Sound Opinion

13 Wednesday Dec 2006

I’ve been catching up with the podcasts from Sound Opinion made available by the Chicago Public Radio and can be picked up via their website or iTunes. Presented by Jim DeRogatis and a lesser known music journalist Greg Kot. I can recommend the podcasts, particularly when interviewing artists as the interviews/discussions to be very open and wide ranging – the Radiohead interview is a good example of this. The people they’ve interviewed for the podcast have been fairly broad and interesting from Radiohead to Lawrence Lessig to Cameron Crowe.

Thom Yorke – free Remixes

12 Tuesday Dec 2006

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Thom Yorke’s current solo website http://www.theeraser.net/ has a couple of free remixes (you need to select the buildings to get access to them). The only problem is that the site is implemented as flash, so making downloading them a little annoying without a download tool.

Damien Rice – 9

05 Tuesday Dec 2006

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Damien Rice is finally back with a follow up to his well reviewed O. The first album wasn’t bad, but the new album – 9 is a definite step up. This gets lots of thumbs up, and if you like your music more acoustic/singer song writer like Tom McRae and Ray LaMontagne then go check it out.

Live Concert Archive

17 Friday Nov 2006

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I’ve come across a new amazing resource – an on line library of Live Concert recordings. If you know much about radio performances, aside from the currently very hot KRCW Morning Becomes Electic, the wonderful John Peel Sessions and from the states in the 70s and 80s King Biscuit Flower Hour. It appears that the Wolfgang Concert Vault (click here) has a lot of these and more. Currently the site only offers a streaming solution, but according the Big O Magazine news email – they’ll be offering a download service soon. There is of course still the Archive.org source for live material as well.

Shortage of posts

08 Wednesday Nov 2006

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We’ve not been posting for a few weeks as we’ve just become parents for the first time and have been getting the hang of managing our little bundle of fun. New service should resume soon.

Review: Hybrid – I Choose Noise

04 Wednesday Oct 2006

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I’ve been listening to this album on my MP3 player for the last week or so and enjoyed it, but last night I finally listened to it through the HiFi, and boy is this the mutts nuts! I find electronca hard to write about – so here is a reasonable review for you : http://www.progressive-sounds.com/Music-Reviews/Hybrid-I-Choose-Noise.asp.

Hybrid’s I Choose Noise at Amazon

Review: Ray Lamontagne – Till The Sun Turns Black

03 Tuesday Oct 2006

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I’ve been a little remiss in album reviews of late, so I here a quick look a new album. In the UK, Ray Lamontagne’s first album has been relaunched four or five times (but the record company never seems to follow through). As a result Trouble has been out for sometime now and the multiple launches has delayed the release of his second album here in the UK, which is a shame as the sequel- Till The Sun Turns Black, seriously eclipses his debut Trouble, not that Trouble was a poor effort, far from it.

Till The Sun Turns Black sees Ray’s vocal delivery coming across a little sweeter and a little less dry than on Trouble, and the instrumentation is far richer, running from a Stax/Memphis Horns backing on a couple of tracks to a muted trumpet that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Northern England brass band, then there is the purest simplicity of a guitar and voice (Lesson Learned); then we have a simple string backing on the title track. The overall effect is that the music carries you along without detracting from the Ray’s vocal performances.

This gets lots of thumbs up, you can purchase the album through Amazon – Till The Sun Turns Black. To add to the joys Ray is touring the UK over the coming months – more information can be found on his website here.

Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Shepherds Bush Empire

02 Monday Oct 2006

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We finally caught up with Ryan Adams last night at the Shepherds Bush Empire in London. This was our third attempt to catch him live (the first tour got cancelled because Ryan managed to break his arm walking off stage in Loverpool, the second due to ill health).

The performance was pretty good, it certainly demonstrated his musicianship & and workaholic rate, as Ryan backed Neal Casal’s support slot on drums, and then his own set wasn’t stopped to mess around with encores, they plaid straight through until the curfew.

The band played through a lot of material from the albums last year, with the audience responding particularly well to the material from Cold Roses.

The ownly irritation of the evening, was that both Neal and Ryan demonstrated Dylanesque attitudes. Neal, stopped a couple of times to rant at tha audience for talking. Although sympathetic to his case, but people talking whilst you’re performing is par for the course when you’re the support. Then Ryan reacted badly to hecklers later in the show when was talking between songs about the problems of picking up coughs and colds whilst on the road. Think Ryan needs to learn a couple of good put-downs.

I managed to capture some pictures on the 3megapixel phone camea (sony ericsson K800i) – a set of which is available on our flickr photoss.

Overall, I’d say a band worth seeing.

BBC Still Banning Songs

26 Tuesday Sep 2006

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I thought the days of the BBC banning particular songs was long gone, and that the worst they did was consign the song to a minor playlist or worse. But this wouldn’t seem to be the case, as according the AlbumVote.co.uk the BBC have banned the latest single by The Sparks – Dick Around (a reference to time wasting) (article here). Understandably with BBC 6 Music and some of Radio 1’s alternative programming being one of the few potential outlets to get the single heard the Mael brothers are pretty pissed off.

The irony is, that they performed the song live on BBC 1 TV only last Friday as the closing performance on the Jonathon Ross show! Plus having just searched the BeeB’s website already been plaid a number of times on BBC 6 Music. A little late now to band the song? Doesn’t this smack of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax?

Flickr Pools

26 Tuesday Sep 2006

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I’ve been using Flickr for nearly a year now, and still continue to be impressed by it. We’ve principally been using it to share our photos with friends and family who spread around around the world.

Pollock No. 1 from MOMA However one interesting trend I’ve encountered, are Flickr pools/groups, to date I’ve used them with friends to share photos from get togethers. But it appears people have been using them for far wider associations. For example, when I posted photos from our New York trip earlier in the year I was approached, and asked if I’d contribute to a pool that is collecting photos of all the work in MOMA – an interesting idea, with all-sorts of potentially interesting implications if it becomes a wide spread occurrence.

Scissor Sisters - Red Square Then as a result of posting photos from the Scissor sisters gig in Trafalgar Square, we’ve been asked if we’d contribute to the Scissor Sister’s pool of that event which can be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/motoredsquare/pool/.

I mentioned, that such pools if they become a wider spread idea, could have some interesting implications. Consider, if you could go online and see images from every exhibit in MOMA , would you still go? Personally yes I would, but is my view representative? But I would take advantage of such pools to help identify which exhibitions within MOMA I would like to see. The MOMA pool can be found here.

As cameras become increasingly smaller, cleverer and greater resolutions, what will happen to photo journalism, as pools like the Scissor Sisters ones may end providing publishers with suitable sources of images from events around the world?