Tag Archive for 'Listening Post'

The Magic of Looping: David Ford, One Take, One Camera.

Looping is clearly one of the fundamental aspects of digital music making. From watching friends play with Fruity Loops in college to seeing an ex-roommate perform a live looping concert for New Years last year, I’ve become increasingly interested in the magic of looping.

Thanks to one of my favorite bloggers, Eliot Van Buskirk of the Listening Post, I discovered this video of David Ford, in which he records his song “Go To Hell” – in one take – using looping and household kitchen appliances, in addition to instruments and a microphone. Badass.

A perfect example of the modern multi-instrumental recording artist looking for creative new ways to make music. He would do well as a MixMatchArtist. To compare this rendition to the original, click here. I think I like the homemade one better.

Breakdancing to a Slow Sad Indie Song

I keep watching this video by Jordan Clark over and over. Maybe it’s that the simple melancholy feel of the song (“Irene” by Caribou) fits the rather sad and wistful mood I’m in right now. Or maybe I’m fascinated by the Cirque du Soleil-esque agility with which these guys are demonstrating their rather unusual human movement. Either way, this video is a beautiful example of how to mix and match two unlikely elements together with a surprising outcome. As the Listening Post notes, “with the right editing techniques, it’s possible to breakdance to anything, even low-tempo indie music”.

Speaking of human movement, here’s another one I found interesting. While the kid is not breakdancing per se, it’s pretty amazing what the human body is capable of.

Then again, if you get an early start like this little guy, you can train your body to do all sorts of crazy things. Here’s another badass b-boy video – this time set to more traditional breakdancing music. This guy is off the hook. Watch for the clip at 2:53 when he does push-ups with his feet off the ground…Nuts.

Cloudspeakers: The Google Reader of Music Reviews

Yesterday, the Listening Post blogged about a “music-oriented news reader on steroids, backed by a social network” called Cloudspeakers. This site is a music aggregator of sorts with links to music reviews, audio, and video. For the fans out there who obsessively read/write artist and album reviews (i.e. not me), I imagine this could be a very useful resource.

If I spent as much time on Cloudspeakers reading music reviews as I spend on my Google Reader reading music/technology blogs, I might get close to knowing as much about specific musicians and their albums as my co-blogger, Actual. But, I’ll stick to what I know and leave that to him.

Via your profile, email, or RSS, you can stay on top of what’s up with your favorite musicians. OR you can browse labels, artists, or users or search for a specific artist. Whether you want to read bloggers’ reviews, watch youtube videos, or listen to audio, they got ya covered. Check it out!

(CloudSpeakers is powered by MusicBrainz, which is a “user-maintained community music meta-database”. Kind of like the wikipedia of artist/album info.)