posts
Tagged as:
jamesblunt, music, sesamestreet, video, youtube.
James Blunt appears on Sesame Street, as so many have done before him, and sends up his greatest hit to delicious effect. Whilst his music may be drippy, dreary, and downright awful… you’ve got to admire how game he is for this slot. It almost redeems him for everything else.
Almost.
personal
Tagged as:
endoftheroad, festival, me, music.
Back after a weekend away at the End of the Road festival, and what a weekend it was. Wonderful weather, great company, and only the briefest hints of rain. It felt pretty special: a small festival (only 5000 tickets), lots of families, great food, wonderful music, and a schedule that never felt too crowded, but always yielded serendipitous discoveries wherever you looked. Highlights included:
There were many others, but that should give you the idea. Alex and I spent a while trying to describe what tied all the acts we saw together, given they felt so disparate. But in the end, there was definitely one thing that brought them altogether: a shared sense of humility. The organisers were thanked in practically every set; the festival lauded similarly. So many musicians and bands just seemed so thankful to be there, and would always inform the audience of this - usually prior to thanking the audience themselves. And they all meant it. It felt wonderful to be at such a gentle, honest festival, which made up in heart what it lacked in bravado.
Already, I cannot wait for next year.
posts
Tagged as:
classical, experimental, music, tv, video.
John Cage performs his composition “Water Walk” on popular 1960s US TV show “I’ve Got A Secret”. As music, it actually works well; as performance, it works even better. There’s something almost surreal about putting a figure like Cage on light entertainment show, but it makes me wonder if anyone would do something like this nowadays. Via Nicky, via boingboing.
games
Tagged as:
article, games, greatgamingmoments, guitar, guitarhero, music, play, writing.
This is the first an (hopefully) recurring series on Infovore, in which I write about, well, great gaming moments in whatever I’m playing at the time - current or otherwise. Let’s hope I can keep it up…
Guitar Hero was my favourite game of 2006. No question of that. A wonderful, empowering, hugely satisfying experience that cried out to be played for the sake of it. The sequel, released at the end of last year, is at least as good. It suffers by not being the first, not having the wonderful new-ness the first game brought to the market, but it’s more attractive, more polished, has much better note-detection, and a swathe of new features.
And, finishing it for the first time this morning, it brought my first “great gaming moment” of this year.
Before we go on, a note on the slightly altered structure of GHII. To progress through the game, you play gigs of songs; complete a whole gig and you can move on to the next set of songs at the next venue. Obviously, they get progressively harder. In GH, it was only necessary to complete either four or five (out of five) in the set, dependent on difficulty level, in order to progress.
GHII roughly sticks to that, but with a twist: it only lists four songs in the group. When you complete the final song necessary to progress, the camera lingers on your gig, and the audience start chanting, demanding an encore. And the game ask you if you want to give them one. Of course, you click yes, and wait for the game to load a song that’ll be a complete surprise to you.
It doesn’t really affect how the game plays, but it adds to the experience - of being a rock god - so much. So: to return to my story.
The greatest moment in the game is the final encore. It’s the final gig. You’ve shredded your way through four hellish solo-heavy songs, playing a special gig at Stonehenge. And the crowd start clamouring for an encore. But this time around, they’re not chanting indecipherable words, oh no.
It’s quite clear what they’re yelling.
“Freebird! Freebird!”
They want you to play Freebird.
And up pops the game. “The audience are demanding Freebird! Will you give it to them?”.
You hit Yes.
“You’re really going to play Freebird?”
Yes.
“You’re definitely sure about this?”
Yes. Got to love the game’s sense of humour.
Practice mode, Guitar Solo i is what you’re looking for, says the loading screen. It turns out that it’s not lying.
“If I leave here tomorrow…“. I stand in my living room, tapping out that wonderful acoustic first section, as hundreds of little computer people wave their lighters in the air. Crudely rendered they may be, but it’s a magical moment.
And then the tempo picks up, and the shredding begins.
It’s all over only a few minutes later. The grin is still on my face; it’s a hectic, exciting series of solos that rattle your wrists. As I write this, that grin is returning to my face, honestly.
It’s the most majestic pay-off. Two games, and seventy-odd songs later, the audience inside my PS2 are clamouring for one last song. They know exactly what song they want to hear. And finally, I can play it for them. That one moment - that’s Guitar Hero II in a nutshell: charming, exhilirating, a masterpiece of challenge-and-reward.
I have to go now. I can hear the crowd calling again.
design
Tagged as:
design, interaction, music, social, socialsoftware, software, userexperience, ux.
I was, partly in jest, invited to join tourfilter by a friend today. What started as an elaborate social-networking joke turned into a really positive piece of user-experience I wanted to document.
