bodhi tree swaying

I love this Lana Del Rey video, even if it does appear that she’s had her emotions surgically removed.

There’s a minimalist version here, which is hypnotically entrancing.

I stayed up until midnight so that I could buy the album on the first day it went on sale.

I first heard Lana Del Rey singing with Woodkid. (This isn’t a great performance by Woodkid. Check out this amazing video of the same song, Iron.) Somehow I’d managed to miss her before that.

Here’s a BBC profile on her, including the story of how she got sued for making this video.

Her album, Born To Die, comes out in MP3 format on Amazon.com on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to it.

I haven’t been blogging here recently. I’m just too busy with a variety of projects. I guess I should take some time out to mention some of them here.

In the meantime, here’s a lovely thing. Click on the squares to make music. I’ve no idea where this is from. I copied it from a Tumblr blog.

From time to time I like to share music, especially when it’s a combination of tracks that just happens to have been thrown together by my iPhone while driving. I hope you enjoy these.

This is the music my iPhone randomly selected for me while I was driving to Portsmouth and back the other day. It’s heavy on Over the Rhine and Amy Winehouse, but I can’t get enough of either of them anyway. It’s a very eclectic mix!

Here’s the track listing:

Dave Smith And The Country Rebels – White Lines
St. Germain – So Flute
Over The Rhine – Ohio
Alison Krauss – Down To The River To Pray
Amy Winehouse – He Can Only Hold Her
Lucinda Williams – Essence
This Mortal Coil – Another Day
Cocteau Twins – Pandora
Portishead – Nobody Loves Me
Over The Rhine – Nobody Number One
Coldplay – Shiver
Amy Winehouse – Intro/Stronger Than Me

PT Sullivan, a photographer I know from New Hampshire Media Maker meet-ups sent me a link to this video he worked on. It’s another “Empire State of Mind” mashup, but much, much better than the famous “Granite State of Mind” video.

I cried watching this. Partly it was sheer joy and partly it was just having the experience of dad-hood recognized.

Enjoy:

I liked what my iPhone randomly put together last night as I was driving home from teaching a meditation class.

8track plays them in random order, but here are the tracks.

Just Another High – Roxy Music
Just Friends – Amy Winehouse
Kakn – Gigi… See More
Kiss The Sky – Shawn Lee & The Ping Pong Orchestra
Knowing – Lucinda Williams
Lady Stardust – David Bowie
The Lake – Antony And The Johnsons
Land Of… – St. Germain
Last Nite – The Strokes
Last Walk Around Mirror Lake – Boom Bip
Lazy Calm – Cocteau Twins
le ciel dans une chambre – Carla Bruni

French pop music rightly has a reputation for being awful, but here’s some music in French that’s pretty good. Most of the artists aren’t French. Axelle Red is Belgian. Carli Bruni is Italian. Isabelle Boulay and Julie Dorion are Canadian. Bat For Lashes is a British band with a Pakistani singer. That leaves KYO, who are that rare thing — a French band that doesn’t totaly suck, Florent Pagny, who is one of those French singers who can’t decide whether he’s singing pop music or opera, and Francis Cabrel who is (in my humble opinion) absolutely brilliant.

Enjoy!

Last night I searched in iTunes for REM’s “Low” and up came a whole bunch of tracks with the characters “low” in the title. And I looked at the list of songs and thought it was a damn fine collection. I whittled out a couple that weren’t quite as awesome and I’d like, and here is the hand-carved, jewel-studded, lovingly polished essence.

I selected The Strokes’ “Is This It,” let iTunes’ Genius build a playlist of 25 tracks, picked my favorites, and ended up with this playlist. So it’s kind of half random, with a smidgen of discrimination, but of course it’s all based on stuff that’s on my computer, and since every song is hand-tooled it’s ultimately a very personal thing at root. Isn’t music always?

(Oops. Band of Horses was in my last mix too. Ah well, “Funeral” is a nice song).

Mostly mellow, which is what I like these days. We have (not necessarily in this order)

• Lonely Ghosts x O+S
• Killbot 2000 x Murder by Death
• Cherry-Coloured Funk x Cocteau Twins
• This Is How It Goes x Aimee Mann
• The Funeral x Band Of Horses
• Auf Achse x Franz Ferdinand
• Please Don’t Go x Barcelona
• The Move x Boom Bip

This little YouTube video does a great job of showing how a musical canon works. The simplest kind of canon is something like Row, Row, Row Your Boat, where the melody can be repeated after a few bars so that the melody provides its own accompaniment. Bach of course went much further than this and, for example, combined the original melody with its own inversion or with the melody reversed. The video managed to depict visually what’s happening, since most people wouldn’t be able to tell what’s going on just by listening. Enjoy!

For some reason (uh, that would be the wonderful people I follow on Twitter) I keep coming across really cool music. This is all from today, except for Bat For Lashes, who I was introduced to a couple of days ago.

With the last band, Barcelona, the visuals are simply stunning. It’s the second largest aquarium tank in the world.

Enjoy!

Bat For Lashes – Circle Song

Said the Shark – True Love

Said the Shark – All You Want

Barcelona – Please don’t go

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I just discovered Joss Whedon’s brilliant, short, three-part tragicomic musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

It’s the story of a confused your man who’s upset with the hypocrisy in the world and who thinks that the way to respond is to become an evil mastermind and to join the Evil League of Evil. He’s in love with a sweet girl called Penny, who has unfortunately started dating Horrible’s nemesis, the narcissistic superhero, Captain Hammer.

In his everyday persona, Dr. Horrible, whose real name we never learn, is talking to Penny in the laundromat about her date with Captain Hammer. Horrible is doing a pretty good job of masking his pain and jealousy until:

Penny: He’s a really good-looking guy, and I thought he was kind of cheesy at first…

Dr. Horrible: (Sotto voce) Trust your instincts.

Penny: …but he turned out to be totally sweet. Sometimes people are layered like

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A few days back I got around to playing on 8track.com, which is a site where you can upload a playlist of music and have it available for others to listen to.

My first attempt was all mellow stuff. We often have a nighttime ritual for Maia where we play a slideshow for her on my laptop with some mellow music in the background. This includes a lot of the music I play for her so she can wind down.

I’ll post something more raucous later on. Feel free to leave a comment about the music.

This and the two three posts immediately preceding it (now deleted) were an experiment to directly import from Pandora, using their RSS feed, a list of songs that I’d “favorited.” The experiment wasn’t entirely successful because there’s no explanation of what this information represents (although there is a link to the song on Pandora.com), and because I’d naively hoped for a digest rather than a post for every song. Ah well, we live and learn. Next I’ll be playing with a plugin that displays some sort of Pandora info in my sidebar.

The Dawn by DJ Krush from the album Kakusei

More: continued here

If the Mozart Effect teaches us anything, it’s that the results of a flawed study are always at risk of becoming a common expression, a copyrighted product, a popular belief infused with a magic that is difficult to dispel.

I saw Brandi Carlile last night at the Stone Church here in Newmarket, NH. She and her band were at the end of a three-week tour where they’d been supporting Jamie Cullum, and they’re just about to go off on another tour, this time supporting Train.

I fell in love with Brandi’s CD about three months ago and must have played it dozens of times since then. Brandi’s voice was a little rough, this being the end of the tour and all, but nevertheless it was a magnificent concert to a sell-out crowd. Peter Hamelin, one of the owners of the Stone Church, a small, but exquisite venue, reckoned this might be one of the last chances to see her in such an intimate setting, and I have to say that I think he may be right. Brandi, a young woman of just 23

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