Computers make amazingly good and cheap synthesizers these days. After much faff, I got Rosegarden working on my netbook. The test files play Bach in orchestral voices and sound gorgeous. One day I’ll make it play something myself more complicated than a doorbell.

So this is having the obvious effect: Broadway musicians being made redundant by synthesizers. It’s purely for financial reasons, and not like Frank Zappa recording his classical albums by Synclavier so as not to have to deal with musicians. Bless their little hearts.

I’ll tell you, Turkmenbashi wouldn’t have stood for this for a moment.

With thanks to the fabulous Kallisti of blastmilk.com for the heads up, album covers as Ikea catalogue pages on Flickr.

From Cracked: The 5 Most Absurd Video Games Starring Rock Stars. It starts with the Frankie Goes To Hollywood game and actually gets worse.

Tristan Jehan is obviously a stylish gentleman with a grasp of what makes culture. He wrote something to work out the beat of a piece of music, time-stretch the first half of each beat and time-shrink the second half. Ladeez gemmun, I give you: The Swinger. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is probably my favourite here. My toddler daughter thinks all this stuff is fantastic. And my faith in anything on a recording having anything to do with anything a human played just dropped even further.

(Also from San Francisco Music Hack Day: Six Degrees Of Black Sabbath, which got me from Pink Floyd to VNV Nation in only eleven steps.)

Update: Someone’s put up a site that does it for you. Some of these are great.

Roger Ebert is a renowned film critic and an excellent and amusing writer. He also wrote a couple of screenplays with Russ Meyer: Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (produced) and the abortive Sex Pistols film Who Killed Bambi? (unproduced, as Malcolm McLaren ran out of money). He’s just posted the screenplay for the latter. Good Lord.

I originally picked up a Rocknerd account so I could review international acts from non-crap bands that made it to the great southern lands. Well, that was over a year ago and I have a small backlog of material. So using a stack method (last in, first out) this piece will be brief review of two reformed 80s semi-intelligentsia synth-pop acts who performed at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on Wednesday April 21 – Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet. OK, so this is Rocknerd, not Popnerd. Next review will be the Buzzcocks.

Read the rest of this entry »

And this one’s with Martin Gambie when he was doing Mardi Picasso. So whatever happened to Martin?

Bulgarian Alexander Alexandrov has been most unfairly sentenced to 16 years’ prison merely for killing his neighbour, who played “Angels” by Robbie Williams two thousand times in a row at top volume over the course of a week. Obviously not a trial by jury.

I’ve been digging up the lost unpublished fragments of Party Fears. Here’s an interview with Dave Graney in late 1992, when nobody cared and he was planning Night Of The Wolverine, the album that made him a rock star in Australia for the rest of the 1990s.

Will the six five four majors shrink to five four three? “Oh dear what a pity never mind,” as Windsor Davies lamented.

“Today is not much skilled craftsmen capable of creating a truly awful cover for a vinyl disc. This art, alas, almost lost. When we look to come down to us … Well, I’m sick of this stylized idiocy.” Jaroslav Sviridov went through LP Cover Lover and picked his favourites: 1, 2, 3. (NSFW for deeply unstylish exposed breasts.) This never gets old.

The last song of the last night, “My Pal” by the Drones with Joel Silbersher, on video.

And, of course, the 7:30 Report. Now, I remember Hamish Fitzsimmons as my mate the Perth bass player who I swapped my 6-UVS T-shirt for a Mustang! Beer Makes You Smart shirt … just the man you want on this story.

The ABC in its infinite wisdom has started broadcasting its first run of the BBC’s Seven Ages Of Rock in the Silly Season, with episode one “The Birth Of Rock” shown last week and unfortunately not available on iView. However I was fortunate enough to catch it when broadcast.

Focussing on the explosion of Blues-based Rock from 1963-1970, “The Birth Of Rock” was a rocknerd’s delight, featuring rare performance footage, new and archive interviews with Keith Richards, Roger Daltrey, Ginger Baker etc. and insights from British rock writers including Charles Shaar Murray. I look forward to watching the rest of the series.

From Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content: If bands were dates.

• Isis would be that girl who was amazing in bed until she started insisting on listening to nothing but Tool while you banged
• Explosions in the Sky would be that girl who’s great in bed, sure, but it’s EXACTLY THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER FOREVER
• Future of the Left would just donkeypunch you and then post video of it on the internet
• Sepultura would be a guy who completely ignores all erogenous zones other than the vag because they “get in the way”
• Coheed & Cambria would be a guy who you initially wanna fuck but he keeps you up all night talking about HIS FEELINGS instead …

Update: And more.

Royal Mail has issued a stamp set that commemorates ten classic rock album covers ranging from The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed to Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head.

The stamps were launched on the 7th of January by Jimmy Page, and Led Zeppelin’s “IV” is included in the ten chosen from thousands by Royal Mail for the imagery of their covers rather than the music on the albums themselves.

PUBLIC ENEMA, The Hit Parade, Thursday (N! News) — James Blunt’s Back To Bedlam was the UK’s biggest-selling album of the 2000s, objectively establishing the final death of pop music after fifty years.

The 2000s were the decade of falling record sales, plummeting profits for the six five four major labels, a number one single requiring only a few thousand downloads as opposed to a hundred thousand physical records twenty-five years earlier and a race to the bottom by the music industry to come up with something, anything, so horrifyingly insipid and stupid as to destroy instantly the mind of anyone exposed to it, like a saccharine Cthulhu, in the quest to find a sufficiently common lowest denominator.

