Sorry for not posting anything recently (aside from trying to get answers from Tom). So to tide you over, here’s some music: Siouxsie and the Banshees improve on an Iggy Pop song, The Passenger: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nAON-MwUPY&fs=1&hl=en_US] Tom Shear (d/b/a Assemblage 23) doing his thing in Anthem. I, for one, love the way the various voices… Continue reading A Musical Interlude
I’m going to tag all my Cocteau Twins MP3s and, in the TLAN frame, set the language code to zxx.
Just heard this on the Metropolis Records podcast, and thought I’d pass it on: Ego Likeness’s song Save Your Serpent (direct MP3 download). The lyrics, in particular, jumped out at me: We are of reptiles We are of stardust We are of mercury and these things are our kin We are of dignity We are… Continue reading Ego Likeness: Save Your Serpent
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gs4MJIcjx8&hl=en_US&fs=1&] Tones on Tail was a side project started by Daniel Ash of Bauhaus. Their discography is short enough to fit on a double-CD album, but it’s one of my favorites. I love the way that Rain takes it sweet time building up. It’s a song that refuses to be rushed. It take over… Continue reading Tones on Tail – Rain
What with it being late December and all, I’ve been listening to a lot of Christmas music lately. And one thing I’ve decided is that I really need to separate my collection into “Christmas music (straight)” and “Christmas music (ironic)”. It hurts my brain when I put the MP3 player on shuffle and it goes… Continue reading Sing Like You Mean It
They Might Be Giants’ new album Here Comes Science is all sorts of awesome. One of the things I like is the inclusion of both Why Does The Sun Shine? and a new song, Why Does the Sun Really Shine?. The first one, a cover of Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans’s song, begins: The sun… Continue reading The Sun Is A Miasma
Some bands that were obviously named before Google became the one and only way to find anything anywhere: ABC AC/DC The Band Foreigner Genesis Guess Who James Leæther Strip (yes, that’s L, E, A-E ligature) M Prince (The Artist Formerly Known as Prince) Secret Service Squeeze The The Type O Negative U2 Wham Yes Bands… Continue reading Wednesday List
I keep thinking off and on about writing a program to apply evo-devo to musical composition (part 2 ). There are tons of problems to solve, of course, but I may have made some progress.
One thing you can do in iTunes is to give songs a rating from 1 to 5 stars. It also has an option to play highly-rated songs more often during shuffle play, but frankly, I can’t be bothered to go through my collection rating songs by hand. And besides, the metadata that iTunes stores for… Continue reading Calculating My Tastes
When I last wrote about using evo-devo to compose music, I had gotten stuck on the problem of implementation. In particular, I couldn’t figure out how to write a seed organism that would develop into a simple composition that I could then use to evolve other tunes. I also wasn’t sure how to get the… Continue reading Software Enzymes for Musical Composition
