Today, I read a blog post on a digital 2D cutter written by my wife Hillary on her awesome new blog, Power Animals, that she is doing with some other Brooklyn-based ladies. She linked to some cool paper art, which included this piece called T.I. by Ian Wright.
T.I. by Ian Wright
It’s very cool and it immediately brought to mind the album cover for Coltrane’s Sound on Atlantic Records:
Coltrane's Sound
Not that I think this is an example of a rip-off, but it also reminded me of this interesting blog called You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
A couple of weeks ago (Dec. 4) I met my friend Ben at Winter Garden at the World Financial Center to watch and listen to Robert Fripp do his thing. First of all, I was excited to see Robert Fripp at all, because he’s an amazing musician and guitarist. He is the backbone of the prog rock band that’s been around since 1969, King Crimson. He has also made some amazing music with Brian Eno as “Fripp & Eno.” The latter is closer to the kind of music he makes by himself: Frippertronics. This is the name for a method involving tape loops that he and Eno developed in the seventies to create atmospheric, ambient, beautiful music. At Winter Garden, he created more beautiful music with just his guitar and that hugely tall rack of electronics. I think these days he is calling it simply: Soundscapes. It was wonderful.
Ok, so, some of you have seem this before. It’s the album cover of “Merriweather Post Pavilion” by Animal Collective. But I saw this on Gorrila Vs. Bear today and I thought it was an animated gif. But it’s not, it’s a jpg. Is it just me or is this image “moving” when you look at it. Believe me, I’m totally sober right now. I’m at work.
If this is not news to you, fine. But it’s news to me. I even have the LP at home.
This is my most-viewed photo in Flickr as of today, with over 800 views. For some reason people are finding this photo and I can’t really figure out why.
This was one of the most impressive and beguiling parts of Angkor as a whole. The Bayon is the central temple in Angkor Thom. There are 216 giant faces adorning all parts of the temple. Traversing the labyrinthine different levels of the temple itself is disorienting even if there aren’t faces at every turn. This was most definitely a highlight of our trip to Angkor.
This is also to say that I have finally finished uploading all of our photos from our honeymoon. (There are a lot of them!) I still have to title a bunch of them and add descriptions, but they are there for your viewing pleasure.
On our honeymoon we read about this restaurant online and it had great reviews. It took a little while to find, riding out bikes around Hoi An, but it was worth the search.
This was at a restaurant called “Bale Well” (pronounced ba-lay well). It’s a family-run affair and the grandmother takes great pleasure in teaching guests how to eat this meal. And, the first time there, you need instructions. You don’t order, they just start bringing this food out to you in great quantities. What you do is take a rice paper, put in some greens, and a couple skewers-worth of meat and some slaw. If you want, instead of (or in addition to) the meat, you can put in a spring roll (next photo). Also, not pictures, are some pancakes called “banh xeo” that you can also pile into the mix. Put in a chili or garlic if you want to. Roll it all up and dip it in the sauce. Repeat. Delicious.
Last night, Liz and Toby and I went to Santos Party House and took in a few bands. Here are mini-reviews:
Tamaryn: Boring but the guitar player had a good sound (put a space echo on it and that’s what you get). They were sorta 80’s goth-ish. Drenched in reverb. More style than substance. Nothing to write home about unless you wrote, “Dear mom, Tamaryn was boring.”
Minks: The first song was rocking and promising. They might be from LA, judging by their looks. The second song was suckier and the singer lost his balls. He basically started mumbling. We left after that song. Again, more style than substance.
Dom: Interesting band that looked promising. Three guitars and a drummer playing with a track. The singer had a cool high squeaky sort of voice but could have sung better. Sometimes one guitar player played bass. They played a part of the Super Mario Brothers music between songs. They looked like they were going to get rocking and kinda guitar-wanky-in-a-good-way but didn’t really. I felt they were sorta 80s rock-ish. Ultimately a let-down.
