The weekly chart for wcbn just came out (entitled “humongous infant on American Bandstand”, for reasons which aren’t imeadiately obvious but I’ve learned it’s best just to accept and enjoy these things). Unfortunately for the state of modern music, “Sexual Healing” by the Hot 8 Brass Band did not make the top 50. You have to play a song more than 3 times a week to get it on the charts around here? What is this, like, top 40?

The Hot 8 were somehow surpassed by konono no. 1 “live at couleur café” (#1), peter brotzmann “the complete machine gun sessions” (#24), and talibam! “ordination of the globetrotting conscripts” (#49), among others.

I tried.

I own a perfectly serviceable little Marantz 25 watt receiver from some nameless year in the mid eighties. It don’t look like much, and it comes from too far this side of the 70’s to have that legendary Marantz legendariness. But it works fine for my less-than-audiophile .mp3 –> laptop soundcard –> headphone jack playback scenario, and it fits on my bookshelf. And it has big shiny silver knobs and switches, which I think I would greatly prefer to the recessed, black-text-on-little-black-buttons interface so beloved of modern audio equipment design even if I hadn’t grown up with my dad’s 1970s 120 watt Yamaha. (which, by the way, never got turned up above 3 1/2.)

Some day I think I want to invest in that two-martini sound. Maybe get me a 2330 from the month I was born or something. Not right now. Too big for the bookshelf, and for 30 year old audio equipment they don’t exactly go cheap.

But yesterday I was procrastinating on ebay and I watched this adorable little 2015 come and go before my misty eyes. With wood case and gyro tuning and everything. It would fit snugly between my text books and my harddrives and glow blue. And maybe or maybe not have that sound, depending on the state of the aging diodes and such. But they’re heavy little things, packed as they are with the weight of distilled grooviness and decades of accumulated affection, and shipping charges were $45. The final bid was $50 bucks, which sounds so cheap… but $50 + $45 just ain’t. I didn’t even bid, which is a sign of my resolute self-discipline.

What a shame. I think it wanted to come and live with me.

dj BC is one of yer better mashup artists. I was looking for his website to download some toons, and thought this was maybe for the wrong dj BC because it leads off with “weddings”. Nope, that’s the right one. I guess everyone has to make a living. Maybe I should have a wedding.

your pale skin
your sexy crooked teeth
the trouble you get in
in your clumsy way
I guess one afternoon
you won’t cross my mind
I’ll get over you
over time.

— Over Time, Lucinda Williams

The Kleptones have a new album out! Strangely enough for a band of remix laptop audio pirates, it’s a live album. And there’s a bunch of associated A/V content. I’ve never been a big fan of “musical experiences” which couple music with other sensory aesthetic pleasures. Mostly I find the whole to be less than the sum of the parts. But that’s just me, whatever. And the music is the music, and the music is there.

The Kleptones veer back and forth from a basic formula of layering hip hop lyrics onto remixed pop and rock riffs, peppered with movie soundbites. Formulaic or not, they do it real well.

Here’s the announcement.

Here’s the download site.

Warning: playing kleptones on your home stereo system can give Mitch Bainwol a headache, even though he doesn’t know why it’s happening. Dan Glickman too, for that matter.

Also, turns out Eric and Jim from the “band” have a radio podcast and associated music blog.

update: The album is a mix of old material thoroughly reworked plus lots of stuff I haven’t heard before. And they really seem to have moved away from the central theme of recontextualizing hip hop lyrics into a much freer flowing mix of madhattery. (although if you’re yearning for more too-black rhymes over more too-white guitar and synth licks, fear not, they’re in there.) Mashup music is rarely an emotional or otherwise artistic experience. It’s more about fun and craft than art. It’s a celebration of the masher’s experience of music — which all great music probably is in part, but mashup mostly stops there and ‘great’ music keeps going. But for shear musical what the hellness, this particular mashup music is hard to beat. And try sitting still through it. Go on. Try.

From When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide, by Demonbaby:

In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I say that safely without exaggeration. It was like the world’s largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn’t make Oink illegal, the site’s creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now. He would have revolutionized music distribution. Instead, he’s a criminal, simply for finding the best way to fill rising consumer demand. I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink – but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen.

It often gets said (including in the above article) that the music industry sleep-walked through a major moment of fate selection when they blew off Shawn Fanning’s offer to legalize napster and chose to sue him instead. It usually goes on to say that since napster’s demise, and because of the technical requirements necessary to avoid repeating napster’s fate no single filesharing network has ever grown up to be as comprehensive or user-friendly. If Oink truly was “unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known”, maybe we blew another one of those moments, a few weeks ago when Oink was cease-and-desisted.

