The latest episode of Yacht Rock, the near-perfect Channel 101 series, was put online a few hours ago, and it’s a classic. It’s the tale of how the rapper Warren G used the smooth sounds of yacht rock to climb the charts in the mid-’90s—and of how this reappropriation helped a gray-haired Michael McDonald win a dollar bet with his old friend Kenny Loggins. Go check out episode 7—and if you’ve missed some or all of the other episodes, you can watch them here. I wrote about the debut episode of Yacht Rock in this post last July.

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categories: Music and Audio, TV and Video

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In 1990, a year or two before he became super-famous, Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted Pat Sajak’s short-lived talk show. It didn’t go so well: The taping was disrupted by a group of angry activists who were seated throughout the audience. A visibly rattled Limbaugh was unable to regain control of the show. “He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man,” a CBS executive later said. “I had never seen a man sweat as much in my life.” Eventually Limbaugh made it to the first commercial break, and then, barely, to the next one; when the show returned from the second break, the activists were gone—along with the rest of the audience. A demoralized Limbaugh then delivered self-serving closing remarks to an empty studio.

This is from one of my Media Shower tapes (hence the phone number and other graphics that are occasionally superimposed over the video). Yesterday I figured out how to embed a YouTube video on a web page, which will allow me to put up stuff like this without worrying about bandwidth. You’ll need the Flash plugin. The clip is about 11 minutes long, and it’s fricking awesome.

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categories: Best Of, News and Politics, TV and Video

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Released this past Tuesday and currently in heavy rotation here in my apartment: Hello Waveforms, a mostly instrumental solo record from the British producer and synth genius William Orbit. It's his first disc of fresh solo material since 1995, when he put out four separate albums, two under his own name and two with collaborators. (Pieces in a Modern Style, his last solo disc, was originally released in the U.K. in 1995 but was withdrawn immediately for legal reasons; it was re-released in slightly different form in 2000.) Last year I wrote a longish post about my love for Orbit's music. He's most famous for his writing and production work on Madonna's Ray of Light—a disc that's filled with his signature sounds and production style—but from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s he put out about a dozen discs of his own music, some under his own name and some with groups like Bassomatic and Torch Song. He's been coasting a bit in the years since Ray of Light, occasionally doing production work for groups like U2 and Blur.

Hello Waveforms is a minor entry in the Orbit catalog. It doesn't break any new musical ground, and in fact most of the tracks wouldn't have sounded out of place on one of his 1995 discs. But it contains lots of tasty analog-synth goodness. It's a laid-back, atmospheric record; apparently Orbit's going to release another disc in the spring or summer of this year, and that one will be much more upbeat.

On this page, you can listen to some tracks from Hello Waveforms and watch a recent interview with Orbit. And Orbit's official website has tons of cool stuff.

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categories: Music and Audio

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Greetings from my new apartment on East First Street, where I moved ten days ago after having lived on the Upper West Side since the Harding administration. The move, combined with a couple of busy periods at work, is the reason for the relative silence here so far this year. But I’ll be putting up a fair amount of stuff over the next few weeks—I have a big backlog of things I’ve been meaning to post about.

I have a lot more wall space in my new place than I did in my old one, so I’ve been happily accumulating things to hang on the walls. For a couple of years I’ve been meaning to find books of original scores by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb (b. 1929), who often uses highly unconventional, and graphically gorgeous, techniques to represent his music on the page. I haven’t heard much of Crumb’s music, but the scores themselves are simply sublime works of art. The staves on Crumb’s manuscript pages often dip, curl, and twist back into themselves, forming crucifixes, peace signs, closed loops, and various other symbolic shapes.

I bought two Crumb collections from sheetmusicplus.com: Makrokosmos Volume I (1972) and Makrokosmos Volume II (1973), both of which are for amplified piano. The design of my site can’t accommodate large, detailed graphics, but these images should give you a sense of the beauty of Crumb’s manuscript pages. The first image is a composition called “Twin Suns,” which is part of Makrokosmos Volume II. I rotated the image about 100 degrees clockwise so it would fit in this column:

Here’s a detail from “A Prophecy of Nostradamus,” also from Makrokosmos Volume II:

I’m going to frame four or six or eight of these and put them up in my apartment. As unplayable as they look, Crumb’s scores are all quite playable by experienced musicians. Don’t ask me how.

Here are video excerpts from an interview with Crumb in which he talks about some of his techniques. And on this page you can listen to sound samples and download cropped PDFs of some Crumb scores.

Okay, more soon…

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio

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