A band called Francis and the Lights has made a video for their song The Top. I really appreciate the simplicity of the video and so I thought I would share.
They are led by Francis Farewell Starlite. They have sold out the Mercury Lounge twice. Their short record A Modern Promise is now available at amodernpromise.com, where Francis performs his song The Top on 35mm film.Video After the jump.
I’m not sure about you, but I spend much of my day in front of a computer. For most of the day I like to listen to music. When I can find new music, I get extra inspired. That is why I was so excited when I first heard about muxtape. Hopefully you aren’t just hearing about it for the first time right now and you have some experience with it. In short, it is the revival of the mixtape. As burning CD’s almost seems to be becoming a thing of the past, muxtape is a platform for people to be inspired by a limited selection of songs in a particular order.
A couple of months ago, Radiohead released the separated “stems” (vocals, guitar, bass, strings/FX and drums) of their single Nude, announcing a remix contest. It is a difficult song to remix at 6/8 timing and 63 bpm, and Tom Yorke + co. apparently had a blast making fun of all the generic 4/4 entries.
James Houston had a bit of a different idea of using the stems, which were available for $.99 each in the iTunes Store. He reconstructed the original song by forcing old printers and hardrives do acoustic tricks and play the stems as an orcestra. Fast forward the clip to about 1:15 for the tune (after the jump).
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Most of you may be familiar with In Rainbows, Radiohead’s latest album. Less of you might be familiar with how they distributed it. The first three months of the album’s availability was accessible via the internet only. Anyone could come to the albums website and download the album for whatever price they saw fit. The band hasn’t released any financial numbers on their profits from the endeavor, but financial success or not, they introduced a new method for mass distribution of music. Until the end of this month, they are experimenting again.
The have separated the song nude into five separate tracks: vocals, guitars, bass, drums, and string. Anybody has access to download these tracks and import them into whatever audio mixing software they have. People then have the ability to upload their remix to a website that users can vote on.
For those of you who don’t know Pitchfork, it is the largest online independent-focused music publication. They receive around 15 million daily page views and over 300,000 visitors daily. On April 7th, the Chicago based company released Pitchfork.tv, their attempt at the every growing audience of online tver’s. The best thing about what they are doing, is that they are producing a lot of the video’s.
As a visual extension of the music coverage Pitchfork has provided for more than a decade, and a means of updating and advancing the music television format, the online channel will bring you closer to the artists you love, through original mini-documentaries, secret rooftop and basement sessions, full concerts, exclusive interviews, and the most carefully curated selection of music videos online.Read more…
This is a great music sharing site. Create a playlist and you are added to the list.
The idea is good, but I am really impressed with the interaction design. He is limiting the searchability of the site, which some users could find as a deterrent. Putting the users in a cluster, though, increases the exploration of the content, and then, when you view a users playlist he is using semantic urls so that you know where you are and that you can bookmark back to that page. So many sites use proprietary bookmarking systems when all internet browsers already have bookmarking capabilities.
The interface is clean and to the point. Kudos.