Author: tunequest

Nine Inch Nails: Metal

From the remix album Things Falling Apart (2000)

Trent Reznor is no stranger to cover tunes, having turned in notable studio versions of songs by Soft Cell, Pigface, Queen and Joy Division, as well as performing a number of live covers at concerts. On the remix album that accompanied The Fragile, Nine Inch Nails added Gary Numan to that list, with a surprising faithful rendition of Metal.

To be sure, Trent layers on his trademark Fragile-era soundscapes, giving the song a gloomy NIN atmosphere. He even tacks on a superfluous 3 minute extended outro, but the soul of the song remains close to the original.

Rumors of this song’s existence circulated the late-90s Internet for a number of years before it was officially released. It was a point of contention among Fan sites whether the song was real or not. When a thirty second mp3 excerpt surfaced in 1999, many supposed that the song’s production was abandoned during the years in the wilderness between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile.

Fortunately for us, the song was completed for our enjoyment.

[audio:070609Metal.mp3]

What I Love: The subdued menace and relaxed feel.

Mogwai: 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong

From the album Rock Action (2001)

I can’t begin the to describe how awesome this song is, but it’s worth noting that it made me completely fall in love with Mogwai. Clocking in a 9-and-a-half minutes, this song is epic. Not for any story it tells, but for how it makes you feel. This mostly instrumental piece of slow-burning segments of increasingly complex layers of post-rockian composition ebbs and flows in hypnotic fashion. Upon crescendo, the song descends onto a melancholy banjo riff, repeated again and again, until the music fizzles out, leaving an intense feeling of profound inspiration.

This is one of those songs that for years has gone largely unnoticed, leading a quiet existence as pleasant background music, until one day it, when the slightest amount of extra attention is cast upon it, its brilliance explodes in your mind. From that day on, the song is never the same and neither are you.

What I Love: The descending bass lines; the extended banjo outro.

Playgrounds: Fun and interesting applications of Last.fm’s technology

The vast array of listening information available at Last.fm probably had a great deal to do with CBS’s decision to purchase the company. Though I’m wary of the deal, I’ve not lost all hope for the site. The Audioscrobbler technology behind it is some pretty fascinating stuff and the data it collects is open and available be analyzed, interpreted, shared and displayed in a lot of diverse applications.

Hopefully, now that CBS’s hand is in the cookie jar, this aspect of the service won’t change. As long as the data is accessible, here’s a number of cool things that can be harvested from Last.fm.

LastGraph

My waveform for 2007, through the beginning of June.

Lee Byron’s work on Last.fm data visualization made a fairly large splash on the net recently. The multi-colored waveforms showed undulating music tastes as artists’ popularity expands and contracts over time. It’s fascinating stuff.

And of course, after a moment of exclaiming "cool!" and "pretty!" the question on everyone’s mind was "How do I get one for myself?" Since Byron’s page was more of a demonstration and proof-of-concept, there was no way for someone to enter their username and get a graph of their own listening habits, leaving many visitors disgruntled.

Enter LastGraph, which does what all those disgruntled users were requesting, for whatever username you want. Results are offered in PDF and SVG formats, which are vector based, so you can zoom very close to see small-scale changes in data. The only thing that’s missing is the ability to track an individual artist within the ebb and flow of your listening. Specifically, I’d like to hover over a line and see that artist’s trends highlighted. That’s not going to happen with a PDF though. Oh well.

~~The site is running kinda bare-bones right now and there is a queue system in place. You may have to wait several hours before your PDF is ready to download. So be patient. It’s worth it.~~ The site’s performance has much improved since it launched.

Also note: the PDFs produced by the site do not render in Mac OS X’s Preview app, so be sure to view them in Acrobat.

Musicmapper’s Last.fm in Time

This chart shows my listening habits during the past 121 weeks (roughly the beginning of March 2005). Click to see larger.

Musicmapper’s Last.fm in Time generates a single graphic that displays a variety of data. The bar graphs in the background represents the total of each weeks play counts. Your top 50 artists are displayed, in rank order, on the right. The line graphs show how each of the top 50 have grown over time.

This can be useful for determining trends in your tastes and habits. In my case, before the 52 week mark, I see a lot flat-lined activity, especially among my top ten, that suddenly takes off. Also, I notice that Susuma Yakota, who I had never heard of before January this year, is in my top 50 and that he got there rather quickly. There is a very steep curve for him starting 23 weeks ago.

Tuneglue relationship explorer

Click for full size.

Tuneglue creates a web of related bands and artists. Start with one artist or band, expand the results to find similar artists or bands, then do the same to those. With four or five clicks, you’ll have a large interconnected web of new bands to explore based on similarities and relationships to your tastes. It’s a neat visual metaphor of musical interest and a good jumping off point for new music recommendations. The lack of sound samples limits its usefulness as an exploratiom tool, though the map is still fun to play with.

