the-inbetween.com

Technical Difficulties

Blondie “Performs” Live on Dutch TV

I love this video of a live “performance” by Blondie of the song “Denis” on a Dutch TV program from, I would think, 1978. I don’t know what the story is here, but there’s something appealing about seeing Debbie Harry just stand dead still while multiple televisions around her show proper (from the same show?) live performances of the song. The video inter-cuts between those which is a shame because just watching her stare at the camera with an air of displeasure would have made it all the more absurd. Somehow it seems more genuine then the mostly lip-synced performances of the era, perhaps owing a little bit to Blondie’s oft-overlooked punk origins.

Videos of the Decade, By Way of Delicious

Antville’s list of the best videos of the decade, no doubt a precursor to many “of the decade” lists over the next two months, is a good one. I don’t have too many complaints about the picks themselves, though I would contest their placement. For what it’s worth, this would have been my number one selection.

In trying to remember what videos I enjoyed this decade that weren’t on the list I turned to two places: my YouTube favourites, and my delicious bookmarks. The YouTube favourites were mostly a bust as they were almost entirely made up of old 80s and early 90s videos that were suffixed with the all-too-common Video is no longer available mark. delicious proved more fruitful as the video + music tag intersection gave me a pretty good zeitgeist for most of the decade. I say that having just realized that as of next month I’ve been a delicious user for six years, so it’s a pretty good indicator for most of my tastes through the decade.

What follows is a list of all the music videos that I bookmarked there over those years that aren’t already on antville’s top 100. Some were chosen for the video itself, some for the music, and others for weird cultural reasons (ie. mostly videogame and/or internet meme-ry).

• Ladytron – Destroy Everything That You Touch – love the band and the video, so I was surprised to not see this listed.
• Massive Attack – Live With me – same for this.
• Alva Noto – Unitxt – embeded below
• Kap Bambino – Red Sign
• Holy Fuck – Milkshake
• Clark – Ted
• Portishead – Machine Gun
• Dresden Dolls – Girl Anachronism
• Beck – Black Tambourine
• Bomb the Bass – Butterfingers
• Fujiya & Miyagi – Ankle Injuries
• Weezer – Pork and Beans
• Kompakt – I’m in Love With a German Film Star
• dan le sac VS scroobius pip – Thou Shalt always Kill
• Bjork – Declare Independence
• Ye-Ye – Eurostar
• Halfby – Screw the Plan
• Cadence Weapon – Sharks
• DJ Shadow – This Time
• Dublab – Poison Diamonds
• Dealership – Forest
• David E. Sugar vs Ears – First OK

God of High Score Legacies

Going through some backlog material I noticed that the above video hadn’t been posted, here or elsewhere. It really should be because of its videogame theme (I do like those) and, more so, because it’s so weird and borderline creepy. A paper-made animated tribute to an imaginary deity that watches over the high-score tables of classic arcade games, Matt Reynold’s student film “The God of High Score Legacies“.

Cubie, post-Offworld

The following post was originally meant for Offworld, but, well, you know. It’s sad to see it end as a its own entity — it’s subsumed into the cluttered new Boing Boing design — and I’m not saying that as someone who occasionally contributed. I was a fan long before my first post there. That said, do follow Brandon’s weblog for any possible new, post-Offworld developments.

sadmb’s Cubie (embedded above) is a java powered music creation application that, by the author’s own admission, takes a great deal of influence from puzzle games. The above video, a demo of a recent touch-screen implementation, certainly shows this: blocks fall from above as if from Lumines; pieces, and the entire stage, are rotated off to the side as in a Rubik’s cube.

The aesthetic is also very game-like, so much so that I wish that it was an actual game that I could play and not an open-ended digital musical instrument. Designed with live performance in mind, it is, as the site claims, also of interest to those who like unidentifiable but curious thing. I certainly do.

Cubie [sadmb.com, freely downloadable version available]

Super Mario: Corruption

I love a good glitch. There’s something special in the aesthetics of a corrupted image, broken renderer, data to audio conversion, or messed up video codec. It’s only annoying when it occurs when you least want it. A video I made yesterday, uploaded to YouTube with odd results (what was converted into Flash is different from what I see when I play it locally,) is one such case. It was my first attempt at recording the weekly Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer sessions. It didn’t go so well.

That upload, and YouTube’s wonderful “related videos”, led me directly to LightningWolf3’s Super Mario Corrupted Zone which features a number of videos of Super Mario games corrupted through the use of Game Genies and ROM hacks. They feature an increasing level of insanity, culminating in:

As our little multiplayer GTA IV soirees have shown, a little bit of chaos in a game can be fun. A whole lot of it, however, is a beautiful thing.

