Scratch Factory: music

Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Princess PUNCH!

This is such a great example of what I love about the Internet, I just had to post it.

If you've seen the trailer for Zack Snyder's upcoming film Sucker Punch, this mash-up will blow your mind.

Breanne Brennan has been making her own trailers from her favourite films for years now, which explains how she was able to put this together. I wouldn't even know where to start, even if I was brilliant enough to have the idea in the first place. I don't know how she finds the lip-synched moments, but some in this mash-up are just uncanny.

But what I think this really proves is the profound depth and quality of classic Disney animation. These brief shots are all (or at least mostly) so full of character and story that they make this admittedly silly exercise work. Close-ups of Cinderella and Aurora carry actual emotion, and draw you in even without the context of the film they come from. It's really a testament to how amazing that studio was.

The loss of 2-D hand-drawn animation is a loss to cinema. While I love the work of studios like Pixar, I'm glad that Miyazaki at least is still carrying on with beautiful cel work, but it's too bad the Disney studio can't find a way to carry it on as well.

Snyder's film may turn out to be full of awesome, or it may be overblown exploitationist crap. He's a talented film-maker, but I haven't outright loved anything he's done so far. But Princess Punch? I'd totally go see that movie.

More silliness

barsoomcore has blogged here in the past about the concept of silliness bringing people together. In that vein, here's some guy named Matt, dancing all over the world.

A Moment Of...

This one's been sitting on the burner for quite a while but I think it's done. I was overwhelmed by the preacher's speech in Lars von Trier's Breaking The Waves, and when casting around for something to contrast it with, came up with the soothing yet seductive tones of Monica Bellucci's discussion of ecstasy and pain. Once that pattern was in place, coming up with a simple piano riff and some string chords was pretty straightforward. I kept trying to dress it up a little but that never really worked. It feels delicate, like it needs room to breathe.

The simplest composition I think I've created so far. Steph says it sounds the most like me. You'll have to decide if that's a good thing.

A Moment Of...

Photo by somebody. License: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

YAAMV: Yet Another Amazing Music Video

Look at this. I mean, seriously, look at this.

The Jukebox Heroes

A while back DC Comics had the Milestone imprint, which featured characters like Static (of Static Shock fame), Icon and Hardware (they were all recently incorporated into the main DC universe). So I recently learned that one of the Milestone characters is a girl in a winged iron armor who calls herself Iron Butterfly (if you didn't catch that, hang your head in shame and check out Wikipedia).

So that obviously got me thinking (as these things are wont to do). And since nothing good ever comes out of thinking...

The Jukebox Heroes:

Robert, a sentient plant.

War Pig, an iron-clad wereboar.

Deaf Leopard, sharp-clawed, keen-sighted berserker. Not really deaf, just stubborn.

White Snake, beautiful female shaman.

Poison Sticks, silent wielder of the twin viper rods.

Concrete Blonde, a hot woman who could turn into living rock.

Wayward, a drifter marked by celestial powers.

JoAnne Jet, superfast girl who loves a battlefield.

Holy Diver, a time-displaced barbarian warrior.

The Foreigner, the alien that brought the Jukebox Heroes together.

In their helicarrier, the Lead Zeppellin, they fight whatever menace threatens the freedom of the world's youth. They fight menaces like Zig, Master of the Stardust, and his Spiders from Mars; Thriller and his Undead Horde; Burning Heart, the Unquenchable.

And the mega-plot is the fight for the icon of ultimate cosmic power known only as the Eye of the Tiger.

Picture by HopePhoto

New To Me

Okay, okay, I'm late to the table here but HOLY CRAP THIS IS AMAZING. The name is Kutiman. He builds music out of YouTube clips. Beautiful, inspiring music. And videos to go along with them -- videos that actually ARE the music itself.

Wow. That's just. Wow. And poke around, there's more.

I don't think I've been this excited about new music since Portishead appeared out of nowhere and kicked my butt way back in Funabashi. There's so much delight and wit in here, married with such a lovely appreciation and respect for the glorious generosity (inspired by narcissism, perhaps, but there you go) of the goofy human spirit. I remember the first time I heard Coldcut's "Say Kids What Time Is It?" -- this is the same energy, the same determination to build greatness where nobody else saw it. This is what art is all about.

Thanks, Trill, for the find.

Cut The Crap!

It's no secret to anyone who knows me (or just follows me on Twitter) that I love kung-fu movies. A lot.

And kung-fu movies have some pretty awesome music in them, and I'd been wanting for a long time to jam some of that music on top of some beats and have kung-fu people yell at each other over top of it. Made perfect sense to me. This song uses samples from Kung Fu Cult Master, Swordsman II and Supercop. The folks above are Sharla Cheung (who appears in Kung Fu Cult Master), Jet Li (in both that and Swordsman II), Kenneth Tsang (Supercop), the incomparable Brigitte Lin (Swordsman II) and Leung Kar Yan (Kung Fu Cult Master, and the guy who actually says "Cut the crap!").

