Medium
This is a nice collection of in-the-zone music. No mention of the Flow State newsletter?! Travesty! Flow State sends links to music like this to your inbox everyday.
music
MediumAll Them Witches on KEXP
When I was 13, epic guitar music was the center of my universe. Jimmy Page and eventually David Gilmore were heroes to me and the songs seemed to conjure entire worlds in four minutes. All Them Witches takes me back to that exciting time when music was magical and this performance is fantastic. I saw them live a few months ago and they are a force.
Enviro-History
You might want to celebrate this Earth Day by revisiting Blackened by Metallica. When I was listening to this in junior high I was only vaguely aware it was about nuclear winter if I thought about it all. I was mostly interested in the guitar work. Maybe I grew up to care about the environment because of the heavy metal I listed to?
Boys in Bands
Dear Internet, this song by Silver Sphere has been stuck in my head since I heard it. My only theory is that I'm the only person who has heard this and must alone carry the earworm burdon. By sharing it here I'm hoping to move on. Thanks for your attention. I'm sorry.
guitars
Kickstarter
This is so good! This album let me hear these worn-in 70s soft rock favorites with new ears and you can feel JoCo’s joy emanating from every layer. It’s too late to back the Kickstarter, but I think you can still get some groovy swag. It’s also on Spotify and the like. RIYL: feelings.
Link Pattern: Music
Generative.fm was at the top of the link charts this week. It's a site that offers endless computer generated ambient music. The crisp design pairs well with the sounds and it's fun to explore. It's also disquieting in light of some other articles I read this week:
A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music is a concise history of popular music by Ian Tamblyn. He argues that simultaneous advances in technology and labor rights helped fuel a golden age of music craft that has ended.
Another article I ran across about the end of music as we knew it from September, 2018: No more heroes: how music stopped meaning everything. This one describes the end of music as a countercultural force and describes the current age as musical wallpaper. (ouch.)
And just to put too fine a point on all of these, we had Mother Jones with: What Will Happen When Machines Write Songs Just as Well as Your Favorite Musician? It's an oddly unsettling discussion of using machine learning to aid or directly compose music. It argues that music could be affected by AI like photography has been by Instagram. The idea of musicians being replaced by musicgram influencers is bleak.
On a positive note I discovered some fantastic new (to me) music this week by King Buffalo. Check out Morning Song. It was not composed or played by computers. It is similar to music I love from the height of the golden age of recorded music but what are you going to do?
A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music is a concise history of popular music by Ian Tamblyn. He argues that simultaneous advances in technology and labor rights helped fuel a golden age of music craft that has ended.
Another article I ran across about the end of music as we knew it from September, 2018: No more heroes: how music stopped meaning everything. This one describes the end of music as a countercultural force and describes the current age as musical wallpaper. (ouch.)
And just to put too fine a point on all of these, we had Mother Jones with: What Will Happen When Machines Write Songs Just as Well as Your Favorite Musician? It's an oddly unsettling discussion of using machine learning to aid or directly compose music. It argues that music could be affected by AI like photography has been by Instagram. The idea of musicians being replaced by musicgram influencers is bleak.
On a positive note I discovered some fantastic new (to me) music this week by King Buffalo. Check out Morning Song. It was not composed or played by computers. It is similar to music I love from the height of the golden age of recorded music but what are you going to do?
SourceForgeThis program is an audio equalizer for Windows. Well, it's a graphic interface for the text-only Equalizer APO which sounds complicated, but you need to install both programs to get a nice, familiar slider EQ:
Ok, so it looks a bit like a 90s Visual Basic version of a familiar slider EQ, but it works. If you spend any time on Windows it's a nice addition because Windows inexplicably doesn't have a native equalizer and neither does Spotify where I spend most of my listening time. Being able to boost the bass and treble and drop the mids is one of those things I could live without, but now that I have the ability everything sounds better.
Ok, so it looks a bit like a 90s Visual Basic version of a familiar slider EQ, but it works. If you spend any time on Windows it's a nice addition because Windows inexplicably doesn't have a native equalizer and neither does Spotify where I spend most of my listening time. Being able to boost the bass and treble and drop the mids is one of those things I could live without, but now that I have the ability everything sounds better.
Roseblood
BBC
Dear nerds, please do not ruin this problematic yet delightful 80s pop tune with any more of your overwrought nonsense. I think we have mined this vein enough.
the1959project.comThis looks like another great day-by-day project to follow in 2019. This is my favorite year in jazz music and it's already fascinating a few days in. [via kottke] I mean look at these albums! Don't like jazz? That's jazz!
law.duke.edu
Some art from 1923 is finally entering the US public domain after a 20-year extension passed by congress in 1998. In addition to a partial list of works here, check out the What Could Have Been section to feel the impact of that 1998 decision. They also have a good page about Why the Public Domain Matters.