• I need to write faster: I got scooped on my own link by Offworld.

Crystal Sculptures

The YouTube video page of crystalsculpture and crystalsculpture2 (I don’t know why there are two, also both pages feature an epileptic inducing background. You have been warned.) are full of sheer radicality. Both pages are packed with all sorts of retro 70s and early 80s (and even 60s) computer animations, motion graphics, and odd ephemera (old horror trailers, documentary excerpts, commercials, and even a home video.)

In particular, I like this clip from a Peter Ustinov hosted show about an electronic composer, Suzanne Ciani, making the music for a pinball game, Xenon. It’s completely fascinating.

Some other selections follow…

Read the rest of this entry…

CD Shopping in Paris

I walked the Avenue des Champs-Elysees a couple of times, up towards the Arc de Triomphe and back down to Place de Concorde and Tuileries, covering both sides of the perpetually busy road. The Avenue was what I expected it to be: lined end to end with designer shops, restaurants, tourists and image-obsessed locals. A couple of Starbucks rounds out the picture. In all my time there I stopped in two shops, the FNAC (French Best Buy, basically) and the Virgin Megastore. This says a lot about me.

The shelves in the DS and PSP “jeux video” sections were filled with most of the same crap that I’d be avoiding in Canada. I did find a copy of “Dr. Reiner Knizia’s Brainbenders” for the DS, a Europe only release I was eager to purchase, but the box was entirely in French which made me question whether the game was too. It would be safe to imagine that it would have multiple language options, but I didn’t want to take the chance; I’ll buy it in London. On other racks I noticed various “English Training” games for the DS which I thought quaint. I considered buying one for the novelty of it.

Is there anything new on the portable systems worth playing? Or is it a complete mess of licensed games and rehashes? Disappointing.

Thankfully, the music sections in these shops were quite good and I spent most of my time there. They’re not much different than the flagship Zavvi or HMV shops you can find in the UK or Canada, but it’s interesting to note the few minor regional differences. There was a section devoted to French bands and singers, of course, but it goes beyond that. In Canada, if you were looking for an Aphex Twin album you’d look in the “Electronic” section; in the UK it’s under “Dance”; here in Paris, it’s in “Techno.” To my untrained ears it seemed like an awfully specific label for a section that contained everything from Squarepusher and Justice to Air and Crystal Castles, bands that I’d hardly call “techno.”

Right next to “techno” was another rack labelled “trip-hop” and a wall of nothing but “House.” I wondered for a moment where I would find Portishead’s third album — their first two are universally classified as “trip-hop” but “Third” is its own thing altogether — and I think it saw it in yet another distinct section. “Electronic” might be vague but when I go looking for an album in the HMV on Yonge Street in Toronto, I know where to look. Here, I’d have to browse through three or four different sections.

There was also an entire wall dedicated to “lounge compilations.” This too seemed correct for France.

The final thing I noticed was that both of these retailers had considerably larger “contemporary composer” sections than can be found in similar stores in Canada. However, this could be a case of confirmation bias on my part. My interest in this music has grown recently so I might be noticing it more than I ever did. Ten years ago I was completely unaware of the “electronic” section in my local HMVs (or Sam The Record Man) and now it’s the first place I go. I’ll have to check the shops in Toronto when I get back to see if contemporary composers are as represented there as they are here, but man, I was tempted to get a few CDs for the fear that they might not be.

Unfortunately, the couple of items that I was specifically searching for I could not find. I hoped to find Kap Bambino’s album “Zero Life, Night Vision” seeing as they’re French but when their label says that the album is “sold out” they aren’t kidding. It’s a shame. I understand why artists like that get such a limited print run, but they deserve more exposure in these post-Crystal Castles days, especially since they’re better and, as is typical, they predate them. Alas, it’s not how good you are, it’s who you know.

I didn’t want to leave empty handed so I bought Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” went home, hit YouTube and posted this incredible video to my Tumblr.

Thusly summarized it better than I ever could:

what is actually going on here will sound somewhat familiar to those who understand how to modulate sinusoidal waveforms binaurally or have at least learned “beat-matching”. this instance, however, involves the pianist attempting to play one piano at a very precise tempo, while simultaneously (and very minutely) increasing the tempo (based upon a sinusoidal timeline) played on the other piano. thusly bringing the two pianos into, and then out of, phase — thereby never achieving actual synchronicity until the 1st note on each piano being played is matched up again, then the performance drops to 8 notes and the cycle starts all over, then again to 4 notes.

it is also worthy to note that this composition is twenty minutes long in its entirity and is meant to be played by two pianists. the fact that one person can mentally and physically process this is truly astounding.

All in all, it was a worthwhile trek.