"Cut the crap!" is one of those colloquial phrases that pops up in a lot of subtitles, and it always cracks me up. It's the primary sample in this little ditty, getting repeated every bar here and there.

It's also got a nice sort of sideways glance at scratching, which pleases me. I hope the song pleases you.

Listen!

Confidence, Crushed

Some things just seem so obvious to me. Like the notion that Arnold's Conan and Julie's Maria belong together. Sort of. If you, you know, don't think about it too much.

So we watched Conan The Barbarian a while back, cause it's awesome (as you know), and I was listening to Julie Andrews singing "I Have Confidence", which is also awesome (as you also know) (and yes, I have The Sound of Music soundtrack on my iTunes rotation) (but I wasn't listening to Julie Andrews WHILE we were watching Conan, cause that would be annoying), and to be honest, the rest was just figuring out how to use new toys.

Steph got me a digital drum machine last year, and this is the first track I've used it on. It's called iDrum and it integrates fully into GarageBand 2. It also works very well as an independent groove-maker, outputting aiff files you can then drag into GarageBand as loops. Awesomely cool.

So this track features less GarageBand loops than any track I've done so far, I think. Only one pre-fabricated GarageBand loop is used in here -- bonus points if you can guess which instrument it is.

Crush Kittens

Steph again provided useful ideas. She also said I should lose the guitar. This time I couldn't bring myself to take it out. Way it goes.

Just A Ski Instructor

Heck with the Zeppelin reunion; the show I'm agonizing over having missed is the new tour by Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

Here are three reasons to live in the UK:

I Love Girls

Endicott

Gina Gina

Finish What You Start

Okay, so we were watching this tremendous British noir called They Made Me A Fugitive (damn them) with Trevor Howard and Sally Grey (where are all the Sallys these days?), and there's fantastic bit in the middle where our now-a-fugitive hero (I don't think I'm giving too much away if I say that a some point in the film the hero becomes a fugitive) confronts young Miss Grey and delivers a blistering speech on finishing what you start.

It's a nailbiter, for sure, largely because you're never entirely sure how far our desperate hero is willing to go. Trevor Howard is a great square-jawed but morally uncertain hero, and Sally delivers pluck and charm a-plenty. Rest assured she does, in the end, finish what she started.

Anyway, that speech kept rattling around in my head, and then it got really hot, and one day we were walking across the park and Steph mumbled, "It's too darn hot," and then Trevor Howard got mixed up with Cole Porter. And a cowbell.

So here's "Finish":

It's possible it needs more cowbell.

After The Apocalypse

Stephanie and I were listening to David Bowie's album "Heroes" quite some time ago. We often spend Sunday mornings playing each other albums that we love. Upon listening to the title track in all its original epic glory, Steph commented that she'd never heard a remake that seemed to understand how incredibly tragic this song is.

We can be heroes. Just for one day.

On a discussion board I frequent there's been a long-running thread about imagining post-apocalyptic management. The folks are generating ideas about how they would set about creating and maintaining their own community in the face of total social collapse -- what sorts of rules should we live by, what resources will we need, what skills will be most valuable. All that fun stuff.

And it occured to me that the post-apocalyptic story is really just another frontier story. These stories are cowboy stories, gold rush stories and gangster stories. Even Robert E. Howard's Conan stories echo with the same idea.

The idea is a compelling one: that what holds us back, what restricts us from achieving our deserved glory, is the society and the social rules that we are forced to live by. If we could just (goes the myth) unshackle ourselves from the chains that anchor us to this workaday life, we could rise above all this petty day-to-day fearfulness and timidity we labour under, we could show our TRUE, unfettered natures, savage and strong, we could be warriors in truth.

We could be heroes. Forever and ever.

Nowadays, when heading out to the frontier is not the possibility it once was, when criminal gangs can no longer be viewed as romantic rebels, the promise of the apocalypse breathes seductively to those who carry that sense that they have been denied their true stature.

"If only we could start over, we could build a society that valued strength, and courage, and independence!"

You'd think the myth would start to lose its power after a century or so. James Fennimore Cooper's little tale about Mohicans can be seen as a tale of this type, that's for sure -- our hero is plunged into a world where the rules of his society no longer apply, and, freed of those annoying strictures, he is able to transform the world around him, and to make the universe adhere to those higher moral principles that we're all so fond of.

A hundred years later, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard are writing pretty much the same kinds of stories, set in pre-history, on Mars, in Africa -- anywhere one could plausibly lose the rules of society. And these stories continue to perpetuate themselves endlessly. If only we could be free, goes the dream, we could be as great as we deserve to be.

