Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player’s hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches.

A month or two ago, YouTube yanked the videos and suspended Ojala’s YouTube account, apparently due to copyright complaints from several of the guitarists. Many of the videos have now resurfaced on YouTube, and because I never got around to posting them the first time, here’s one of the best. Eric Clapton does jazz:

More: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Vai, Slash, Eddie Van Halen, Metallica, Jake E. Lee with Ozzy Osbourne. Also, Yngwie Malmsteen, complete with symphony orchestra!

Inspired by Ojala, someone else contributed this Oscar Peterson-Joe Pass train wreck:

The walls in my apartment are a little too bare, so today I ran around a bit looking for some nice framed stuff to buy. I’ve also been poking around the web trying to find things. And that’s how I stumbled onto the incredible James Brown poster below. I’m not sure if it’s available for sale; it’s the poster of the week on gigposters.com, a very cool site devoted to the art of contemporary concert posters. The site itself doesn’t sell posters, but apparently some of the designers sell their creations. I gotta e-mail the artist—he goes by the name Moctezuma—and find out if I can buy one of these. More of Moctezuma’s work is here.

Check out this awesome Quicktime VR image that was taken during a recent Pixies show at a medium-size club in Prague. You can spin around and see the whole club; you can zoom in and zoom out; you can look at the ceiling. Follow this link or click on the image below to check it out. (Heads up: The site will resize your browser window, but not too much.)

How cool will it be when someone finally develops a system that can handle full-motion video with these kinds of controls? It’ll be years before that’s possible, I’m guessing, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually.

The photographer, Jeffrey Martin, has lots of other great panoptic images on his website.

Ever since I started this site, a year and a half ago, I’ve been wanting to post about the young British musician Stuart Wyatt, a classically trained electric violinist who plays solo live shows using foot-controlled loop samplers, a technique known as live looping. Wyatt used to have a robust website with plenty of free mp3s, but health problems and financial difficulties forced him to abandon the site in 2004 or 2005, and it eventually disappeared. I was happy a few weeks ago to discover that he now has a new site up with lots and lots of his music.

I do live looping with guitars and electronics, and I first became aware of Wyatt’s music in 2000 or 2001 through his participation in the Looper’s Delight mailing list. At the time, Wyatt was living in Paris and making money by bringing a rechargeable amp out to the Place des Vosges and creating elaborately layered instrumentals with the help of a battery-powered 14-second loop sampler (the classic Line 6 DL4):

Wyatt typically starts a piece by sampling himself playing a four-, eight- or sixteen-bar melody or rhythm. As the initial phrase repeats itself over and over again, he plays melodies and harmonies over the top of the loop, occasionally tapping the record button with his foot to add new phrases to the existing loop. In the right hands (and feet), such as Wyatt’s, live looping is mesmerizing to watch: Over many minutes, you watch and listen as a single musician slowly builds a simple musical phrase or section into a fully formed piece of music, often with harmonies, rhythms, drones, and counterpoint. A lot of the time, looping is simultaneously a composition and a performance, where a musician is reacting to what he or she has just played.

Here’s an excellent track called “Thursday Piece,” which Wyatt improvised live at home in 2002 with an Electrix Repeater—one of the best music gadgets ever. I own one and am obsessed with it.

“Thursday Piece” is about 12 minutes long, and it builds and develops slowly but beautifully. A lot more mp3s are on Wyatt’s main music page. If you like what you hear, you might drop him a little money through PayPal—he’s apparently having a rough time these days.

Live looping dates back to the early 1960s, when the minimalist composer Terry Riley developed the Time Lag Accumulator, a dual reel-to-reel system that let him record and loop a simple musical idea and then overdub dozens of improvised parts. The result was a massive, hypnotic, and ever-growing wall of sound. In the early 1970s, with help from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp began experimenting with a Riley-style reel-to-reel system that he later named Frippertronics. (“There it was,” Fripp later said, describing his discovery of this technique, “a way for one person to make an awful lot of noise. Wonderful!”) After years of experimenting with looping in the studio—on albums by Peter Gabriel and Hall & Oates (!) as well as his own—Fripp took the setup on the road in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a series of solo guitar-and-tape-delay concerts. Here’s some more looping history. These days, inexpensive digital technologies—both software and hardware—give both amateurs and pros a remarkable amount of looping power: There are now tons of great cheap looping devices on the market, almost all of them much more powerful and versatile than Fripp’s 1970s reel-to-reel system.

Because looping is a technique, not a genre, it is used in a wide range of music styles. The singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur plays solo live shows using two loop samplers and a stageful of effects devices, which allow him to create the sound of an entire band: He’ll start a song by tapping and slapping a beat on the neck and body of his acoustic guitar, and then he’ll layer arpeggios, strums, and backing vocals to accompany his own voice. It’s pretty incredible to watch. (The singer-songwriter Howie Day has apparently used looping in a similar way, though I’ve never seen or heard him do it.) This guy does tight, intricate beatboxing with the help of a great software program called Ableton Live. And this fairly technical Guitar Player article explores how various prominent guitarists incorporate looping into their playing.

