Wugazi is combination of Fugazi and Wu-Tang Clan, created by Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy. The album, 13 Chambers is available to download from their site.
Dan Solomon interviewed the pair and discussed how the album came to be. For the technically minded, Joe Gross offers a track-by-track breakdown of the album.
In casual conversation, music is one of those those canonical small-talk subjects that ranks up there with the weather. Even if you don’t share musical tastes, the topic can provide numerous avenues of discussion before the canapés arrive. It should be easy, but my encounters tend to go something like:
“So what do you listen to?”
“Umm… well… you know… lots of stuff.”
Which, is usually followed by some mumbling and wild gesticulation in attempt to coax a few band names out of my brain. Meanwhile, I’m hoping the prolonged awkward silence will push the conversation in a different direction or at least give me the opportunity to pull out my phone and distract them with videos of kittens falling over.
If my sparing partner actually seems interested and vaguely techno-savvy, I point them towards my last.fm profile. Of course, it’s just a clever way to redirect the discussion and draw attention away from the fact that I know nothing about my own musical tastes.
Now, we move on to a subject which could be considered tangential, if it hadn’t already been mentioned in the title and featured prominently in graphical format. Yes, this is a lazy segue.
I’m a regular user of the genius mix feature in iTunes, it provides a decent base for playlists and can set an overall tone better than DJ. On the other hand, I probably used the genius mixes feature once or twice when it came out and forgot about it. Most of my music wasn’t in genius at the time, but it’s the lack of customizability kills it for me.
The genius mix label gets lost in the iTunes sidebar’s sea of text, so I don’t normally notice it. I was playing around with the iPad’s Remote app, where the feature seems much more prominent and decided to give it awhirl. Honestly, I’m still not a big fan of the feature, the lack of customizability kills it for me. Although, now that more of my music is indexed it drew my attention to the genres and iTunes’ perception of my listening habits:
There we have it — new fodder for the small-talk cannon. It doesn’t even matter if the list is accurate. Memorize the genres, spit out a few of them at any given time and you’ve got enough permutations to last a lifetime or at least until the last course is served.
Stjepan Hauser and Luka Sulic playing Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson. That is all.
The top artist for 2010 from my last.fm account. The graphic isn’t from the end of the year, but the stats should be close, we’re only a week into 2011. The idea was stolen from russell davies.
You may also be interested in last.fm’s best of 2010, and Hype Machine’s zeitgeist. It gives you some idea about what people were actually listening to versus what critics were writing about.
The Guided By Voices Database has everything you need to know about the band’s discography, as well as the various side projects that Pollard and crew are involved with.
This site allows you to navigate & search the Guided By Voices discography and gigography. Information includes catalog numbers, scanned album images, track times, credits, vinyl color, pressing information, release dates, setlists, and gig ticket/poster images. Song details include the releases the song appears on and gigs where the track was played live.
I found a copy of the setlist from one of two back-to-back shows that I went to at the Horseshoe Tavern years ago. Both nights were epic, featuring three hour sets with double encore.
Making Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”. Pretty cool to see how the song is constructed, makes me believe I can sit down and bang out the next great club hit.
A grown’s up guide to indie rock. An interesting perspective, largely summed up by the idea that everything old is new again.
Work Associates recently created a typographically inspired cover for Klang, the third album from The Rakes. Given that the album was recorded in Berlin, Work turned to the Bauhaus movment and the work of Ludwig Hirshfeld Mack for inspiration. Hirschfeld-Mack developed a light and colour modulator apparatus, to provide a visual translation of music.
A visual breakdown of Pitchfork’s 100 best tracks of 2008 (compare to Billboard’s tracks) .
Unwanted Scrobbles, a brief list of the most deleted tracks and artists on last.fm.
Eightface is a weblog by Dave Kellam. It's largely just a collection of links to things I find interesting, with some attempts at pithy commentary interspersed.