Estonians rock?

There was a time, once, when I thought absolutely nothing good could ever come out of the republic of Estonia (except, of course, Brandon Fraser via Encino Man which also starred a young, de-hobbitized Samwise Gamgee, but I digress...).

That is no longer the case thanks to Opium Flirt.

Several years ago, I downloaded the title track from Opium Flirt's first album "Saint European King Days" and thought it was pretty good (I found it on the very decent music blog "said the gramophone"). So I saved it along with the rest of the mp3s that I download weekly from the internets. As often happens, these single track downloads get lost in that sea of mp3s that fill up my hard drive. And because I've got my itunes playlists set so that I only listen to music that I haven't heard in the past 6 months, it was at least a year or two after I downloaded it that this Opium Flirt track pleased my ears again.

But upon a second listen I became mesmerized. Opium Flirt's "saint European King Days" is a hauntingly wonderful song. So I checked out some more songs by the band and discovered that they are all over the place (in terms of style). This is a sure plus for any band, in my book. You might be able to categorize Opium Flirt as "ambient psychedelic", but then you'd only be accurately describing about half of their songs.

Anyway, I highly recommend taking a listen. Three words of warning:

1. listen to the whole song and not just the intro (their intro's are often long and can be monotonous)
   
2. listen to more than one track
3. the song "Saint European King Days" would make me want to cry, if I wasn't such a manly masculine man

More from Opium Flirt here.

porn on the floor? possibly knotcaphe fourwirk

Is this the greatest music video of the current generation? Probably not. But it's still frickkin awesome.

Major Lazer "Pon De Floor" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

Science can be creative (and fun)

Events in my life have conspired to create an interesting state in my academic life. It appears that I will be spending a good portion of my near future designing an experiment which studies human gesture and the development of phonology (or sub-lexical compositionality) using a fucking WII-mote.

There's a small, but significant part of me that is giddy at that proposition. That is the WII-msical side of me which causes me to spend a good part of my free time playing video games. The serious, pragmatic, scientist part of me is apprehensive, concerned about the aspect of these events that leads to the future state in which I'm, potentially, publishing the results of such a study (under, what is likely to be, a very clever title).

One really awesome aspect of my recent work is that it's actually involving a lot more creativity than I've experienced in much of my previous academic work. I love doing simple research, but there's something really appealing about stepping in new territory, the kind of territory where a linguistically trained graduate student is programming an unintuitive input/output mapping from a fucking WII-mote to a three dimensional space represented in a computer screen. If you would have asked me in my undergraduate days whether I thought that computer programming for academic purposes would become one of the few creative outlets of my future career, I may have laughed at the question.

Speaking of creativity: I'm just loving the band "Immaculate Machine". At their best, they sound like an interesting mix between "the new pornographers" and a classic rock cover-band. At their worst they sound like a classic rock inspired folk rock group (which actually doesn't sound so bad).

Even though it doesn't sound anything like what I just described, I'm particularly taken by the song "Dear Confessor" from their 2007 release "Fable" (see video).



They later re-recorded that song in what I think is Mandarin Chinese (see Wo Xian Tanbai below, from "wont be pretty", their 2008 7-inch EP) which I think is really awesome because, up till now, the vast majority of music I've heard in Mandarin has been boring top 40 adult contemporary.



It's always fun to hear foreigners sing rock (see l'aventurier for an example of how cool the 80's were for France, though I prefer the more recent ska version made by a bunch of CANADIANS) (I'm being tongue-in-cheek condescending here. No hate mail please).



Anyway, Immaculate Machine, along with "Fanfarlo" and a few others, are setting up 2009 to be the year of group-chanty-folk rock for me.

Seriously: Jonathan Coulton

Jonathan Coulton

I don't remember when it was that I first heard of him, but I'm pretty sure the first song I heard was this one:

	Jonathan Coulton - First of May
	Found at skreemr.com

It was love at first sound. This guy, JoCo, was a computer programmer who stopped being a computer programmer to try his hand at writing music:

	Jonathan Coulton - Code Monkey
	Found at skreemr.com

His lyrics are witty and absolutely relateable to a 28 year old geek. His music, though 'campy' in style, displays a knack for writing some pretty amazing melodies. Case in point is "RE: your brains" a song about an office worker turned zombie trying to debate with an ex-colleague about whether the zombie hoard (of which he is a part) should be let into his mall fortress.

	Jonathan Coulton - Re Your Brains
	Found at skreemr.com

JoCo is best known for his "thing a week" project, where he attempted to write. produce, and record one song per week throughout a 52 week period (sept '05 to '06 for a total of 52 songs)--quite an amazing feat, if you ask me. You can read about that here.