I could be king

Now of course all kinds of adventure stories rely on some sort of device to separate the story's world from our familiar dwelling; the defining characteristic we're looking for here is that hand-rubbing glee I remarked on earlier in discussing Howard's happy anticipation of civilisation's (inevitable) collapse. That notion that once all these awkward rules (that are really just in place to be nice to the weak -- a group that WE'RE not a part of, of course) are out of the way, we can get to building that society we always knew we could build.

Even more, the notion that if human beings would just stop interfering with their namby-pamby caring and sympathy, the universe really would work out so that everyone got what they deserved. At which point WE (being, you know, part of the strong group, the noble group, the certain-to-come-out-on-top group), can finally be ourselves.

Maybe we're lying; maybe we better not say.
But we could be us just for one day

All of which brings me back to David Bowie and HIS take on the apocalypse. "Heroes" is an anguished cry of a man who HAS lost all the rules and strictures that form society. But this loss isn't cause for individualistic ecstasy; it leads to terror and desolation, to which Bowie's only response can be the repeated, insistent, and ultimately hollow assertion that we can be heroes, that we can escape these confines.

But Bowie turns the whole notion of escape inside out at the operatic climax of "Heroes":

I can remember
Standing by the wall
The guns shot over our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall.

Ah, yes, the wall. Of course, Bowie recorded this album in Berlin, so we know what "The Wall" must mean, right? On the other side of that wall is our escape. Here, guns shoot at us as we kiss, but surely all we have to do is cross that wall and we're free, right?

No.

And the shame was on the other side.
Maybe we're lying; maybe we better not say.
But we could be us just for one day

If we can't be us right now, on this side of the wall, what makes us think we'll be us when we've crossed over? Here, standing as guns shoot over us, is where we must make our stand. Not waiting for the apocalypse to come along and give us our grand chance to shine. If we're not shining this very second, it is only because we are afraid to do so. Putting off our moment of self-creation until we've crossed to the greener fields over the wall will only expose us to the shame of running away.

"Heroes" may be tragic and horrible, but it is also strangely uplifting and hopeful. We CAN be heroes, and whether it's for one day or forever makes no difference -- once I've learned how to be myself, they're the same thing. The apocalypse is now, inside myself. I have no one to blame if I miss it.

Berlin Wall photo by Joost Commandeur

You Are In Love

Saw Brotherhood of the Wolf at the Festival here a few years back. Liked it okay -- painfully overcut, but otherwise some good stuff. Some time later Steph said, "Hey, remember that Italian actress from Brotherhood? The prostitute? She was really good -- she was in another movie, Tears of the Sun. Let's check it out."

Of course the woman in question is the actress Monica Bellucci, and is only one of an endless line of amazing actors that Steph has managed to pick out of the crowd and alert us to before we even know who they are. We have a whole "stable" of actors that she's identified as worth keeping tabs on. Sometimes we end up watching great actors in not-so-great movies (Tears of the Sun, say), but it's always thrilling watching somebody live up to the potential you see in them and deliver spectacular performances.

Now ordinarily I prefer subtitles to dubbing, since voice acting is if anything harder than normal acting, but Blaine's copy of Brotherhood doesn't include subtitles, so we watched it in English. And discovered that many of the actors did their own English dubs (since they're European and thus speak thirty languages) -- including Monica. So I grabbed a bunch of choice utterances, scrambled them up with a little Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass ("Green Peppers" from Whipped Cream and Other Delights), added a solid base of GarageBand loops and voila!

You Are In Love (We're Not Married)

Learned a lot listening carefully to Dmitri From Paris, Towa Tei and Coldcut on a recent trip to TO. It may not show, but I swear I learned it! I got more help from Steph, of course, than I did from any of them.

I Don't Like You Anyway

Bran Van 3000's album "Discosis" captivated me from the first moment I heard it, in a record store in Kyoto as Steph and I awaited our train back to Tokyo. I had no notion of BV3G as anything other than the one-hit wonder of "Drinking In LA", a tune I'd liked well enough back in the day but never really gave another thought to after its moment (it's really the "Life In A Northern Town" of 2000).

It remains one of my favourite albums, as much for its confusing jumble of themes and styles and genres (not to mention languages) as for the crisp muscianship and imaginative production. Sounds and voices come in and out, sudden and sharp or soft and gently announcing themselves. The whole album gives off an impenetrable aura of dreaminess, and I think that dreams and mystery are at the heart of this light-hearted but serious offering.

"It's so predictable to want to be so beautiful..."

What kind of music is this: electric beats and wistful acoustic guitars, overwrought diva vocals alongside freestyle rapping, spoken word tales that rewind and wrap around themselves, revealing a core of nothing but nonsense crafted from self-reference and wordplay.

