Monthly Archives: September 2008

Classical Music Download Site

18 Thursday Sep 2008

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A download site for Classical music has just gone live called Passionato offering high quality MP3s (320kbps) and FLAC recordings at what appear to be very good prices. The Guardian has a full review of the site here.  It will be interesting to see how the site goes given that classical music fans tend to viewed as snobs when it comes to the source of their music.

 

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Rick Wright

17 Wednesday Sep 2008

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Being a bit behind in my blogging the sad death of Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright to cancer is common knowledge now.  If you’d like to read more about Rick then Uncut’s obituary is a good place to start.

Personally, I hope that the discussions and speculation about a possible Pink Floyd reunion are permanently ‘put to bed’ as a Floyd without Rick isn’t really Pink Floyd in my opinion, although the nit pickers will not point out that he wasn’t a proper member of the band, but a hire gun for a considerable period during the 90s.

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FabChannel – Quality Streaming Live Concerts

12 Friday Sep 2008

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I’ve come across a rather interesting resource called FabChannel.com.  FabChannel are providing quality video streams of whole concerts from legitimate sources, either licensed concert recordings from music companies such as Universal and V2 or professional recorded performances from Dutch based venues.  The video quality is good enough that it could be expanded to watch full screen with only a small amount of graininess on a 1600x1200monitor with streaming through a Flash player. FabChannel’s performances cover a wide range of well known artists such as The View and Martha Wainwright, and they claim to have got over 900 performances available already.

 Martha Wainright on FabChannel

The site also has integration with last.fm and can also provide useful artist bios etc. To generate income to pay for the service there are some adverts on the site, but they’re not annoying popup’s etc.

 

Gutter Twins Release EP called Adorata on Sept 2

09 Tuesday Sep 2008

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The Gutter Twins (Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli) are releasing a new EP to help raise funds for the Natasha Shneider Memorial Fund.  The EP comprises of covers ranging from Down The Line (Jose Gonzales) to Deep Hit Of Morning Sun," (Primal Scream). 

My only grievance with this is that the download is exclusive to iTunes!

For more information see the following sites:

Real or Thomas Tank engine like models?

09 Tuesday Sep 2008

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The small beautifully detailed models in the Thomas the Tank Engine programmes have a strong place in my life now I’m a parent to a small boy.  The question is, is the following image a small model like Thomas or real?

Despite looking very model like, this is in fact according to an article on Wallpaper (here) the photography of Naoki Honji, who creates the model like effect by manipulating the light and colour intensity of the images. Combined with the panoramic nature of the photos they look very model like.

 

The Wallpaper article provides more example of the images along with details of an exhibition of Honji’s work.

 

famous photographer Annie Leibovitz talks to Vanity Fair

09 Tuesday Sep 2008

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The famous portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, probably best known the many for the recent ‘scandal’ when having a photographic session at Buckingham Palace with the Queen has been interviewed by Vanity Fair. The article can bee read here.

In the iinterview she talks several of her best images including that of the Stones whilst at Rolling Stone magazine, Demi Moore for Vanity Fair and the recent Queen portrait.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to BOfH for the link