A quick note to you guys, coming straight from my camera phone.  I was looking through my photos on my phone and found these quick shots I took at Bonnaroo. Nothing fancy, just some camera shots that summed up a surprisingly entertaining show.

The first shot is the Bonnaroo main stage at night with no one on it.  The second is a shot of Metallica on the stage.

That’s all.

So recently Radiohead announced a remix competition for their track “Nude” off In Rainbows. This audacious request, normally drawing anyone with a copy of Reason and some sweet beats, turned out to be frustrating for remixers. As it turns out (and as the below remixer noted), “Nude” is in 6/8 time and is 63bpm.

Those who work with music know that 63bpm is awfully slow for typical remix music, and heaven forbid using anything not in standard 4/4 time. Again, this is probably a nod to kids with Reason or Fruity Loops who are used to their program defaults and not used to a challenge.

Considering this, electronic music artist James Houston decided to play with the challenge a bit, or “take the piss” in his words. Check out his creation below: Houston took pieces of obsolete computer equipment and programmed them to “play” the song. The effect is chilling, considering how eerily similar a stack of hard drives (hacked into speakers of sorts), an old printer, a scanner, and some antiquated electronic bits sound like Radiohead — especially Thom Yorke’s vocals.

Check it out: Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo

I love the concept of turning old into new, especially when it comes to bending rules in an otherwise boring remix competition. Head to the Radiohead Remix website to hear the most popular submissions (sadly, the above isn’t even on the site), but be warned: it’s nothing as good as a dot matrix printer jam.

i’m going to make a website this weekend and start posting all of the songs i’ve ever made ever on it. it’s going to be the comprehensive putay song catalog. everything will be available to download. it’ll all be free. and after that i’m going to post everything new that i do as well. i’m taking all of the terrible pressures of commerce out of making jams.
no sweats. - Matt Pusti

Matt Pusti makes some of my favorite music in the universe. He’s also making my music some of my favorite music in the universe.

Matt’s obsession with noise laces his hefty electronic music with subtle delicacies no one should be forced to live without.  You may know him as “Makeup and Vanity Set” … RIP.

After some initial difficulty¹, Matt has put up a website of his ‘jams.’ Do yourself a favor and check it out.

1. In matt’s tumblr blog, he cites the following areas of difficulty

1 the amount of songs versus how much webspace i have is sort of an issue. it’s a lot of jams. 2 writing out all of the code for the links will probably take me forever and i really didn’t have any time to do it this weekend. 3 the last makeup and vanity set record was (is) technically supposed to be released on matt and paul’s cassette tape label, so i’m sort of hesistant to put that online since i committed to releasing it with them.

Photo by Brittany Pyle

Elsinore, of Champaign, Illinois, does something new in a surprisingly familiar way. Maybe new is the wrong word to use, but there are only a handful of bands¹ doing something similar to what Elsinore does.

The band is not afraid to embrace the lost art of harmony. At times they have more part harmony than I’ve heard since my high school choir days. Thank heavens the pitch is perfect or this would be intolerable. They really pull it off.

Their song Landlocked is close to 7 minutes long. Though I’m not a fan of big, fluffy, lengthy and epic song segments without epic vocals to match, I listened to this whole song on accident without realizing it was happening. I think that means they did a good job. Speaking of vocals, Ryan Groff’s lead vocals are crystal-clear and pleasantly high. They’re especially enticing when you catch some of their smarty-pants lyrics².

Listening to Groff’s vocals coupled with the interesting sound of their instrumentation, I can’t help but imagine I’m watching a new Wes Anderson film. Like most of the other parallels I’ve drawn, it’s more of a tip of the hat than a full-body check.

Here and there they get this weird old-timey feel. Sometimes I fancy I’m listening to Elton John pretend to be a player piano somewhere in the old west.

Really neat band, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of these guys.

1. See The Snake, The Cross, The Crown, The Shins
2. “landlocked by cash crops” etc.

I’m getting old. I haven’t enjoyed going to shows for years. When I do venture out into society to observe live music, I take special pains to miss the opening bands and catch the mid section of the set I want to see. I have literally seen The Cure play and wondered when their set was going to end. Needless to say, it’s gotten pretty bad.

That’s why I am so astounded by Gone City. The first time I saw them play I totally lost it. There set feels like 5 minutes of a good dream to me. I danced and clapped and completely forgot that my aging bones start to ache when I’ve been standing for more than 10 minutes.

