A Solid Call 2.0

Crap : Nobody told me that The Gonnabees have a guest spot on Wm. Hung's album. I may have to up my sales prediction...

God, this anti-Britney song is awful.

My pick for William Hung is 37K first week.

AMI: It's the new AIM. : Good thing that Euro indie label consortium AIM is advising a similar group that's forming in North America. Perhaps they should advise them that AMI as a name is annoyingly similar to AIM? These are supposed to be creative people who have a tough job ahead in marketing indie music --- and AMI is the best name they can come up with? Umm.. thanks for coming out. JV tryouts are on Thursday. P.S. Watch for a big A Solid Call announcement tomorrow!!

Recap - Michael Bublé @ Belly-Up : Michael Bublé was awesome! He totally ripped it, and he was better than I had expected. And, I expected a great performance. He gets full marks from me for delivering one of the highlights of my musical year thus far. Here is an unordered list of my takeaways from tonight’s show at the Belly-Up Tavern:

• Banter that was both very witty and highly profane
• Surprisingly few hot chicks
• A George Michael medley
• A song sung into someone’s cell phone
• Moondance
• Simulated masturbation
• Encore that happened before he even left the stage
• A song done without the mic
• A hell of a voice

Wow.

Indie Watch: Randi Driscoll : Jason R shares some more with us: "I just ran across my friend Ryan's wife on Sonic Garden. They moved up to Los Angeles a few years ago so that she could make a go of her singing career. Looks like she finally made it [Rick, insert Wucka, Wucka, Wucka here].

Anyway, they are both really nice people and her music is cool if you like female singer songwriter stuff a la 10,000 Maniacs and Ani DiFranco."

Archos AV500 at CeBIT 2004 : Swiping a link from Slashdot: Check out the Archos reveals the AV500 at CeBIT 2004. COuld it be the first Archos that I truly covet? A combo PDA-slash-Personal Video Player. Pretty sweet. Could I watch a movie on that thing?

Rick Rubin Speaks Out : Interesting story here about Rick Rubin putting together a collection of peace songs. "Rubin says he asks most artists he works with to record a song about peace, and has stockpiled quite a few over the years." says FMQB. Is Rick a peaceful guy? I support this sort of expression where a lot of my contemporaries think entertainers should just shut the hell up and entertain.

MTV Edits Fountains of Wayne Video : As seen on Fark (under the "Asinine" category): MTV Edits Fountains of Wayne Video. "The new version doesn't have the girls saying that, and while they do lip-synch the song, at no point does it show them lip-synching the words "Mexican Wine." A source tells the New York Post that MTV wouldn't show the video because the girls were saying the word 'wine.'"

That's a really... valid and helpful place to focus our censorial energies. Sure...

The End of Back to Mine : When I heard that the next Back to Mine compilation was put together by Richard X, I figured it would be a lot of 80's techno-pop. I was right!. Back to Mine has now jumped the shark. Animotion - "Obsession"? Don't need to hear that again. Though I still haven't found Back to Mine by Slam. I don't even know who Slam are. (Also noting - Back to Mine is now considered its own label.)

KCRW Music: Trash Can Sinatras : Jason R. writes in with: Not sure if you were a fan of the Trash Can Sinatras, but they were one of the best and most overlooked bands of the 90s in my humble opinion. Anyway, KCRW had them on the air the other day performing some new stuff and it's pretty tight.

Just wanted to share it with my musically savvy friends. Recommended if you like: Travis, South, The Verve, James, The Housemartins, etc.

Now, what if I didn't listen to The Housemartins but I did like The Beautiful South. Will I still get anything out of this?

[woxy] 97X the future of rock and roll : Dave recently turned me on to [woxy] 97X the future of rock and roll. This amazing alt-rock station plays... really new shit -- the kiss of death for radio. Well that's not true, but stations like 92.1 in SD coudln't keep listeners by playing too much unfamiliar new stuff. The titans of terrestrial need to play a lot of old mixed in to make for a safe listening experience. I fully understand why that's the case for the masses, but I crave more new stuff than your average pair of ears. And it seems as if WOXY is all about the new shit! (Check out their charts - Franz Ferdinand, TV On The Radio, The Von Bondies.. wow!!) But -- doh! They can't hack it in the terrestrial world and are going Internet-only. On their site, they say "We may be the first terrestrial radio station ever to make the full-time jump to the Internet!" Ummm, no GrooveRadio in L.A. did it as well as KPIG, but we'll let them skate on that. It's a stream I'm playing a lot... and Dave says New Music Tuesdays are awesome. It's a solid call.

