Music

Relating to CDs, shows, etc.

xrayspx's picture

I might have a concert problem

Music: 

Depeche Mode - Policy of Truth

Here is an annotated email from Ticketmaster:

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T**e *h* S**n****s B***i**G, **k* ***m b****n*.

Music: 

Xebox - Bunker Buster

This week David Lowery grumpled many of the Interbutts as he published a list of 50 "undesirable" (read: "un-licensed") music lyrics sites to target for legal action by the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA). With some major exceptions (RapGenius!), many of these sites do, in fact, suck. They're undesirable from an Internet user standpoint as well what with pop-unders and malware.

The fact is, they are worried about lost revenue from the licensing fees these guys should be paying, and the fact that lyrics sites have tons of ads, and that it follows that their owners are sitting on massive piles of cash in the Caymans. So let's go sue 'em all and get that Scrooge McDuck money silo each of them has to have. Here's a better idea, why doesn't the industry run its own goddamn lyrics sites? Well hell, I bet since we live in The Future and all, you could even track how many times someone searches for a song and give Dave Lowry his quarter of a cent per 100 impressions for Euro-Trash Girl lyrics.

The claim that it's "ripping us off as artists" is unconvincing though. If someone's reading the lyrics, you must assume they're listening or have just listened to that song, which they either own or they don't (Keep going after those pirates, I can at least see the point kind of, best of luck). Very very few songs have lyrics that merit reading on their own without music surrounding them. No one is reading the lyrics to Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive who isn't also listening to that song right now.

The Musician as modern Shelley is in all but the most exceptional cases disingenuous at best (Fun fact: Search for Percy Shelley on Google, and the #3 hit after Wikipedia and Poets.org is poemhunter.com, one of the NMPA's targeted sites of IP thieves). Off the top of my head, I can think of four musicians whose lyrics I could just sit and read, and even that is only a handful of songs per artist. Also off the top of my head, I can think of zero musicians whose lyrics I have just sat and read as art for its own sake.

It certainly didn't take Tennyson to write Take The Skinheads Bowling.

"Industry Sues Morons, film at eleven". Fine. "Fragile snowflake genius loses livelihood when someone can search for their lyrics for /free(!)/". Well you lost me there pal.

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Al Jourgensen, Boner Killer

Music: 

Belly - Feed The Tree

Al Jourgensen has just cured me of a huge crush I've always had for Amy Mann. I was reading some press interview for a book he apparently just released, and he comes out with the claim that Voices Carry was written about him. That's obviously pretty far fetched, and clearly completely wrong.

It was actually No More Crying. God Dammit.

``Yes, we`re rational people. But we are also really sensitive artists who have a lot of pain to express.`` Most of it is Mann`s. For the songs on Voices Carry, she excerpted chapters from her own troubled love life, dwelling on the heartaches and heartbreakers. No More Crying, for example, ``is about Al Jourgensen (keyboard player with the synth-pop band Ministry) and nothing else,`` Mann says.

I'm a huge Ministry (RevCo, Lard, Homos, etc) fan, but man, that shit don't wash off...

Much like Evan Dando did when he tarnished my Juiliana, I find myself largely cured.

If anyone tells me anything horrible about Tanya Donelly, I might just hang myself!

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Orpheum, Boston, 3-24-2012

Music: 

The Pogues – Poor Paddy

That was a Plate o' Shrimp, as it was on top of my feed as I was uploading tonight's photos.

It's too late for me to think and write well, so this is the Short Version today. This is the third time we've seen Nick Cave, and I have to say it was definitely his best sounding show. Not to say that he ever sounds bad, but he was off the wall tonight. Even he said it's the first time in a while he did Red Right Hand in tune, and The Weeping Song was dead on accurate.

Just to think that only four years ago I never thought I'd ever get to see him, and here we are three shows in, and excellent every time. Cave is full-on constant energy from start to finish all the time, these are consistently among my favorite shows, and I'm very glad I finally was in a position to take some photos.

Sharon Van Etten opened, and she was great. Reminded me of Hope Sandoval a lot, or Beth Orton, Juliana Hatfield maybe? Anyway she was good, go buy her record.