Mike Flynn, Paul Brantley, Jesse Palmer, and Billy Gemmill seem to have a firm grasp on killing it. This band specializes in catchy, thick, straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll and I cannot get enough. They only have two songs up on their myspace; I guarantee you will be moving within the first measure of their song Devil’s Got My Soul. At first glance, the message seems a little sketchy, but upon closer examination the song isn’t nearly as evil as it lets on. Devil’s Got My Soul is featured in a yet unreleased independent horror film.

Take a look at their EPK. Seriously, somebody sign these dudes so I can single handedly buy all their records.

Send me an email about your favorite unsigned artist and maybe I’ll feature them next week.

I’m going to beat this drum as long as I can, because the two music cultures I’m involved in (my work life and my personal life) wildly contradict on this point. My experience with music is almost purely digital (except for my snobby vinyl collection), so this is something I’m pretty keen on rubbing in the old guard’s face.

We have a five person national promotions (radio) team who is constantly pushing our music to radio stations across the country. Everything they do is all about getting the music out there onto the radios of consumers all day, every day. For free.

The simple fact is, people who listen to the radio frequently don’t buy music. The New York Times says, “[a recent] study, written by Stan Liebowitz, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, compared record sales and music radio listening in some 100 American cities from 1998 to 2003. It found that, very roughly, an hour’s worth of radio listening per person per day, over the course of a year, corresponded with a 0.75 drop in the number of albums purchased per capita in a given city. Professor Liebowitz has proposed that people use radio listening as a substitute for buying music.”

0.75 may not seem like much, but that’s almost one album per person across the entire US - that’s millions and millions of unsold albums.

Conversely, there are numerous studies out there that have shown peer-to-peer illegal downloading has actually caused an increase in the sale of music over the last five years (check BoingBoing, P2PNet, NY Times, etc).

I’d go so far as to say that peer-to-peer downloading is providing the same service that our radio team strives so hard for every day; free promotion for our music. The only difference is that peer-to-peer showcases the whole album, not just the key single. So, if it’s good, the fan will buy it. If not, eh, no thanks. It’s cliché to say it, but if our music was better, we’d sell more of it. It’s just a fact.

We as a music industry need to realize that radio is feeding free music to what are often core consumers: middle America who use a desktop radio at work and their car radio to get access to music for free any time they want it. If we’re so concerned about record sales, we need to plug that hole immediately.

That’s a bigger problem than P2P, and since record labels tend to have no control over merch, publishing, and live revenue, the hemorrhaging labels have got to get people back into buying albums.

It’s hard for me to listen to anyone that isn’t Queen.

Though I truly believe Queen is the best band to have ever graced the earth’s face, I do not consider this belief responsible for my exclusivity. I think the reason I want to listen to Queen is simply that I know them. I’ve listened to Queen for years. They are my friends. Today, I can’t make friends with any new music because there’s just too much of it.

Everyone has something to say about how wonderfully accessible music has become. Though I agree with the latter sentiment, “wonderful” is not the adjective I would choose. Perhaps frustrating or overwhelming would be a better representation of of my feelings on the matter. The only new music I have time to discover is the latest album of a band I’ve already learned to love.

It’s not that I’m lazy about music, it’s just that every time I try to find something new I face a torrent of newness- not unlike a natural disaster. I am not afraid to die, but I am afraid to drown. Mixtapes frustrate me. There’s so much out there, I am teased constantly by songs I think I might like, but there are so many. How can I ever build a relationship with a band? These single song purchases are destroying me. Why would I want to buy the whole cow when I can get the milk for free or 99 cents? These brief stints and love affairs are not what I’m looking for. I’m steadfast and long-term. Where is my musical match? I refuse to believe that it’s lurking on Last.Fm or LimeWire. Where is the album that I listen to start to finish? Highway to Hell¹, Rumours², Bad³… will we never experience a repeat performance? Bands today are so prolific. It’s too easy to make an album. No one thinks it through. Everyone’s obsessed with ideas and leaves execution to the wild dogs outside the gate⁴.

Thank you, Queen, for being you.

1. AC/DC - one of their best albums
2. Fleetwood Mac - their best album
3. Michael Jackson - MJ’s 2nd best album
4. Biblical reference to a bad place