Meara O'Reilly's Chladni singing

"Chladni patterns were discovered by Robert Hook and Ernst Chladni in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that when they bowed a piece of glass covered in flour, (using an ordinary violin bow), the powder arranged itself in resonant patterns according to places of stillness and vibration. Today, Chladni plates are often electronically driven by tone generators and used in scientific demonstrations, but with carefully sung notes (and a transducer driving the plate), I'm able to explore the same resonances." - Meara O'Reilly

Here is a video of O'Reilly making amazing, shifting geometric patterns by singing a sequence of notes:

Gogoyoko

You'd think that online music sales would be more financially rewarding for artists than traditional music sales involving a physical product such as a CD, record or tape. Unfortunately, that's mostly not how it works. Information is Beautiful has statistics and a graph.

Here is a video of Georg from Sigur Ros talking about Gogoyoko, a new music store designed for artists to sell directly to their fans.



Check out Gogoyoko here. It looks very smart.

Update: The Information Is Beautiful figures have been questioned as they exclude a number of important factors, such as marketing costs, recording costs (if these are paid for by the artist they get a much bigger share of the final proceeds, if not costs may be recouped before any royalies go to the artist). And a statutory royalty payment is always made to the writer(s) of a song whether or not the performers receive one. So remuneration in the music business is really very complicated!

The good news is that the Internet offers a multiplicity of options for artists. Some that seem to offer a very good return to artists are: CDBaby, which charges artists a flat $4 per CD sold, and allows them to set the retail price as they wish; Bandcamp, a site which currently delivers 100% of the digital download fee to artists who own their own recordings, less PayPal transaction fees; and Amplifier, which takes a 20% cut on music sold (this compares with the about 85% cut taken by itunes)

I'm indebted to Russell Brown, Simon Grigg, and Samuel Scott for explaining some of these matters to me.

If you're interested, this ars technica article graphs the market shift from albums to individual tracks and from download to streaming content. Things are changing in the music business, that's for sure.

Snap, crackle, pop!

Thanks to Andrew for pointing me to this wonderful electrical rendition of the Doctor Who theme.



The device used here is sometimes known as a "Zeusaphone", because of the, uh, lightning bolts!

According to Wikipedia:

"Zeusaphone, also called a Thoremin, is trademark for a high-frequency, solid state Tesla coil, when its spark discharge is digitally modulated so as to produce musical tones. The high-frequency signal acts in effect as a carrier wave; its frequency is significantly above human-audible sound frequencies, so that digital modulation is able to reproduce a recognizable pitch. The musical tone results directly from the passage of the spark through the air.

This is a variant of the plasma arc loudspeaker, designed for public spectacle and sheer volume rather than fidelity."

If you fancy the musical sparks, you can buy one, here.

Marvellous Missie Moffat

Check out this video of Taranaki singer-songwriter Missie performing live with The Gentle Kings. And there are more tracks on her MySpace page, including the brilliant For You.


missie & the gentle kings- live at spiegeltent

missie | MySpace Music Videos


Hey, Missie, you rock :-) Let us know when we can buy the CD.

Belgian flashmob performs number from The Sound of Music

Yes, really! I think they must have rehearsed it, separately or together, but it's still amazing! Thanks RH for the link.
It reminds me of an Improv Everywhere stunt.

The Lounge Bar by The Front Lawn

Just dug up this classic on YouTube. Just as amazing as I remember seeing on late-night TV in the late 1980s!

Phil Judd interview

Stuff today has an exclusive interview with Phil Judd, formerly of the Swingers, Split Enz, and Schnell Fenster. Read it here.

And here are a few clips:




I particularly remember The Sound of Trees, Schnell Fenster's first album, which featured Love/Hate Relationship and other such classics as Whisper.

Hello again

Yes, gentle readers, I have been away. While I work on some more meaningful content, here is something awesome to listen to:

New Zealand landscapes: Northland to Antarctica

There have been a lot of books published about the New Zealand landscape, but none are like this one! Grant Sheehan has assembled a stunning collection of fresh images and new angles on areas he obviously knows intimately. Sheehan's landscapes are not the sort you find on postcards; instead, he picks out rich colours and textures: lichen on a fence, crops in a field, layers in rock, reflections in water, clouds soaring in the sky. He captures the atmosphere of a place more than recording its landmarks.

Grant Sheehan's images are perfectly complemented by a CD of son Rhian Sheehan's ambient music, included with the book. Rhian Sheehan's spacious soundscapes recall Brian Eno in his Music for Airports period: they're lush but subtle, and they fit the New Zealand landscape so well.

You can order the book from the publisher, Phantom House, here.

I hope the book is a wild success for the Sheehans -- it deserves to be.

You can find out more on Rhian Sheehan's music here, and you can listen on his MySpace page.

And here's a video to be going on with:

Classic Ready to Roll!

The New Zealand film archive has made 100 New-Zealand-made music videos available online here! They're wildly assorted, from middle-of-the-road to wildly experimental, and from historical to recent, so there's something to interest most people.
Some of my personal faves include this Chris Knox from 1984, and this Split Enz clip from 1976, and the lovely Bic Runga from 1997.
Nod to Russell Brown for the link.

And if those don't make you feel nostalgic, try watching the intro to RTR Countdown from 1983!

Traces of sound

The world's first sound recording was not Edison's record of "Mary had a little lamb" in 1877, but an engraving of a French folk song in soot-covered paper made by a Parisian inventor in 1860. It wasn't made to be played back, but with clever technology, sound archivists have recovered the long lost sounds. Read the full story here on the BBC.

The Distant Future

The Flight of the Conchords are so funny they won a Grammy with their debut EP.

Flight of the Conchords

"New Zealand's fourth-most-popular folk-parody duo"!

To anyone who wasn't watching the Flight of the Conchords on Prime at 10pm Monday, make sure you watch next week! It's the best thing on telly since The Office. You can read some background here on Stuff, on BBC Radio 2 here (some music clips at the bottom of the page), or BBC Four here. And if that's not enough there's always YouTube.

The Conchords remind me a little of The Front Lawn, and also of Chris Knox. Their songs have the surreal quality that seems to run through a lot of Kiwi humour.

Pensioners' rock band releases single

They want to elbow their way into popular culture. And why not, indeed? And besides, aren't the Rolling Stones pensioners now? The BBC has the story.

Context is everything

A world-famous violinist plays masterworks on a famous violin. At concerts people pay vast sums to hear him play, and he is mobbed for his autograph.

What would happen if he played somewhere outside a concert hall, The Washington Post wondered. Would people still appreciate his playing if he busked incognito in the subway?

"In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look."

The whole fascinating story is here. Thanks to Matthew for the link.

Rivers and Tides

Anyone who admires the work of Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy should see this amazing film. Goldsworthy uses found materials in their natural setting, and documents the natural processes which change and eventually destroy them. The film showcases Goldsworthy's astonishing patience, and also his spontaneity, in a way that his own photographs and writing can't convey. A highlight for me was watching one of his leaf-chains being swept down a stream, snaking and swirling along with the current.

Another remarkable film from the same director is Touch the Sound, about deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie. The film isn't just about her, it's also about sound itself, and how conscious she has become to the nuances and possibilities she senses all around her, without hearing as we do.