I didn’t have an Oink membership, but I nagged a friend to dig stuff up there when I couldn’t find it through my own sources. It was indeed scary fast and scary complete. One thing the Oink raids demonstrate: the ‘piracy’ police or their corporate puppeteers may be more clueful than previously assumed. Oink was not a well-known thing, if the cops or the music industry types were aware of the special place it occupied in the music distribution ecology, then maybe they have their fingers closer to the pulse than most of their behaviour suggests. Does that mean they’ll be attaining late ’90s awareness eventually? Time, and probably lots of it, will tell.

As Cory Doctorow tells us again and again (and again) bits are only going to get easier to copy. Any business model which depends on limiting copying of files is contra-indicated. Networks are not getting smaller, computers are not getting less efficient. Music executives tell us that DRM is there to “help keep honest users honest” (actual quote). I made the mistake of buying my files from an online music store once. Just listening to the music on the devices and in the places I wanted to required applying esoteric and illegal unlocking software, the effectiveness of which depended on the time since the last DRM version release. Years later I discovered I couldn’t burn the damn things to a CD, just in time to not play them on a radio show. Both then and now, the lesson I learned wasn’t to keep buying music, it was to keep not buying music, since the free stuff is better.

I listen to a lot tracks once or twice to decide if they’re keepers. Imagine if I had to pay for each one! At the online store rates (which, by the way, are ridiculous) I would be paying literally thousands of dollars a year for music I would never again listen to. Therefore I wouldn’t, therefore I wouldn’t find the music that I do love, and music would be a much smaller part of my life. Lord knows 99.99% of the radio stations aren’t auditioning anything I might want to hear again. And if they did, it isn’t as if I could find it at the pop-craptaculous music stores I’m sometimes startled by in malls. The system is, in a word, borked.

The saving grace of this capitalism thing is supposed to be a emergent genius for innovating to meet consumer desires. In 10 years of turmoil the only genius innovation the music industries have debuted is the assembly-line litigation of music listeners. When someone finally did get around to, imagine this, attempting to distribute music as files (which is not quite the point actually, but probably a precursor to the point), it wasn’t even a music industry player, but a computer company that did it. And now that company is focusing mostly on locking in customers to their little music ecology through restrictive licensing and vertical integration of formats, software and hardware. Cheers. In a sense, they are coming back around to the music industry they used to challenge. Leveraging monopoly status to force customers into purchasing inferior or actively antagonistic products seem to be the real genius of modern capitalism.

(Hey, didn’t I predict some of this like 4 years ago? Why don’t people listen to me?)

While it was still operating, the heaviest Oink user I knew was a member of an up-and-coming pop band signed to a major label. The buzz in the file-sharing scene now seems to be: 1) Oink? What was that?, 2) I was part of Oink and I’m fired up to build the next, bigger one, and 3) Oh yeah, how do I get to be a part of that action? Users are going to keep on building these castles up and the industry is going to keep on knocking them down, but they’ll get bigger every time. And each time they do, the standard for how well an industry replacement would have to function to draw users back into a paying model will get higher. We need to figure this out. Artists have to get paid. As the conventional distribution channels crumble the necessity of finding a stable income for artists grows. Each year the industry fiddles while their weird little Rome burns, the more I hope that a solution comes soon, and the more I hope that the contemporary industry has nothing to do with it.

Buddy Rich versus Animal in a drum-off. I think Animal handles himself pretty well.

And my love has my favorite ears,
They lean forward when she hears.

— Michigan State, Devendra Banhart

Sheer bloody genius.

Apparently folks other than I have been concerned that James Randi is walking on eggshells with his challenging of overpriced audio cable paranormal bullshit. Mr. Randi doesn’t seem daunted by our collective concerns.

I must thank those concerned readers who sent me informed warnings about the possibilities of fakery and the actual parameters of audio performance – not wanting me to wander out of my sphere of expertise. As I’ve said before, I know two things with considerable authority: how people can be fooled, and how they can fool themselves. The latter of those is often the more important factor. In designing double-blind testing protocols, I have always seen to it that the security, randomization, isolation, statistical limits, and information-transfer elements are carefully set up and implemented. Designing an appropriate protocol is not outside of my abilities, and I feel quite secure with this. All my life, I’ve been involved in the fine art of deception – for purposes of entertainment – and I daresay that despite my advancing age, I can still do a few dandy card tricks and make a couple of innocent objects vanish from sight, if pressed sufficiently. When that acuity degrades, it will be time to call in appropriate assistance…