Category Archives: Music

Spiritualized – Hey Jane

Posted on by
Reply


The video for Hey Jane, the first single from the new album by Spiritualized which is called Sweet Heart Sweet Light. For a limited time NPR offers the chance to listen to the full album online.

On Spiritualized’s seventh album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (out April 17), Pierce sounds more inspired than ever by his own looming mortality. This, after all, is a guy who nearly died of double-pneumonia in 2005, and who spent months mixing this new record while taking chemotherapy for degenerative liver disease. For all the brooding rock ‘n’ roll swagger of “I Am What I Am,” and for all the chugging grandiosity of the nine-minute single “Hey Jane,” the most indelible moments on Sweet Heart Sweet Light are those in which Pierce lays his soul bare and pleads for something beyond his reach.

Jason Pierce (a.k.a. J. Spaceman)
Jason Pierce (a.k.a. J. Spaceman)

The Lists of 2011

Posted on by
Reply


The end of the year comes with the customary lists of the best and the worst that has happened over the course of the year. A selection of 2011…

Al Jazeera English: Al Jazeera top 10 2011
Android Police: All Android Police App Roundups From 2011 + Bonus: Tablet Apps
Big Think: 2011, The Year in Ideas
Bing: The Top 2011 Searches from Bing: A Year of Breakthroughs and Heartbreaks
CBC News: YouTube taps Maria Aragon, talking dog as top 2011 videos
Discover: Top 100 Stories of 2011
The Daily Climate: Climate coverage down again in 2011
Forbes: MF Global, American Airlines Top 2011′s Biggest Bankruptcies
Forbes/David DiSalvo: Ten Brain Science Studies from 2011 Worth Talking Abouts
ghacks: The Best Windows Software of 2011
The Globe and Mail: The Globe 100: The very best books of 2011
The Guardian/Charlie Brooker: A guide to the buzzwords of 2011
The Guardian: 2011: the year in data, journalism (and charts)
The Guardian: A dictionary of 2011
The Guardian: Bestselling books of 2011
IMDB: Most Popular Feature Films Released In 2011
Inside Social Games: Facebook Announces “Top” 2011 Games
MetaCritic: 25 Best PC Games
NatGeo: Ten Weirdest Life-forms of 2011: Editors’ Picks
TheNextWeb: Nielsen Reveals Top Digital Brands of 2011
NME: 2011 Reviewed – The Best Of Everything
NPR: Music And The Big Idea: The Top 5 Concept Albums Of 2011
NPR Music: Favorite New Artists Of 2011 with tracks to download
Paste Music: The 20 Best Cover Songs of 2011
Popular Science/MSNBC: 10 top inventions for 2011
Psychology Today/David DiSalvo: Ten Impressive Psychology Studies from 2011
Reuters: Whale sperm, orgasmic feet top 2011 bad science list
SciAm: The Top 10 Science Stories of 2011
SciAm: Duh! 11 Obvious Science Findings of 2011
Space.com: Year in Review: 2011 in Space Exploration
SPIN: SPIN’s 50 Best Albums of 2011
TheStar: The ABCs of 2011’s natural disasters
TheStar: Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga top 2011 Twitter trends
Vancouver Sun: Layton’s death, Stanley cup riot among top 2011 Canadian news stories
Wikipedia: 2011 in film
Wired: Best of 2011: Pop Culture’s Tastiest Bits

More to follow through updates…

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

Posted on by
Reply

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (album cover)To commemorate the 2011 International Day of Peace, I thought it would be a nice idea to create a playlist that features all the songs of PJ Harvey‘s latest album Let England Shake. Its theme is war, so that makes it quite apposite for this day.

The album has generally garnered critical acclaim as well as PJ Harvey’s second Mercury Prize. Recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset with long time collaborator Flood who co-produced the album with PJ Harvey, John Parish and Mick Harvey. Let England Shake was also mixed by Flood.

It was also accompanied by twelve videos for all the songs which were made by photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. The playlist below contains all those videos in the order in which the songs appear on the album.

The songs are, in order (the links open up the lyrics for each song from pjharvey.net):

Let England Shake
The Last Living Rose
The Glorious Land
The Words That Maketh Murder
All And Everyone
On Battleship Hill
England
In The Dark Places
Bitter Branches
Hanging In The Wire
Written On The Forehead
The Colour Of The Earth

The titles in bold above were released as singles and contained the ‘B-sides’ The Nightingale and The Guns Called Me Back Again respectively.

More: Interview video (The Guardian)

Birdsong and Music

Posted on by
Reply

David Matthews (Gresham College)Via Gresham College, a lecture by David Matthews:

Many composers have been influenced by birdsong. Mozart treasured the songs of his pet starling, even giving the bird a ceremonial funeral.

David Matthews, one of Britain’s leading composers, has always been interested in the incorporation of the natural world into his music, recently even including birdsong in some recent compositions.

This lecture offers an opportunity for reflection on the relations between music and the natural world and how a composer can be brought closer to one through the other and vice versa.


Length: 53 minutes 56 seconds

BBC: How TV Ruined Your Life

Posted on by
Reply

How TV Ruined Your Life is 6-part comedy series by the BBC in which Charlie Brooker uses a mix of sketches and jaw-dropping archive footage to explore the gulf between real life and television:

Charlie Brooker: How TV Ruined Your Life
Ever wondered why life doesn’t measure up to those youthful lofty expectations?

From love and money to fear and progress, Charlie Brooker explores a different universal theme each week as this six-part series attempts to explain where it all went wrong and just how wildly the TV and movie ideal differs from life’s grim reality.

Marking the point where the mad daydreams of TV and the sorry reality of real life collide, the series employs a mixture of archive footage, sketches and interviews that will have you wiping away tears of laughter while nodding in recognition, which means you’ll probably have your eye out if you’re not careful.

The episodes explore the following themes:

  1. Fear: From public information films to crime dramas, Charlie explores TV’s approach to fear.
  2. The Lifecycle: From kids shows to Countdown, Charlie explores how TV can infuriate anyone of any age.
  3. Aspiration: From Dallas to Grand Designs, TV continually rubs desirable lifestyles in your face.
  4. Love: From Blind Date to rom-coms, TV has warped our expectations of romance.
  5. Progress: Charlie Brooker argues that television has warped our relationship with technology.
  6. Knowledge: Tracing how TV’s notion of knowledge has sunk to celebrity presenter drivel.


Charlie Brooker at The Guardian and on Twitter.

Musical Minds

Posted on by
Reply

Oliver Sacks (Wikipedia)Can the power of music make the brain come alive?

Throughout his career Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and acclaimed author, whose book Awakenings was made into a Oscar-nominated feature film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, has encountered myriad patients who are struggling to cope with debilitating medical conditions.

While their ailments vary, many have one thing in common: an appreciation for the therapeutic effects of music.

NOVA follows four individuals — two of whom are Sacks’s case studies — and even peers into Sacks’s own brain, to investigate music’s strange, surprising, and still unexplained power over the human mind.