Kylie Minogue : Hmm. I just entered to win Kylie Minogue's underwear. Hey, I didn't think up the contest...

Butterfly Boucher :
So what do you think of Butterfly Boucher (video link)? I'm still making up my mind on this new "Hot AC" singer. I guess her album, Flutterby, was out last year, but I'd never heard of her. I haven't turned the album off yet, so that's a good sign. (Favorite track: "A Walk Outside" with lyrics "Which came first - the love or the love song?") Seems like all the pieces are there - solid production, songs with hooks, a snappy look and a great name. I think the only thing that might be missing is emotional depth. Is that a problem for anyone? Official site is here. I heard the song "Another White Dash" while perusing AllAccess and their "Cool New Music" links.

Sophie Ellis Bextor Official Gallery : Writing from the dark pit of 3 A.M. where imagination stretches further than at any other hour of the day, I say: Why not check out the recently revamped Sophie Ellis Bextor Official Site's photo gallery? I think looking at the perfect girl really obliterates any sense of self I have left. Clearly I am not of the same species as S.E-B. Any biological classification that lumps her and I on the same page is grossly inadequate to describe reality. Wow.

Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It : Neat article on MTV.com: Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It.

Choose Your Own Adventure : "The Jay-Z Construction Set is a toolkit with all of the necessary software and raw material to create a new remix of Jay-Z's Black Album. It includes nine different variations on the Black Album, over 1200 clip art images, and a couple hundred meg of classic samples and breaks."

New Artist Profile: The Hong Kong :
I completely stumbled upon this new band at random in an e-mail about some party at SXSW. I've been deleting each of the the 3,000 party invites that I have received in bitter disgust and vicious regret because I can't go to SXSW, but this particular one had a line that caught my eye:

“Pneumatic pop iced with magnetic blend of modal-jazz hosanna and Sixties-girl-group glee...the Hong Kong endures routine comparisons to Stereolab and Blondie.” -Rolling Stone

Pneumatic? Of or relating to air or other gases? Hosanna? Good ol' Rolling Stone… so I had to try and find out about this band. But, good luck trying a Google search for a band called The Hong Kong -- a brief and futile exercise. Somehow I stumbled across their record label site… and lo and behold: there were downloads -- two full tracks in passable 96kbps air-related glory. Plus the PR firm +1 has some pics that don't hurt the eye.

But, it was the music that won me over. So, I hereby tab The Hong Kong as my new favorite band*. Check out the tracks and maybe buy the CD. I might ask my brother in NYC to pick it up locally.

* until next week. Or, ten minutes from now.

Helpful links:

• Official site with downloads: etherdrag.com/thehongkong
• SXSW Profile (with a 128K MP3 or Ogg Vorbis download)
• Buy their CD for $8 at truthflies.com
• Profile & pics at +1

P.S. : Three things that made discovering this band difficult.

1. The name is impossible to search for on Google - so word of mouth promotion becomes tougher. This is made 100x worse by the band not yet having their own URL.

2. Their PR firm is no picnic searching for either - +1? Oh, plusone. Dot-net, no less. And, once you find it, The Hong Kong's link mistakenly goes to stellastarr's Web site! Oops!

3. plusone.net's website is in a frameset! So, I couldn’t easily link directly to their profile page. (I had to look at the Properties of the page - something your average Joe wouldn’t know how to do.)

I'm not perfect myself, but these are just some details that I'd pay attention to if I were paid actual money to do this sort of thing. I would recommend that The Hong Kong get set up at CDbaby.net pronto and get their stuff available in the legal digital download stores.

What is Music? : I just heard on the March 10th Breezeblock with MaryAnne Hobbes that the avant-garge electronic artist Squarepusher believes that human artists can no longer claim any "sovereignty" over the machines they use to create the music.

This got me rather agitated and almost angry, as I believe that SP's belief is absolutely correct.. for him his and his "peers" like Aphex Twin. Of course the machinery is in control... when you make noise in the fashion of randomly applying filters and inserting loops without following any sort of musical conventions.

