iTunes To Sell You Your Home Videos For $1.99 Each

The latest move from Apple to make our lives just that bit more convienient. Steve is amazing!

You can read more at The Onion.

HELP!

My pal is getting married at the end of the month. I can’t go to the wedding, but I want to make a mix that MAY POSSIBLY BE PLAYED AT THE RECEPTION!

She’s French, and very indie-cool. She told me that there’ll be Arctic Monkeys, Hard Fi etc being played at the reception/party and that I should really go because I’ll be the only one dancing with her! LOL

Anyway, here’s the ideas I have so far. Its indie-cool tempered with encouraging non-indie-cool people to dance. Suggestions? Amendments? Etc?

Bear in mind that we are all in our early 30s! 

• I Will Survive Cake
• Legal Man Belle and Sebastian
• Bonnie and Clyde Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot
• Danger! High Voltage! Electric Six
• Seven Nation Army The White Stripes
• Release The Pressure Leftfield
• Rise Public Image Ltd.
• Rebellion (Lies) Arcade Fire
• She Sells Sanctuary The Cult
• The Walk The Cure
• Smells Like Teen Spirit (House Spirit Club Mix) Warp Brothers
• I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor Arctic Monkeys
• One More Time Daft Punk
• The Bad Touch The Bloodhound Gang
• Cannonball The Breeders
• Lazy X Press 2 feat. David Byrne
• Somebody Told Me (Mylo Mix) The Killers
• Horny As A Dandy Mousse T vs The Dandy Warhols
• Bottle Rocket The Go! Team
• Rapture Riders Go Home Productions
• Jump Around House Of Pain
• Milkshake Kelis
• So Here We Are Bloc Party
• Flame Bell X1
• Tequila (Mint Royale Shot) Terrorvision
• Just Can’t Get Enough Nouvelle Vague
• Buck Rogers Feeder

It’s coming….

What I’m listening to… Guillemots

It's been a good week for new music.

Check out Guillemots. Their album From The Cliffs, while lacking a little quality control in parts, is madly ambitious with falsetto vocals, Wall-of-Sound production and some damn catchy tunes. Their latest single, 'We're Here', isn't on the album. I heard it on the radio (God bless you, Tom Dunne) and it's the first piece of music that made me sit up and say 'WTF?'. It's a madly veering epic thing that seems to have three songs colliding in a very sweeping romantic way.
Granted, the previous track to do this was 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love' by The Darkness. And I still think it's great. So there.

Anyway, the band themselves are multinational and have preposterous names (this is a very good thing). The centresperson appears to be called Fyfe Dangerfield. Indeed. And this is what he has to say about his nutty little band.

"We want to make the sort of music that reveals something new about itself each time you listen to it, but that doesn't need to be at the expense of it being accessible," says Dangerfield. "Headmusic's all well and good, but it's got to hit you in the heart and feet too. After all, you're never going to top birdsong as the ultimate pop music. All we can do is try to come close."

Download Trains to Brazil - Guillemots

Like this? Buy the single. 

Best. Album. Ever. (Maybe) 1. I Trawl the Megahertz - Paddy McAloon (2003)

"Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque" said Paddy McAloon, centresperson of Prefab Sprout, on their only Top 10 poptastic (and wholly unrepresentative) hit way back in 1988. Delighted as I was that the Sprouts were on Top Of The Pops and getting quizzed by Smash Hits (RIP), I didn't really click with From Langley Park to Memphis until years later.

But I stuck with them largely because of the strength of 'When Love Breaks Down', arguably their best known (and loved) track, which I remember listening to in the mid 80s on late-night radio. I couldn't fully get rid of the hiss on FM (we lived in the middle of nowhere in rural Ireland), but the music played by Mark Cagney, John Clarke and yes, Gerry Ryan, introduced me to the Sprouts, the Blue Nile and the 12" of Chaka Khan's 'I Feel For You' - all of which have left some kind of indelible mark on me.

That music, tracks like 'When Loves Breaks Down', 'Tinseltown In The Rain', and 'Atmospherics: Listen To The Radio' were thrilling and complex and grown up. Obsessed with the pop charts as I was, I was shattered when they didn't appear in the Top Ten alongside my other fave raves the Thompson Twins and other singles acts. I was still a singles buyer; albums were expensive and full of things that were, well, not-singles (tweens today have it good with the all-killer no-filler joy of iTMS and the like).

But thrilled I was nonetheless. A new rich vein of music was opening up for me, the creators of which have continued to provide me with, if not quite the startling joy of my teens, a source of pleasure not easily found in other fields. Perhaps as one ages, one really has heard it all before and overwhelmed as I now am with a bewildering amount of music, I'm not easily grabbed by the balls by a piece of music.

How odd, and great, then that Paddy McAloon has managed to bowl me over at several stages in my (and his) musical career.

I Trawl the MEGAHERTZ is a bizarre piece of work. I labelled it 'unclassifiable' in iTunes. While it has comparisons with Gavin Bryars, Gorecki and John Cage, it really doesn't belong in the classical section. It's not electronica despite the snippets of talk radio and the method of its being composed (McAloon said that without certain software, he could never have executed his ideas). It's certainly not pop or rock.

(There's a bit of a saga about detached retinas and being housebound with only the radio to console, but you can Google that. It's not as interesting as the music {although I'm very pleased that Paddy's peepers are OK - now lose the beard…}.)
Whatever genre it is, it's heartbreakingly beautiful. The album begins with a monologue by a woman with an American accent, who is 'telling myself the story of my life'. She doesn't let up for the next TWENTY-TWO minutes. The collage-like narrative seems to be about loss (Your daddy loves you - he just doesn't want to live with us anymore), anomie (I am waiting for life to start), and resignation (Repeat after me: 'Happiness is only a habit').

However, like so many truly great pieces of art, something is salvaged out of the sadness of simply being:

By day and night, fancy electronic dishes
are trained on the heavens.
They are listening for smudged echoes
of the moment of creation.
They are listening for the ghost of a chance.
They may help us make sense of who we are
and where we came from;
and, as a compassionate side effect,
teach us that nothing is ever lost.

Which must mean that somewhere in the ether, those same crackly transmissions I listened to under my pillow as a kid are still floating around, forever loaded with the possibility of thrill.

Download I Trawl the MEGAHERTZ (excerpt) - Paddy McAloon

Anyone getting that Easter feeling yet?

Right, seen it all now…..

Apple have announced that the next version of OS X will allow users to boot up their sexy Intel Macs with Windows XP or OS X.

Can’t wait to tell the tech support people at work that I want more Macs in the lab. Sorry Eberhard… heh heh…

Scary Video: Massive Attack Live With Me

Yeeps, have you seen this video? 

Massive Attack have been away for a while. It's the usual story, a couple of fantastic albums then a mediocre one then a really rubbish one - time for a Best Of!

And so they have recorded a rather decent track to remind everyone of how we used to like them. 'Live With Me' is a nice slice of brooding electronica in the 'Sly' or 'Protection' fashion. But the video….

I don't have a television, and haven't had one for some months (why bother? One can explore torrentville for those essential US series such as Desperate Housewives & The Sopranos). Therefore I don't get to flick through zillions of music channels. So, I was quite quite startled to turn on the TV in a hotel on a MID SUNDAY AFTERNOON to find a yound professioal-looking lady pouring bottles of vodka into herself in a highly dysfunctional and death-baiting style. 

Then she falls down a spiral staircase forever.

All over the country, young children were transfixed and a little bit spooked as their parents, dozing over the papers, switched channels too late.

You can watch it over here somewhere.