Played and replayed.
I was inspired to post this self-indulgence by the wonderful Björk, who, by way of the equally wonderful Alex Ross, shared her favorite records just the other day.
Björk chose 13 albums; I tried to stick to the same number, but ended up with one more. Two are Requiems, which may seem odd but I have something like 15 different requiems in my collection and do find myself playing these particular two most often. So, without further qualification—aside from the usual caveats like these are my answers today and I tried to choose albums that I actually listen to frequently rather than those that look most sophisticated (i.e. for better or worse)—here are mine.
In alphabetical order:
THE APPLESEED CAST: Peregrine
THE BOOKS: The Lemon of Pink
BJÖRK: Vespertine
BRAND NEW: The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK: Requiem, Mass in D (performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Istvan Kertesz and Simon Preston).
GABRIEL FAURÉ: Requiem (performed by the Choir of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh and conducted by Matthew Owens).
PETER GABRIEL: Passion
OH, SLEEPER: Son of the Morning
RADIOHEAD: The Bends
ROBERT FRIPP STRING QUINTET: The Bridge Between
SINEAD O’CONNOR: The Lion and the Cobra
TIN HAT TRIO: The Rodeo Eroded
U2: Achtung Baby
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Fantasia on a Theme (performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Leonard Slatkin).
Cold Freezin’ Night by The Books
Also cool. (via)
…because it’s awesome…
One of last week’s episodes of To the Best of Our Knowledge had a segment on the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (shown above) — a private garden created by architect Charles Jencks and his wife to explore scientific concepts with landscape. Very cool!
Generative music visualization:
The visual concept of Clavilux 2000 is quite simple. For every note played on the keyboard a new visual element appears in form of a stripe, which follows in its dimensions, position and colour the way the particular key was stroke: The length and vertical position show the velocity, the stripe’s width reflects the length of each note.
By mapping the color wheel on the circle of fifths, the colours finally give the viewer and listener an impression of the harmonic relations. Notes belonging to one specific tonality always get colors from one specific area of the color wheel. Therefore each key gets it’s own color scheme and “wrong” notes stand out in contrasting colors. The more different tonalities a piece has, the more colorful the visualization will be.
Earth-Moon-Earth (EME), or “moonbounce,” is an experimental kind of radio transmission first proposed in 1940 by a British communications engineer. With EME, messages are sent in Morse code from Earth, reflected off the surface of the Moon, and then received back on Earth. Later realized by the US military after WWII, today the technique is used by amateur radio operators across the world. Currently, EME provides the longest communications path for any two radio stations on Earth.
Fascinated with this curious mode of communication, artist Katie Paterson translated Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and sent it to the Moon via radio waves. Ostensibly “remixed” as it bounced off the contours of the Moon’s surface, the sonata was then retranslated into a new score and played by a grand piano at Modern Art Oxford. You can listen to the remixed sonata here: http://www.katiepaterson.org/sounds/katie_paterson_sonata.mp3
(via SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § The Ancient, Distant, and Dead)
Also check out here moonlight light bulbs: Lighting engineers, took painstaking measurements under a full Moon to recreate its exact spectral profile to make custom light bulbs.
Very cool use of holographic projection for music performance. (via BERG)
via GOOD:
When a blackout hit parts of the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in early February, a 2HeadedHorse filmmaker took to the roof of his building and started playing with his camera, focusing on the lights of helicopters and cars against a dark city. The results are this little video for “The Long Night,” a song by Patrick Park.
Read more: http://www.good.is/post/intermission-the-long-night#ixzz0gMY3sp3I
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Awesome. Drawings by Marco Fusinato. Via But Does it Float.
Sunrise, by Yeasayer
“
Music fans are more likely than musicians to love the kind of music they love and disdain other kinds.
Musicians are more likely to love music as a group and to be riveted by at least one kind of music their fans feel is wrong, so very wrong.
”
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