On my own music page, you can hear a few tracks where I use looping extensively, though not in a live, real-time way. For those tracks, I built up a bunch of loops and then remixed them in my studio.

In 1979, when I was 10, my father bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 for my family. The TRS-80 was an attempt by Tandy, Radio Shack’s parent company, to enter the burgeoning home-computer market. It was a rickety, cheaply made little thing that totally earned its derisive nickname, “Trash 80.” But I was fascinated by what it could do. Those were the days of Asteroids and Space Invaders; my friends and I were part of the first generation of children to grow up obsessed with videogames. When my dad brought the TRS-80 home, I was convinced it would be like having an entire arcade of awesome videogames in my bedroom. That was not, um, the case. My version of the TRS-80 had something like one kilobyte of memory—no joke—and didn’t utilize a disk drive; you loaded programs into its memory using a standard audiocassette player. But I still had fun with the thing. I remember programming it to play back a funk-free rendition of “The Hustle” comprised entirely of staccato eighth-note ticks and bleeps. God, I was so fucking cool.

Anyway, getting to the point: I was assigned an oral report in my sixth-grade English class a year or so after we got the computer, and I chose to talk about my TRS-80. I still have the notecards from that oral report—see below—and they’re pretty hilarious, and not just because my handwriting is totally freakish. In the last few years, I’ve re-created this speech in front of New York audiences three or four times, most prominently at a 2003 installment of my brilliant Upper West Side neighbor John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book series. I read two oral reports from my childhood and adolescence that night; the other one was my 10th-grade Led Zeppelin report, which I posted about here.

(For the record, my computer-geek period only lasted a year or two. By 1981 or 1982 I had lost interest in computers—though not videogames—and I didn’t really start using them again until the early ’90s, right after I graduated from college. During my undergrad years I wrote my papers by hand in notebooks and then stayed up late typing them on my electric typewriter while listening to every Van Morrison LP in my collection—and reaching for Liquid Paper when I made a mistake. Ah, good times.)

Here are my two favorite lines from the report:

[Y]ou can buy a line printer that prints the information on the screen onto paper, which can be quite useful if you don’t want to copy something by hand.

[…]

Another way to save and/or load in programs is with floppy disks, which are square disks that are floppy.

Here are the seven notecards. I’ve posted a full transcript at the end of this post, in case you find my freakish handwriting unreadable.

[Continue reading "My Sixth-Grade TRS-80 Speech, 1980"...]

I love this: The new video from the goofy power-pop band The Presidents of the United States of America was shot entirely using an array of Sony Ericsson cellphones. The song is a Weezer-ish tune called “Some Postman,” and the video was directed by the Australian filmmaker Grant Marshall.

The original video file resides here, but that server is very slow, so I’ve put the video on my own server. Here’s the video; it apparently only works with Quicktime 7. I’ve encoded and uploaded a lower-quality version that should play nice with other video plugins, as well as earlier versions of Quicktime. [UPDATE, 10/19: I’ve taken the primary file off my server because the bandwidth was getting a little out of hand. So I’ll just point you again to the original video file, which is here; it apparently only works with Quicktime 7. I’ll continue to host the lower-quality, more broadly compatible version on my server as long as I can. If you have Quicktime 7, you should definitely watch the original file, because it looks and sounds much better. UPDATE II: Okay, I had to take the lower-quality version down, too. But the cool people at ifilm’s Viral Video channel have begun hosting the clip. If you have Quicktime 7, you should definitely watch the original file; if you don’t, head to ifilm and watch a lower-quality streaming version. And P.S.: The RSS feed for ifilm’s Viral Video channel is well worth subscribing to.]

Here’s some background about how the “Some Postman” video was put together, and here’s some more. The phones were only capable of 10 frames per second (standard video is shot at around 30 f.p.s.), and they couldn’t capture quick jerky movements without pixelation, so much of the footage was shot with the band performing the song at half speed.

(I bet Clive will want to link to this…)

[via Lisa Rein.]

Metallica Drummer! is a hilarious bit of home-video footage that became a phenomenon on the underground video-trading circuit in the late ’90s. A couple of years ago I summarized the video’s backstory in the lead paragraph of a book review I wrote for The New York Sun:

One day in the early 1990s, a young Canadian heavy metal fan put a chair in the center of his living room, turned on a video camera, cued up a Metallica album, and launched into the most hilariously earnest display of fantasy musicianship ever captured on tape. Glaring straight at the camera, and wearing a pair of Bart Simpson shorts, the scowling young man re-created every snare hit, every kick-drum thud, every cymbal crash on the recordings—but he did it on an imaginary drum kit. The young air drummer quickly forgot about the tape he had made, but someone later found it and released it into the underground trading circuit without his knowledge. Metallica Drummer!, as the video came to be known, developed a cult following in the late 1990s, probably because it’s so revealing of the fantasy world that lurks in the imagination of every music freak. To paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have seen Metallica Drummer, and he is us.