Diamond Rings: Standing around the corner we heard electronic beats and a synth and a guy singing. I thought it sounded kinda crappy and lame but we were just hanging out. I stepped into the room to see a guy with a blond swoop coming out of a blue jays cap and some sweet eye makeup. He was playing the keyboard next to a laptop which was producing the beats. He was actually really good and I think it took me seeing him to figure that out. I thought he was sort-of a cross between Rufus Wainwright, Eddie Izzard, and [someone else I can’t remember]. The guy can actually write songs and is a good performer. He also played some songs on guitar with the laptop backing him up. Usually I see duo or solo bands and wish they just had a band but I didn’t with this guy. He held his own.
Diamond Rings
Marnie Stern: I am not too fond of her record(s) but, live, she is great! I really enjoyed her set a lot. I didn’t know much about her or the way she looked; I just knew she was a female guitar goddess who loves finger-tapping. First off, she doesn’t finger-tap all the time, which is good. Second, her appearance made it better, for me. She’s unassuming, short, has long blond hair in a decidedly non-hipster style, and wore a cute dress/skirt thing. Basically, she looked like a regular girl. And she looked like she was having a lot of fun up there too. Cracking vagine jokes with the bass player and stuff. I may not run out to buy her record but I’d see her perform again for sure.
Marnie Stern
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.: Dressed in NASCAR outfits. Great vocal harmonies and pretty good poppy stuff. It just wore thin after a couple songs for me. Sorta too saccharin for me. They did a cover of “God Only Knows,” introducing it by saying they wish they wrote that song. Me too. Or, I wish they could write songs that good too.
Wild Nothing: Boring songs, bad lead singer. Lame, lame, lame. I booed them. I may have had too many by that point. That’s when we went home.
Deerhoof was awesome yet again. They never fail to rock and impress. This time Ed and John both played electric 12-string guitars. I saw them at the beginning and thought that they’d play them the whole time, because that’s what they do. And they did. I gotta say that the 12-string sounded really awesome and lush on some songs but on others (Dummy Discards A Heart, for example) they lacked the riffage precision. Still, it wasn’t so bad and that’s just nitpicking.
They unveiled a new song which is presumably on Deerhoof Vs. Evil and that was a good song. There were two covers in there but I didn’t recognize them (Martin did). Some of the hits were played as well. “Basket Ball Get Your Groove Back” was pretty much the only silly song they played. (And don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Flower, Panda, Dog on the Sidewalk and all those.) This lineup of the band is great. I love the addition of Ed.
I can’t wait for the new record and I can’t wait to see them again.
As I was riding the elevator last week in my office building, the door opened at the 14th floor while someone got on or off there. In the hall I saw a door with a sign for EMF, Electronic Music Foundation. When I got back to my office, I looked it up on the internet and found this. It looked interesting and I also saw an announcement of a performance for the following Monday (yesterday), so I decided to stop in and see.
Tomoko Sauvage is a maker of electronic music. She uses bowls filled with water as the foundation of her instrument. It’s similar to the Indian instrument jal tarang but she uses them in a different way. While the Indian instrument is played as a percussion instrument, Tomoko does not hit them with sticks. In each bowl she has a hydrophone (an under-water microphone) and has those running to a mixer.
She can move the water with her hands to get sounds, which is what she started the performance with. She incorporated feedback coming from the speakers through which the music came. The pitch of the sound varies with the volume of water in the bowl. Adding more water lowers the pitch and removing water raises the pitch. She had a delay and loop pedal through which she ran the sounds to create loops of the music. At one point she removed all the water from one bowl and added sparkling water, which created a bubbly sound. Finally, she had water dripping from small cups above to create a random, dripping sound. Removing and adding water, she changed the pitch of the drips.
The performance was interesting and the sounds were watery, drippy, and at times, soothing. I enjoyed it a great deal.
I look forward to hearing what else the EMF has to offer.