I hope that whoever lost the iPhone I handed in gets it back quickly. People really need to PIN lock this shit, I'm constantly surprised by those who don't.

Sampling of photos from the Flickr set:

Sharon Van Etten opened:

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Two Angles on the Country Badass

Music: 

Circle Jerks - American Heavy Metal Weekend

From Mike Ness:

To The Cramps:

I remember reading a record review for a rockabilly compilation (Which we own, and which is awesome) in which the writer claims it's disingenuous for the compilers to draw a line from 50's rockabilly to punk. He said in effect that punk owed nothin' to no one. Anyway, Johnny Cash came up followed by Hasil Adkins in iTunes just now and reminded me of that obvious music hater's review of a really good compilation. The review seems to have gone down the memory hole.

A Short list:

Sid Vicious covered an Eddie Cochran song, and it was popular.

Elvis Costello covered an an entire person. That was popular too.

The Cramps are a thing which exists

The Misfits, Ramones and Clash are also things which exist.

Jim Heath has a career.

As does Hank III.

GG Allin closes some sort of loop.

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Hmm. So that's how it is in their family

Music: 

Shriekback - Malaria

TL;DR: Here is how to restore DJ to iTunes, as much as possible

A few months ago, Apple maliciously broke iTunes in several really specific ways, one of which was to drop the DJ functionality, which is basically how I would listen to music.

Reading a thread on JWZ's site this issue, among others, I posted my somewhat-fix for the issue. And it is. A "somewhat" fix. It acts pretty much like DJ used to act, but for two problems. You can't drag things from a window with your whole collection into your "DJ" window (Cause hey, ONLY ONE WINDOW NOW), and besides, I had to create a Smart Playlist to fix it, and you can't add to a smart playlist anyway. There is "Play Next", which I guess works.

My other main gripe with this is that when I hit Next to skip a track, usually it removes it from the top of the playlist, but often enough to annoy the fuck out of me, it doesn't, and I have to go back in and clean up the top of my list a few times a day. Worse, songs I've skipped will come back up in the mix sooner than I would otherwise want them to, since iTunes doesn't know I've skipped them.

I remember reading somewhere that there was a discussion once about how to make iTunes mark something as "Skipped", or at least what the secret parameters are that cause things not to become "Skipped". So tonight it annoyed me enough to hunt around, and of course, the very first hit was back to a different JWZ post from exactly three years ago this week, complaining about this exact skipping thing.

Of course he didn't get a satisfactory answer, because he almost never gets a satisfactory answer to exactly what he asked. It looks like if you skip between 2 and 20 seconds into the song, and don't hit pause ever, it will show as Skipped. Neat.

His Herp Derp checkbox was the only thing that made any of this sane for me in this case.

To mostly restore iTunes DJ, do the following:

Click + at the bottom left of the iTunes window and create a new Smart Playlist. I named mine "DJ-ish".

Match All of the following rules:

  • Last Played not in the last 1 days -- Or however long you want to go between repeats
  • Last Skipped not in the last 2 days -- This will make iTunes clean up most songs you skip using the Next button.
  • Limit to 100 items selected by Random -- or however many upcoming tracks you want it to pull at a time
  • Match only checked items -- Unless you want iTunes to randomly play songs you've explicitly told it you don't want to hear by un-checking them
  • Live Updating

It's pretty simple to get most of that functionality back, but you know what would have been simpler? NOT REMOVING IT.

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iTunes Mass Importer

Music: 

Bauhaus - King Volcano

For my own notes, so I don't forget I did this... Big thanks to Doug from Doug's Applescripts for iTunes for convincing me that making iTunes update in this way is possible.

As with all things, I have to make my music library overly complicated. In historical times, I ripped at 128k, then 192k, but even a lot of the 192k mp3s sound like crap, so I've decided that going forward, I'm doing 320k CBR MP3s as well as FLAC.

I'm using Max to do the rip and encode on the Mac. It encodes both sets of files in parallel and saves them in a directory under ~/Music/max-rips/Artist/Title.

Here is a script to sort that and update iTunes. It'll drop the MP3s in my MP3 library directory, then drop the FLACs in a repository for them, finally making iTunes add the new files at the end. If all you want is to make iTunes rescan your library for new files from a script of bash shell, you want the osascript line toward the bottom, just substitute the path to your collection in place of mine.