The video—a clip is below—is funny without any context, but knowledge of the backstory makes it richer and funnier. The historical record consists primarily of two articles published in the San Francisco alternative press in January 1999. The first article appeared in The San Francisco Bay Guardian when Metallica Drummer’s identity was still a secret. The second came out a couple of weeks later in SF Weekly and related the reporter’s experience of tracking down the mysterious Metallica Drummer in Vancouver and informing him that he and his video were famous. Sort of. The guy was shocked but oddly proud.

Here’s a clip of the first song on the tape, “Sad But True.” I think that link may work best if you have Quicktime 7. It’s a smaller file, so try it first. If you have any trouble, try this version instead, which is slightly bigger and may have fewer compatibility issues.

The latest issue of Stay Free! contains an excellent and lengthy interview with Bill, the man primarily responsible for the flash-mob phenomenon of 2003. Bill is a very smart man, and he has lots of smart things to say about the phenomenon he inspired. Here’s an excerpt:

I had conceived [flash mobs] specifically as a New York thing. People in New York are always looking for the next big thing. They come here because they want to take part in the arts community, they want to be with other people who are doing creative stuff, and they will come out to see a reading or a concert on the basis of word-of-mouth. Partly they want to find out what everybody else is so excited about, but partly they just want to be a part of the scene. You have this in other places too, but I feel like there’s something in New York that makes it kind of a city-wide pastime. Part of what I liked about this idea was that it would be very frank about the pure scenesterism of it. What is it that would make people come to the flash mob? Well, it would be the fact that if it went off as planned, lots of other people would be coming. The desire to not be left out was part of what would grow it. I didn’t have all of these grandiose notions about it at the time; I mostly just thought it was funny. But I thought of it as a stunt that would satirize scenester-y gatherings.

The interview was conducted by Francis Heaney, whose blog you should be reading.

Last night I went to P.S. 122 in the East Village to see All Stories Are Fiction, my friend Mike Daisey’s latest series of monologues. The show was FANTASTIC. He’s one hell of a talented storyteller. Here is a description of the format Mike is using for these shows:

Last spring monologuist Mike Daisey created 13 new shows in 13 weeks in a daring new series at P.S. 122 called All Stories Are Fiction. Plucking from events that befell him in the years, days, and sometimes minutes before he walked onstage, Daisey weaved together brand-new shows, creating one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-seen-again monologues before the eyes of the audience each and every time.

Now the creator of 21 Dog Years and the monologuist The New York Times has dubbed “the master storyteller” and The Seattle Times calls “a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black” is back at P.S. 122, this time taking aim at nothing less than happiness itself.

The rules are deceptively simple: 45 minutes before show time, Mike goes into his dressing room with a legal pad and a Sharpie and creates an outline. At 7:30 sharp, Mike emerges and tells his tale for the assembled audience for the first and only time. Over two months these monologues will address the essential question of happiness: what role does it play—or should it play—in our lives?

Mike’s doing a new show at 7:30 p.m. every Monday through May 9. I will definitely be going back for more. Tickets and other details are here.

Mike also has a blog.

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Yelling “Freebird!” has been a rock cliché for years, guaranteed to elicit laughs from drunks and scorn from music fans who have long since tired of the joke. And it has spread beyond music, prompting the Chicago White Sox organist to add the song to her repertoire and inspiring a greeting card in which a drunk holding a lighter hollers “Freebird!” at wedding musicians. …

Kevin Matthews is a Chicago radio personality who has exhorted his fans — the KevHeads — to yell “Freebird” for years, and claims to have originated the tradition in the late 1980s, when he says he hit upon it as a way to torment Florence Henderson of “Brady Bunch” fame, who was giving a concert. He figured somebody should yell something at her “to break up the monotony.” The longtime Skynyrd fan settled on “Freebird,” saying the epic song “just popped into my head.”

Mr. Matthews says the call was heeded, inspiring him to go down the listings of coming area shows, looking for entertainers who deserved a “Freebird” and encouraging the KevHeads to make it happen.

But he bemoans the decline of “Freebird” etiquette. “It was never meant to be yelled at a cool concert — it was meant to be yelled at someone really lame,” he says. “If you’re going to yell ‘Freebird,’ yell ‘Freebird’ at a Jim Nabors concert.”

But the origins are much older and more complicated than that.