What I wanted to share was the sign-up process. Normally, with social-networking sites, you have to endure some form of semi-elaborate sign-up before you’re allowed in… and then you start having to ram content in. Tourfilter neatly turns that on its head.
Tourfilter is a site that scrapes listings pages for information about your favourite bands, generating emails, RSS, or iCalendar files to keep you up-to-date. It’s a really simple, single-minded site that gives music fans personalised listings.
For a new user, there’s a form on the left of the homepage with a large textarea, in which you write the names of bands you like. I entered one band name… and via Ajax, a huge list appeared to the right of the field, of other bands I might like. Of course, I did, so I started clicking on some of them to add them to my form… and the process slowly became addictive. Pretty soon, I had a long list of bands I’d be potentially interested in seeing in London. The Ajax made it very compelling, and pretty quick. And, of course, the more bands I added, the more useful the fly-out Ajax list was, because it had better data to compare against.
Underneath the text box are three fields: username, password, and email address. Once you’ve filled them out, all you have to is click the submit button… and your brand new account is created, with all the information you’ve just filled out.
So tourfilter reverse the customary process: you add your initial data first, and only then create the account. Once you’ve done that, everything’s ready to go. I really enjoyed this experience: the Ajax element quickly showed the value of the site, which only increased the likelihood of me signing up.
I think tourfilter still has a little way to go - sometimes its scraping leaves something to be desired - but still felt its compelling sign-up process was worth commending.
posts
Tagged as:
distribution, media, mp3, music, singles.
A few days ago, I ran into my college friend Dave, who (amongst other things) is now running a small, independent record label called Kids. Kids release limited-edition, short-run 7″ singles (at the moment); they’ve got a solid lineup (including Paul Hartnoll’s debut single) and, as I bumped into him, Dave was off to a launch party for KIDS009, the latest Wombats single.
We caught up quickly, and he handed me their previous release, the double A-side of It’s Magnetic and Out on 24s (on clear plastic) from Assembly Now. When I got home, I stuck the 7″ on the record player and listened to both sides - really great stuff, and a band I’ll be keeping my eyes on.
What was really interesting, though, was the piece of paper that fell out of the single when I opened it.
On it was written a small note to say that because I’d bought the single, I was entitled to email somebody at Kids who’d send me details of how to obtain the MP3s of that track - for free.
I love this idea. The short runs of 7″ singles that Kids put out are ideal for a small record label trying to find its feet - reasonably cheap to press, I’d imagine, and which can turn a reasonable profit-per-unit. And for their target market, 7″ are still an acceptable distribution format for singles. But their target market also own iPods - and nothing’s more tedious than ripping vinyl to mp3.
So this pattern really works in their favour: people pay money for the music they want to hear on a format convenient for home, and get the mobile format thrown in - because let’s face it, they’re going to find a way to do that anyhow. The convenience of doing things this way around is a huge bonus, though. I hope other small labels do this sort of thing - it’s relatively little effort and cost on top of the pressing, but it’s a smart idea that’s in tune with exactly how people like to listen to music.
And, of course, I hope Kids continues to thrive as a label.
…and get away clean.
My pal Joey Muck is doing some music/dancing shindig with a few of his pals. “A club night in London’s trendy Clerkenwell”, if you please. 8-2am, tonight - I’m probably leaving well before 2 because nobody appears to have got the message that whilst Thursdays may be the new Fridays, they’re still school nights.
Anyhow. If you like mucky pop, rude raps, sleazy rock, and filthy electro (and god knows I do) get down there tonight and shake some.
(Also, if you’re that way inclined: Do Dirt’s Myspace page)
The way the guitar part in The Rakes’ Binary Love sounds like a scratchy 56k modem.
Red wine.
Sleep.
Dancing monkeys in Timesplitters 3
New razorblades on thick facial fuzz.
It’s al been a bit crazy recently; busy at work, fear setting in regarding Etech (which I’m sure will be fine), pressures of sorting out travel to latter, plans for after March. del.icio.us keeps this place busy, and turns the lights out at night.
posts
Tagged as:
electronic, journalism, music.
Another piece of writing in the New Statesman; this time, a review of the Le Placard international headphones festival.
About 40 people are sprawled on the floor, or on an array of battered chairs and sofas. Along one wall is a row of desks and tables, behind which sit a handful of unshaven young men, backlit by Anglepoise lamps, fiddling with laptops, mixing desks and a wind-up shortwave radio. Naturally, I can’t hear any of it. So I sit down at a table and try to plug in my headphones.
OK, this is my new favourite thing on the internet this week: the Shadow Percussion Project [details from Musicthing]. Enterprising young percussion teacher teaches his high-school percussion group to play live arrangements of tracks from DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…; the result is awesome. Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt works better than Changeling IMHO, but that’s only because I like it more as a track; the drummer gets the chopped-drum-break about two minutes in down to a tee. [61mb wmv file at the other end, but well worth it]