I'd like to pass $directory and $albumdir to the osascript and have it live inside the inner for loop, but I've not figured out how to use my variables inside the 's that osascript -e requires to run its part. It only takes a few seconds to re-index the whole thing.

This is the utterly fugly 15-minute first draft with crappy variables and whatnot, but it does work.

(Yeah yeah, "find blah blah | while yadda yadda", 15 minutes, works, admittedly fugly, 2000 CDs and nothing has | in the artist or title)
Update #2: Nevermind all that, the script below is a lot clearer and does all that stuff I wanted.

maxmover.sh:


#! /bin/bash

find ./max-rips -depth 1 -type d | awk -F "max-rips/" '{print $2}' | while read artist
  do

    mkdir "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/$artist"
    mkdir "flac-output/$artist"

    find "./max-rips/$artist" -depth 1 -type d | awk -F "max-rips/$artist/" '{print $2}' | while read album
      do

        mkdir "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/$artist/$album"
        mv "max-rips/$artist/$album"/*.mp3 "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/$artist/$album/"
        mv "max-rips/$artist/$album" "flac-output/$artist"

        `/usr/bin/osascript         tell app "iTunes"
        add POSIX file "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/$artist/$album/"
        end tell
        EOT`

      done

    rm -f "max-rips/$artist"/.DS_Store
    rmdir "max-rips/$artist"

  done

Update:
It looks like there are several ways to skin my osascript cat. These aren't even the most fluid examples I've found.

xrayspx's picture

The Coup & People Under The Stairs at the Middle East, 12/5/2012

Music: 

DEVO - Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA

Go Here:Read an interview with Boots Riley, by old friend and excellent writer Tom Andes. -- @The Rumpus

A very happy confluence of events led me to lie to Chris Portugal at The Coup / People Under the Stairs show. The first thing that had to happen was that the original venue for People Under the Stairs had to be unprepared to open. That venue is the Sinclair in Cambridge. It's apparently still not open as they're shuffling shows to TT's and the Royale.

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Mike Watt and The Missing Men @ Brighton Music Hall, 10-17-2012

Music: 

The Pixies - U-Mass

We just walked in from seeing Mike Watt & The Missingmen at the Brighton Music Hall. The latest in our unintentional Punk Rock Legends series, so this is brief.

This blistering set was all of the album Hyphenated-man, which we do not yet own, but will tomorrow. It was pretty much beat poety, jazzy, hardcore rolled up in 2 minute songs.

Watt was looking a little worse for wear from his 2010 knee injury. I'm not surprised, because when we saw him with Iggy Pop (and The Neighborhoods!), just a few weeks after he hurt it, he was in a full immobilizer, and had to get on stage with crutches. Once on stage with a bass in his hands, he proceeded to run around and jump all over the place as if it hadn't happened. He looks like he's feeling it more now, which I know from experience really sucks.

One of the best bits was this cover of Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix during the encore. This version has better vocal audio than we heard, if I find video of tonight's show, I'll replace this Iowa footage:

Here are the photos, they're not great, because the Brighton Music Hall isn't the brightest lit place in the world, but got some good ones:

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Public Image Ltd. @ The Royale, Boston MA, 10-15-2012

Music: 

Big Black - Racer X

Here are some of my favorite photos from Public Image Ltd. PiL played a long set, with no opener, and a good mix of old to new music. John's voice was a bit worse for wear, but he actually became better over the course of the night, I feel, probably due in no small part to generous application of Courvoisier VS.

We spent most of the night being systematically mesmerized by Lu Edmonds and his Buzuq. Natalie was convinced going in that Warren Ellis was touring with them, because she saw multiple sources mis-identifying him from previous shows. That's really a shame. They're similarly masterful, equally anachronistic visions of a late 1940's bearded man thrashing some poor instrument to death, but not the same person. I did get a sense last night for what it would have looked like if Wm. S. Burroughs were a guitar player.

The crowd was strongly in favor of this show, but artists need to keep in mind that Boston Does Not Dance. It just seems to not be what we do. Sorry. We were dancing in spirit, John. We get that a lot here.

A few pictures from the 27 I put to Flickr:

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