One killer app of the site, however, is missing. I talk of course, about a "six degrees" linker. It would be very cool to input two artists and see how many jumps are necessary to connect to two. For example, it takes four jumps to connect Mogwai to the Strokes (Mogwai » Radiohead » The Beatles » The White Stripes » The Strokes, according to Tuneglue). I figured that out on my own, but it would be nice of the site to do it for me.

Last.fm tools by Anthony Liekens

cloud of recommendations

This site features a number of Last.fm related tools. My favorite is the artist recommendation cloud, which generates a number of suggestions for musical exploration based on your top artists. Higher recommendations appear at a larger type size. Recommendations can be based on stats from your overall list, the past 12, 6 or 3 months or the past week.

Also be sure to check out your eclectic rating. I scored an 80 out of 100.

How compatible are your tastes with a radio station?

sekrit

Last.fm user profile bbc6music is, you guessed it, created by the songs BBC Radio 6 (6music) plays on air. Though not every song that the station broadcast gets uploaded to Last.fm, the user profile still manages to add about 100 play counts per day. As of August 2011, the station has an accumulated track count of nearly 380,000. The most played artist is David Bowie.

Mainstream-o-Meter

mainstreamnes

Finally, there’s the Mainstream-o-Meter, which compares your top stats with the overall most played artists site-wide. Each of your most-listened-to artists are given a weighted score which is then used to calculate your overall "mainstreamness."

Last.fm is certainly a vast treasure trove of information, so hop to it and get exploring.

Sarah Shannon: I’ll Run Away

sarah shannon

From the album Sarah Shannon (2002)

It’s been more than a decade since the rock band Velocity Girl broke up, putting an end to one of my favorite high school-era ensembles and effectively ending my exposure to the group’s vocalist, Sarah Shannon. Her post-VG work, a band called Starry Eyes, was short-lived and VG’s online fan base wasn’t large or cohesive enough to adequately maintain updates of band members’ whereabouts. From my perspective, Shannon had disappeared from the music scene completely and over time, my teenage indie-rock crush faded.

And while Velocity Girl’s particular mix of noise pop received and still receives a fair amount of play around here, by and large I stopped trying to follow her career, having figured she was just done with music in general. So it came as quite a surprise to me when I learned that she had released a solo album. But it was even more of a surprise to actually hear what it sounded like.

Exemplified most by I’ll Run Away, this song and album is the anti-Velocity Girl. A far cry from the sunny, jangly pop-rock of a decade ago, this song is soulful and somber, bordering on jazz-lounge pianist balladry. Sarah says the song is about being down, out and lonely in the dead of winter in Seattle, and yeah, I believe that. But for some reason the song doesn’t make me feel sad.

That’s just Sarah’s charm at work I guess.

[audio:070603IllRunAway.mp3]

What I love: As always, Sarah’s voice; the song’s steady mid-tempo rhythm.

Bonobo: Flutter

From the album Dial M for Monkey (2003)

Bonobo, the simian pseudonym of UK producer Simon Green has been a downtempo-lounge favorite for a while around these parts. In addition to his excellent production values, he’s notable for his distinctive infusion (though not pervasively) of eastern (mostly Indian) influences into what could be called “intelligent chill-out music.”

With a danceably faster tempo usual, Flutter is actually a bit of a departure for Bonobo. But as seems to be the case with me, it’s an artist’s digressions that attract the most attention.

If upbeat downtempo isn’t a style of music, I nominate Flutter as its charter document.

[audio:070531Flutter.mp3]

What I Love: Those chimes, that kickin beat and the melancholy trumpet.

Yeah, What They Said 5/30

Yeah, What They Said, pointers to interesting stories. Some people call it “link sharing.”

“Same great Pabst taste, without the beer.” PBR bottled water, available in China:

Pabst Blue Ribbon Bottled Water from Dave Nemetz on Vimeo.

Pi (π) played on a piano
Each digit 1-9 is assigned a note and 0 is a quarter rest.

Cumulative advantage
Some things remain popular because they are popular. As the popularity of something increases, the likelihood that its popularity will continue to increase becomes greater. “If all those people like it, it must be good.” The notion has been common sense for years, but now there’s scientific data pointing toward it.

Album Covers Separated at Birth
There are no new ideas. Pages and pages of album covers that are strikingly similar in concept and execution.

A tip calculator for iPod. It’s not free, but it looks cool. I used to have a tip calculator on an old cell phone and have been missing it for years, so this intrigues me.

Day Trip: Atlanta, Home of the Braves
I live in Atlanta, so I enjoyed this visitors’ travelogue about a day in the city, even though it’s mostly about baseball and other trivia. Did you know that the kazoo was invented in Macon? Oh, and no one calls it “Hotlanta” unless they’re being deliberately obtuse.

The Strokes have produced a ~~music video~~ short film for their single You Only Live Once. It’s very “sci-fi” and a good song to boot: