the potty (speaking of which, Will has been doing much better with regard to potty-training lately).

Another thing that Will has gotten interested in is “playing music notes”. Years ago, when I was in college, I wrote a DOS-based MIDI composition program. It is actually what I used to get most of my music into electronic form. Malin doesn’t care for the music: she can’t get past the fake instruments and distinctly video-game-like sound produced from my computer’s MIDI card. But Will likes it, and calls it “music notes”. He doesn’t mind listening to the music, but his favorite part is just changing the colors of the user interface so that everything looks hideous – from electric green to neon pink and everything in between. Then he’ll play a track to see how it looks.

Until recently, I was unable to run my program since I no longer have a sound card that works with DOS drivers (i.e. a Yamaha-OPL2/OPL3-compatible synthesizer with MPU-401-compatible MIDI device, running on default I/O ports). But my friend Scott clued me into DOSBox recently, and it works like a charm. It emulates old DOS hardware to run almost any old DOS application or video game while using your current, state-of-the-art devices and Windows drivers under-the-hood. I had to tweak the settings to get everything to run just right, but now it does.

Since installing DOSBox, I’ve used the program to write a couple of new songs. You’ve been warned – all sounds were generated from the MIDI hardware on my computer, so they’ll have a very video-game kind of sound. It doesn’t help that my expertise does not lie in orchestration. So sometimes I pick MIDI tracks that I think sound good, but they only further the “video game” quality of the music. I’ll let you decide. Here are two songs I wrote over the past week: song1 and song2. Sorry if the downloads are slow – the files are kind of big because these MP3s were encoded at a very high bitrate (nothing but the best for my original music!)

Just for some perspective, here a couple of songs that I wrote ten years ago, while still in college: song3 and song4. I’ve got lots and lots of these laying around, so maybe I’ll post more later. I’ll definitely post links so you can download my MIDI software and the DOSBox configuration for it to run sweetly. I’ll try to do so before another month goes by…

We’ll start off with an amazing guitarist that I remember seeing on YouTube several months ago: Andy McKee. When I first heard of him, his record label – CandyRat – had taped recording sessions with lots of their artists and posted all of the videos to YouTube. This guy was definitely the most impressive. Below are links to four of his tunes that happen to be my favorites:

• Drifting
• Africa (written by Steve Lukather’s band, Toto)
• Art of Motion
• The Friend I Never Met

His style is very similar to Michael Hedges. If you’re not familiar with Michael Hedges, then you can see him play here.

I just recently ran across another cool artist, thanks to a long time friend of mine, Keith Groover (Keith and I were next door neighbors for several years in Taylors, SC). One of his websites had a link to an awesome video by Kaki King. She is an amazing guitarist whose technical style shares a few things in common with Andy McKee. Below is a link to that video followed by a couple of other videos of hers:

• Playing with Pink Noise
• Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers
• Yellowcake

While we are on the topic of awesome guitarists, how could we possibly forget the un-freakin’-believable Stanley Jordan. The links below are videos of live performances by this phenomenal virtuoso (after seeing him play, you can easily forgive his cheesy choice of costume):

• Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven
• The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby

How about something completely different? Like some Wierd Al? Some skateboarding? YouTube has it all!

Here is a neat tune from a European pop group named Bloc Party. And here is an even cooler video for it, created using an addictive Flash application named Line Rider. And while we are talking about Line Rider, who can forget this one? (featuring a song named Tank! by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts – also featured during the opening sequence for the animé show Cowboy Bebop).

Finally, I will share another facet of YouTube’s greatness: the availability of bizarre Japanese television programming.

Treadmill Madness:

Our big US television networks need to seriously consider hiring the guys that come up with this stuff – pure genius! (and way better than Deal or No Deal).

I have a co-worker, Karen, who is a huge fan of G Love and Special Sauce, and she mentioned to us a few months back about their playing at the Tabernacle here in Atlanta. I am a fan of some of G Love’s music, so I wanted to go. To my pleasant surprise, Malin wanted to go, too. So we got tickets and have been sitting on them for months.

Saturday we met Karen and her husband, Cliff, at a restaurant in Midtown to eat before the show. We carpooled along with two other people (a couple that knew Cliff from work) to the show. It seemed that everyone there was 18 or under. There were lots of young kids there. I don’t usually go to see shows where the dominant age group is 15-25, so this felt a little odd. I like to pride myself on not listening to the crap to which most teenagers listen. That probably sounds snobby, but I honestly don’t think that many teenagers listen to much jazz, fusion, bluegrass, or Steely Dan.

The first opening act, Ozomatli, was pretty cool. Malin was not terribly impressed by their music, but we all agreed that they put on a great show. The second band, Slightly Stoopid, was a big disappointment. At a party several months back, I had heard about this band and how great they were supposed to be: the older brother of one of Malin’s high school friends is a big fan of theirs. I had heard some of their stuff before the show thanks to Karen playing a mix CD that had some tunes by both Ozomatli and Slightly Stoopid. But these guys have not yet found themselves musically. Their set was a hodge-podge of genres from all over the map – none of them being my favorite genre.

The first couple of songs that Slightly Stoopid played were a good start. And then they kept playing… It quickly went downhill. Malin and I were equally dismayed about the length of their set. After they were finished, a lot of the kids cleared out. I guess that punk / reggae / rap / metal / hip-hop / jam is a genre that is popular among today’s youth. I was unimpressed.

G Love and Special Sauce put on a good show. Karen was incredibly excited to see them play. She even poked fun of herself, likening her enthusiasm to Beatlemania and suggesting that she might faint when G Love came on stage. She did not faint, which was unfortunate because a photo of that would have been a great addition to this post!

They played a lot of tunes that I knew (though Malin was less familiar with their music), and they played well. Their keyboardist is awesome and some of his jamming solos reminded me a lot of John Medeski. By strange coincidence, the first time I ever saw a show at the Tabernacle was to see Medeski Martin & Wood in 1998. My second time at the Tabernacle was to see The Funky Meters in 1999, and it was the first time Malin and I went to a show together (we had just begun dating). Both of those were great shows.

Ultimately, Malin and I did not return home until 1:30am. We both emphatically agreed that the night would have been better (and we would have been less exhausted at that point) if Slightly Stoopid had gotten sick right before the show. Oh, well.