Music = rules. Now I don't mean rules like "you can't swear," "everything has to be in 4-4 time" or "you need a good looking singer". Those are conventions that some pop music uses. No, to say that music = rules means that to call a sequence of noise "music" you need to have some sort of structure and control over the sounds that are produced. I could break a truckload of really dry sticks, and the sound might be sort of interesting, but nobody could call that music -- unless you're John Cage... or Squarepusher, apparently. To introduce randomness can be inspired or even considered visionary in certain quantities. But, how much is too much?

The concept of entropy, generally stated, says that the universe tends to move towards less ordered states. The example used in the physics book I am reading is to take War and Peace and throw the pages up in the air and look at the results. What is order? For our intelligences, there is something that lends a very particular importance to a particular sequence of pages, namely 1-740, in order. Now, perhaps reading War and Peace in the order of 645, 5, 328, 98, 94, 222.. etc. could be considered brilliant, but there is no objective difference between that sequence and 6, 65, 321, 733, 254, 76 etc. I see the work of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin in the exact same way. The sequence "blip blip, bleeeep, [static] [sample] [bell]" might be this genius piece of compisition, but really there's no objective between that configuration of noise and another group of random settings on the same equipment.

What sets great melodies and great music apart from the rest is that if you change things around, omit words, invert melodies, etc then the difference in the composition is instantly noticed. These truly creations are the result of skill and control and talent working within -- and occasionally challenging -- the framework of rules that is music.

Squarepusher may be a genius, but maybe he's just a random twiddler of knobs who has a small following of wackos.

LightScribe - Laser etch your CDRs : Coming soon, LightScribe technology will be added to CD/DVD burners which will allow the user to use the drive's laser to etch a label on to the non-data side of the disc. PCWorld says this HP invention is 6 months away.

Disappointing, BT :

Dear Customer,

Due to unforeseen delays, the release date for "Monster: Music From and Inspired by the Film" CD/DVD has been moved until mid-2004. If you selected Two Day shipping, you will receive the album on the release date. If you selected Regular shipping, you will receive the album 4-10 business days from the Friday before the release date.

If you would like to cancel your order, please contact us at merchandise@musictoday.com and include your full name, email address, shipping address, and customer number (found on the confirmation email you received when you pre-ordered).

We apologize for the delays, and thank you for your support.

The Official BT Online Store

New Music - Nellie McKay :
I've found my new favorite toy. She is a 19-year-old singer from London with some serious attitude named Nellie McKay. In fact, I can't listen to her album, Get Away From Me without getting all giddy and psyched about it. It’s totally irrational. She sings a jazzy sort of cabaret/hip-hop/pop -- infectiously simple and pretty unique to my ear. According to AMG, the title of her album is a play off of Norah Jones' Come Away With Me. That's ballsy. I totally love it. Nellie McKay is the anti-Norah.

Some introductory links

• Nellie on NPR, including 6 full live tracks
• AMG Bio
• USA Today review
• Some weird Nellie McKay blog-type thing
• Odd info link: nelliemckay.net
• Official site: nelliemckay.com

I don't think she will become that popular -- she's too crazy -- but who knows. Her debut album is a double-CD with 9 songs on each. That’s just ridiculous. She is clearly a super-talent though and even if she isn’t massive commercial, I feel she'll probably be around a long time. (But, I said the same thing about MC 900 Ft Jesus) I hope I can get someone to dig this record. The NPR page is probably the best one to check out. Interviews and live tracks do it for me.

Lacuna Coil Ecard : Darlingos writes: "Lacuna Coil will be the next Evanescence.... mark my words...

They have a chick singer and sound much like Evanescence... they have been touring extensively this year with Opeth and others..and now have been added to Ozzfest... AND are opening for POD on their tour prior to Ozzfest. They are already very well known in Europe and to the metal/hard rock crowd..they will crossover with these tours.

They are the same deal as Evanesence and will appeal to the same crowd. I don't know if they have a video or not..but the singer is a looker and if they have a decent video, they will blow up big, if they don't it's only Century Media's fault.They might not know how to handle this band... hm..."

I don't know about a video, but here's the Lacuna Coil Ecard. I'm not convinced that the song is as strong as Evanescence, and there is a rumor that the chick is really a man. Still, I'm interested. What do you think?

Joss Update : Soul Sessions cracked the million mark in worldwide sales, according to HITS.

Let's go to a Concert!  : Pretty solid. I got my ticket Section E, Row 8 for this concert. W00t!