Monday, February 23, 2009



This is possibly the coolest music video that I have ever seen. The visual effect that you are seeing is done by director Nabil Elderkin, and it's a technique called "data moshing." Now I'm not sure exactly what that means, but aesthetically it's meant to mimic the mixing of electronic music and instrumental music that Kanye is transitioning toward.

Just like some of my other blog entries, this one has a cool video to start it up, but I quickly veer away toward something else. This blog entry is about the geographical, hidden links between artists that many people are unaware of, but almost every musically inclined or musically interested person somehow seems to be cognizant of. What I'm speaking about is the music tendencies, genres, and styles that seem to group themselves in particular regions. I suppose I first realized this when my roommate asked me where the band I was listening to was from. The band is Wolf Parade, they're from Canada, and it turns out that that says a whole lot about them, but I'll get back to that in a sec. The second time I realized the importance of place was during our electronic music lecture when Juraj was speaking about House music, and about how it came from a club called The Warehouse in Chicago, which created a whole city scene of music that was by no means unique, but heavily centered in the area. The third time that I realized this was when I started using this website/program called Last.fm that tracks all of the music that you play through itunes (it might work for other programs, i didn't check) and then allows you to play a "station" that plays only song reccomended to you based on the music that you've been playing on itunes. So, it turns out that the music that I really love is made either by indie bands coming out of Ontario and Quebec, or rap artists coming out of brooklyn or queens (actually the band i'm listening to right now on last.fm is an indie band from brooklyn so i suppose that supports it even more! [actually, one of my favorite bands to come out of brooklyn are another indie band so i'll just add new york indie bands to the list]). Some of the canadian bands that i've been listening to then are: Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes, Destroyer, and Arcade Fire. Some of the new york rap groups/artists that i've really been enjoying are: Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Jurassic 5, Biggie, AZ, and Jay Z.

What this has also allowed me to do is to figure out exactly the kind of music that i would want to listen to in the future, with or without last.fm. For rap I like spoken voice samples, slower, simpler, rougher beats, long rap strings. For Indie I like extremely psychadelic, reverbed, echoed, distroted acoustic guitars, xylophones, and Extremely poetic, perhaps overly imagistic lyrics.

The video below, however, doesn't quite feed into the parameters i've laid out. The lyrics are good, but not overly complicated, and the only real instrumentation is a guitar, but i love it, even it's pretty sappy.
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