	Jonathan Coulton - Tom Cruise Crazy
	Found at skreemr.com

The best part was that he released all of the songs, for free, on the internet. And he still ended up making more money than he had working as a programmer (at least by 2007, he did). Oh, and Valve paid him some money for writing the ending song to their hit game "Portal"

	Jonathan Coulton - Still Alive (J.C. Mix)
	Found at skreemr.com

JoCo is playing a show at a local watering hole this Thursday. I can't wait:

I think it should be called FACE DANCE (or feesu daansu)

Yet another way the Japanese can be CrazyCool.

I think what's happening in the video below is: one of the four people rigged up a system that converts tones to electical impulses.  Those electrical impulses are then sent to these poor people's face muscles.  The music starts playing, and what you get is

FACE DANCE

Putin's a badass

So, how horrible would it be if the world found out you dig ABBA? Probably not so horrible, unless you're the ex-leader of Russia.

Even then, it probably wouldn't be so bad. But the BBC is reporting the story, so it must be important, right?

No, probably not.

Dear Deer

This here is officially my favoritest music video of ALL TIME:

hands

I thought this video was super clever:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

singing duets

I learned to enjoy Kara-oke (kara=self oke=okestra=orchestra) when I spent time in Japan. At first I hated karaoke because I thought I was a horrible singer and I didn't want to subject anyone to my terrible voice. But then I learned that I'm not actually tone deaf and if I tried I could do a half decent job singing most songs that I was familiar with. Upon that realization I started enjoying karaoke a bit more. But not too much.

The problem was that in Japan the selection of english songs, while large, consisted of the standard items: Golden oldies, The Beatles, 80's long-standers, and modern pop songs by brittany spears and her clones. You could find Green day or Nirvana at some places but that's not so fun to sing. These standard items are ok, but I don't know them so well because they're the kind of music that I deliberately try to stay away from - because I've heard them so much (typically when they first came out, or when I first started listening to the oldies station) . My dislike of a vast majority of songs (very few exceptions) exponentially increases with every listen. And since I don't pay much attention to lyrics I have a ton of trouble karaokeing these tunes.

My biggest problem was male-female duets. They were all basically songs I didn't know so when I was asked to take part it just wasn't easy or fun. I've since thought to myself "what is it about duets that I don't seem to like?"

It turns out that there's probably nothing wrong with duets. Today, as I was listening to my iTunes collection while working, a song from a cd that I've owned for a while came on. It was a duet, and one that I actually liked quite a lot. That song is from a more-than-half-decent-band who call themselves "Stars."

Here it is:

	Stars - Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
	Found at skreemr.com

So there's a duet that I'd be happy to sing (especially since it's short and I know most of the lyrics). Now to find a karaoke place in California that actually has it on their machine...

Of course there won't be, because I'm sure songs need to be licensed for karaoke use and pitzy little indie bands don't (or aren't asked to) license their songs.

in harmony with one's self

I first heard of fredo viola a couple of years ago when the internet brought me his 'sad song'.

His full album was recently released on itunes. But to more easily appreciate his music you should get a taste for how he makes it by going to its flash-heavy website.

song tips

I was just listening to my iTunes playlist, as I often do while working at the computer, and this song came on:

	Iron & Wine - The Trapeze Swinger
	Found at skreemr.com

I'm a big fan of Iron & Wine, but I haven't heard this particular song in a while. And as I was listening to it (all 9+ minutes of it) I thought to myself that this would be a fantastic song to run film credits to OR to play as a graduation song.

I've never really approved of any of the graduation songs that I've been subjected to. The problem is that no single person gets a say in what graduation song gets chosen, its done by democracy and so it's done by popularity which automatically makes all of these decisions completely unoriginal. I guess it's also possible that the most popular person chooses a song and everyone agrees because that's what you do in high school or elementary school.

So we used songs like that Sarah McLaughlan song about remembering each other (I actually like a lot of Sarah McLaughlan songs but that mirrorball album got overplayed). I also remember some lame song set to Pachelbel's Canon which came out around the time I graduated high school. That one seemed to be written specifically for high school graduations and it was terrible. And for some reason, I think we used Mariah Carey's 'Hero' for my 8th grade graduation.

Anyway, MUSICAL RESPECT goes to any class who uses Iron & Wine's "trapeze swinger" as a graduation song.

P.S. Iron & Wine will be opening for the Swell Season at a concert this october at SDSU. I highly recommend it. Here is a sample of the Swell Season:

	Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova - When Your Minds Made Up
	Found at skreemr.com

	Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová & The Frames - Falling Slowly
	Found at skreemr.com

Basia Bulat

Basia Bulat

She's from Canada and she rocks.

In no particular order (please listen to entirety):

	Basia Bulat - The Pilgriming Vine
	Found at skreemr.com

	Basia Bulat - Little Waltz
	Found at skreemr.com

	Basia Bulat - In The Night
	Found at skreemr.com

	Basia Bulat - Snakes and Ladders
	Found at skreemr.com

	Before I Knew
	Found at skreemr.com

I've been having a hard time finding her cd at brick and mortar shops. I don't want to buy online. If you people in the US fall in love, please tell others so that she may develop a fan-base here and come play for us