But there's a running vein of ore under all the strangeness, a constant cautious exploration of dreams. Kermit the Frog flips off angry drivers while daydreaming of turning a traffic jam into a block party. A suburban girl's dreams of rock and roll trigger a cultural overload. A cultured fellow sends a message to a luscious actress which becomes a strange reversal of roles.

"I really can't recall who I was meant to be that day,
I'm an actress; I play so many roles.
But the script required Miss G,
that's who I was meant to be,
and I was just about to pick out the clothes
(when my crumpled paper ball
hit the floor beside you, it made no sense at all)"

Dreams of speed, of sex, of love, of transcendence. Transcending one's own identity, as the actress does (and ultimately her customer).

"Who do you want me to be?
Who do I want to be?
Who do you want me to be?
Get
Fucking loaded."

The title, Discosis, suggests a play on psychological terminology, so maybe I'm not so far off here. Maybe the constant shifts and eruptions in the music reflect the constant stir and boil of our minds, where memories collide and come bubbling unexpected to the surface.

"One day God walked on old Mount Royal, just to dream of the human form,
through stones and cans and comic books in a kettle,
then you came out like a shining goddess of heavy metal.
It's too bad some hearts just don't settle,
and the pipes are leaking and you feel like leaving,
Yeah we've heard this one before.
Dear God, buddy, now don't you meddle,
cause I got my own twisted ways of showing you
that I do, yes I do, I love you in my own twisted way."

Strange stories like this litter the album, drifting along without seeming to resolve properly, transforming themselves from one tale to another. The way the songs reinvent themselves as they go on reflects the constant expressions of change, of the need for change and the desire through self-change to effect self-assertion.

"Do what you want to make the fuckers pay, don't waste your time and sleep your life away; I always meant to tell you I don't like you anyway..."

More Groove

I seem to be in the midst of creating a bunch of sort of "movie-related" music. One reason is that since I can't sing worth piss, and don't have any useful way of recording voices anyhow, I use vocals I can get ahold of, like movie dialogue.

Also some of my favourite music is movie music (like the Kong theme) so what are you going to do?

Now, if you were to grant points based on awesomeness of theme song AND crappiness of movie, I think you might have to rate Diamonds Are Forever as the highest of the high. Song: awesome Shirley Bassey ass-kicking. Movie: Well, uh, no. It sucks a lot. I can't think of another Bond film that quite combines those two qualities so well.

So here we have:

Only Diamonds Never

Steph helped a lot with this one so if you like it you should thank her. You wouldn't like it so much without her.

Savage Breast, Soothed

Hurray for GarageBand, my lovely M-Audio "Keystation" (thank you Stephanie), and The Movie WAVs Page. I have just released my latest no-doubt-soon-to-be-topping-the-charts tune, Carpenter's Moon.

Making music is one of those things I totally suck at, but love doing. Unlike, say, football, which I totally suck at, and HATE.

There aren't many things I totally suck at and enjoy. Music. Drawing. And sleeping. I never really got the hang of that, which means I usually only do it five or six hours a night.

Which ain't healthy, but I'm just no damn good at it.

Anyways, yay! Music! Yay!

Animal Talk for Meghan

Meghan is our newly-four-year-old niece. A year ago we couldn't figure out what to get our nephew Tanner for his 7th birthday, until Steph had the bright idea of making him a CD of dance tunes, since his mom told us he liked to dance. The CD was a big gift, and a few months later Tanner's older brother Dillon got a CD of classic punk/new wave tunes.

So now it's Meghan's turn. Meghan gets a CD called Animal Talk:

The track listing for Animal Talk is as follows:

"Animal Talk" - Twink
"The Lonely Bull" - Herb Alpert
"Asleep In A Snake Basket" - Twink
"Day-O" - Harry Belafonte
"5-Piece Chicken Dinner" - The Beastie Boys
"Signifyin' Monkey" - Oscar Brown, Jr.
"Pussy Cat" - Twink
"Tiger Rag" - Kid Ory
"Three Little Birds" - Bob Marley And The Wailers
"Sleepy Rabbit" - The Tropic of Cancer
"The Pink Panther Theme" - Hollywood Studio Orchestra
"Funky Cat" - James Knight and The Butlers
"Hoppity Jones" - Twink
"Rock Dog" - Swoop
"Cow" - Gene Loves Jezebel
"Garden Bird" - Cutman-Booche
"Catnip" - Twink
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" - The Tokens
"Aqua Boogie ( A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)" - Parliament

I like to think I'm the first person to put Parliment, Gene Loves Jezebel, Harry Belafonte and The Beastie Boys on a single disc. I'm probably not, but it pleases me to imagine I am.

I stole the cover image from somebody on deviantart.com.

Coming soon: thoughts on barbarians and possibly pictures of monkeys. Stay tuned.

Scratch Factory