(Read more …)

From unexpected drama to shocking performances, MTV’s 2009 Video Music Awards managed once again to raise eyebrows and get people talking. What most people missed, however, were the occult meanings encoded in the VMAs. The TV event was in fact a large scale occult ceremony, complete with an initiation, a prayer and even a blood sacrifice. Vigilant Citizen looks at the symbolism used during the show. Cheers to Annette for alerting me to this vital information.

I got a new MP3 player for Christmas from Arkady. It’s a cheap shitty ChiPod — S1 chipset-based. I actually asked specifically for a cheap shitty S1-based ChiPod because they play Oggs and I happen to have a shitload here. (Doesn’t say in the manual they do, ‘cos supporting Ogg means Thomson charge you ten times the price for the MP3 licence. So they just snuck it in anyway.) Pink, 4 gig, looks like a fake Nano 4G, torturous interface. JUST WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED!

With SkullCandy Ink’d headphones. Apparently these are “hep” with the “kids.” They just happen to be pretty good for ten quid (seven on Amazon). Left and right aren’t marked, as is apparently the fashion these days (telling left and right isn’t “fab” or “bling” or whatever the “emo” term is). But if you’re too cheap for Sennheisers or Etymotics, they’ll do very nicely, thank you.

‘Pod is filled with This Kind Of Punishment, ’80s New Zealand indie on Xpressway. 1, 2, 3. Never say I never give you anything.

Redcountess blessed me with What Would Keith Richards Do? (“Everything.”)

Oh, and my mother gave me Christian Rock. I don’t dare play this thing in case it causes a vortex of suck consuming all in its wake.

So. How was your haul?

Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax are confirmed to share the stage at the Sonisphere festivals in Poland and the Czech Republic next Northern Summer.

Anthrax and Slayer are also confirmed for the UK Sonisphere festival, but with the headliners already announced as being Iron Maiden and Rammstein it is unlikely that the “Big Four” pioneers of Thrash will all play at Knebworth. However earlybird ticket buyers for the UK festival will get a free ticket for the Poland show.

Julian Lennon and co-songwriter James Scott Cook will donate a percentage of profits from a song on Lennon’s new EP to the Lupus Foundation of America and St Thomas’ Lupus Trust.

Titled Lucy, the song is about Lennon’s childhood friend Lucy Vodden, the alleged inspiration for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, who suffered from Lupus for many years before dying in September this year. Cook had a grandmother, also called Lucy, who also died from Lupus.

Spotted by Redcountess, Martin Newell’s 1992 rock’n'roll Christmas lyrics. I particularly liked “Hip King Wenceslas.”

Andy Updegrove is a computer standards lawyer. This is about as far from rocknerdery as you get. But I deeply appreciated his piece from 2005 on the Hammond B-3 Organ and how it has “has received recognition as an instrument in its own right — something even Stradivarius failed to achieve.”

We’ve all poked fun at him over the years, but one of Rock’n'Roll’s veterans with a big heart, Ronnie James Dio is battling the early stages of stomach cancer in The Mayo Clinic.

If you feel so inclined you can send Ronnie a get well card or email to help him throw the horns at the big C.

There is a social networking campaign to stop Simon Cowell achieving another Christmas no. 1 spot this year with one of his overblown ersatz productions.

The creators of the campaign are asking people to buy Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name Of online from iTunes, Amazon etc. between December 13th and December 20th in order for it to qualify for the Christmas no. 1 spot.

“What kind of music do you like?”

Fuck. Who can answer a question like that? I HAVE FUCKING THOUSANDS OF ALBUMS, MOTHERFUCKER. IF YOU CAN FIND THE COMMONALITY OTHER THAN “THEY’RE IN THE SAME HOUSE,” YOU’VE JUST PRODUCED A NEW GRAND UNIFIED FUCKING THEORY OF MUSIC AND THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER CAN JUST FUCKING GIVE UP AND GO HOME LIKE THE N00B IT IS.

(And pissed off at myself that I haven’t come up with a glib small-talk answer to that question that I wouldn’t choke on saying out loud.)

What makes you RAAAGE so hard you want to throw the record player out the window?

You can’t figure that chord out, can you? Turns out there wasn’t just guitars in the studio, but a piano as well — as determined by mathematical analysis of the recording.

From NewsBiscuit: “Two decades after being given a C60 cassette of specially selected songs, Rachel Hannigan, a 38-year-old consultant from Knutsford, finally realised the collection of tortured alternative rock songs given to her by her chemistry lab partner James Barr was not just a compilation of some of his favourite songs that he thought she might like, but was intended as a declaration of love.”

A buncha MP3s just really doesn’t cut it. Who has time, for one thing?

Solid body electric guitars are only shaped like an acoustic for reasons of familiarity — get the neck right and you can do anything else. Unfortunately, there are those who fail to recognise the difference between “can” and “should.” The Lego one is way cool, though.

If you’re trying to be the peak body for musicians in the UK, it helps not to alienate anyone who can read. Supporting Lily Allen’s several strikes’ worth of copyright violations is a really bad start. I’d say its quite ovious.

My first thought was: “Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey will be more than a little annoyed.”