Just Some Links

Not much time - writing a burst of emails. I might get back to why in a later entry.

Need to listen to something while writing though, and for inspiration and expanding the horizons of the mind, I make sure to check the personal blog of Le Gammeltoft. Le is (co-)DJ on Unga Bunga, the source of a wealth of choice bits of attention-arousing sounds.

Also, a very dear friend recently pointed me to the magnificent Submarine Sessions courtesy of self-styled "Digital Magazine" third ear. Submarine Sessions, you ask? Simple, really. Take one submarine, one artist, one song, and one camera. Then stir.

Stop Press - Grizzly Bear feat. Michael McDonald

I must be doomed to playing musical catch-up.

I just heard While You Wait For The Others by Grizzly Bear, sung by one of my favorite soul-singers, the one-and-only Michael McDonald. You may know him, for instance from, this little tune - What a Fool Believes.



Apparently, the version of While You Wait For The Others was on a B-side of a single released back in September. It is hauntingly beautiful.

Reevalution - Turboweekend

I recently put down Danish synth/electro-rockers Turboweekend as less than surprising, and lacking something. Silas Bjerregaard, the singer is clearly gifted; however the singles, I'd noticed on the radio, and zipped past on my Last.FM-profile, were quite good - but a bit too tidy, too constructed, too pretty for my taste. I may be simple creature, but in both electronic and rock-music I generally look for something unsettling, something unexpected and raw, an instrument, a passage, or a driving beat, that oozes energy. Incidentally, that is, I guess, as close as I can get to a personal definition of rock.

I wasn't particularly happy about putting Turboweekend down, though. They fit pretty much in the sweetspot of my current musical tendencies; and I found myself digging through their back catalogue over the next few days. I'm pleased that that musical journey led me to reevaluate my earlier verdict.

Listening through the material from their two albums, Night Shift (2007) and Ghost Of A Chance (2009), I found myself liking the lighter style and faster beats on their debut-album more. Listen, and take look at, the pleasingly naïve and refreshing Wash Out.



Given my preferences, this contrasts to the more somber tone of Ghost Of A Chance, exemplified here with the single After Hours.



Now, at this point I happened to watch a recording of the excellent show Backstage (on DR2 - by our nice friends, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation) with Turboweekend (and rappers UFO Yepha). The programme seeks to expose the best of current Danish live-music, by setting up a friendly "battle" between two Danish bands, also requiring them to create a novel act together. This had lead to many interesting, amusing, and also splendid moments of art. I'll try to get back to that later. For now, let me focus on Turboweekend. Simply put, live, they add that spark of energy and power, that I so missed in their recordings. Listen to, and in particular, take a look at their rendition of After Hours on the show.



Interestingly - speaking pure audio - the live-version is not radically different, actually. Mostly, the vocals are sung more powerfully and freely; but the energy that their stage-performance exudes makes a great difference for me. The intonation, and visual underlining of the line "From my window - I've got a clear view of the towers." simply drags me in and requires me to feel the beat and vocals much more strongly.

Their other single-performance on Backstage, of Holiday - also from Ghost Of A Chance, displays a similar amount of great energy, that just blasts through the screen. (It really helps also, that the Backstage-audience for this programme is really enthusiastic - something which is sadly not the case, every time.)



Splendid. Turboweekend is on my plus-list now. And incidentally - damn, I look forward to having more time to go see live-music again...

Yes, I am a Sucker for Good Pop

I recently discovered splendid Web 2.0 (oh, the proliferance of terms with next-to-no information content) music-site The Hype Machine. The site solves a simple problem: Tracking and listening to all the splendid songs that are blogged - and thus eponymously 'hyped' - on the internets.

Good old Carpark North just popped up, being blogged about by an American. In particular, it was their tribute to the raging hormones of youth, Human. The award-winning video by Martin Thurah is simply fantastic. The song is strong one, but it was only when I watched the video, that I really felt the song. Take the time to watch the video - preferably in a larger window than the one below:

A spark, maybe?

I'm feeling myself drift more and more into listening to music which, I guess, can be classified as electronica (though as an aside, I must say, that mostly I view genre-classifications of art with disdain). Maybe it's simply that most musicians nowadays simply grew up with computers with decent audio-recording hardware, and started their careers on 'borrowed' audio-editing software rather than on a beat-up acoustic guitar.

As I've hinted in the last blogentry, I have a special interest in collaborations among artists - intended or not. I tend to go hunting for mashups, remixes, covers, duets, etc. In those clashes something new and unexpected sometimes emerges. In trying to bridge the gap between two or more artistic styles, a tension is built - at the most basic level just from not knowing whether the experiment is going to collapse in a puddle, or is going to hold together.

As (another) aside, I think it's the same kind of energy that I seek in live-performances. That spark of energy that emerges from artists that dare to interpret their own (or even better, others) creations live, rather than just reenacting the recordings line by line.

Returning to electronica and the previous paragraph, today I tripped over a fresh remix of Turboweekend's "Trouble Is". Turboweekend is a Danish band typically classified as synth-rock (... well ok, genres are nice for brief introductions - but really - just go listen to them for yourself, rather than believing a two-word-classification). Frankly, I've found their music a bit less than I hoped for. Being a great fan of fellow synth-rockers (pfhhht...) Veto, I simply think, that - apart from great vocals - the singles, I've heard from Turboweekend have lacked ... well, something to surprise me.

That said, right now, I'm trying to decide whether the following remix adds a spark of rawness to "Trouble Is". The remix is by a bloke called Joker (he is a bloke - he is very much from the Bristol scene - and he seems to take his name seriously (quote from The Guardian: "[...] and a third man, 20 years old, who leans in and gives his full name slowly and carefully to the dictaphone as 'Joker ... Joker' [...]".)).

Listen for yourself below:



Oh. And, I should also advertise, that you can listen to the original version of "Trouble Is" on Turboweekend's Myspace-page.

Mashup-hunting in Århus

Being in the music mecca Århus again - this time for pleasure, not for business - puts me in a funky mood. Having just laid the rest of my little family to rest, I'm surfing, remembering my old addiction to mashups - (popularized in Denmark as 'bastard pop' by the splendidly crazy radio show Monkey Business).

I'm wading through various levels of amateurism on Youtube, when I trip over this little jewel mashing up Depeche Mode and Madonna:



I was a huge Depeche Mode fan back in the days, and I guess the beat in "Personal Jesus" lends itself quite smoothly to this kind of exercise, but still - this is nice work. If you're in to this kind of thing, I can recommend a browse through the blog of the obviously talented creator DJ Appolo Zero.

Interdisciplinary Skills

We interrupt our regular programme briefly for this choice bit of news, courtesy of CNN International.



This just came onto my radar: "Crooning ex-prime minister Koizumi is 'Ultraman King'".

At JAOO

I'm at JAOO. Overall quite a positively surprising experience. Much less business-lingo and far more fairly advanced conceptual and abstract stuff than I had expected. I knew that keynotes by Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell-father) and talks by Don Syme (the man behind F#) would be good.

But I was positively thrilled by some of the topics discussed and some of the discussions we got into on the day with the concurrency-track. Rich Hickey and the idioms he'd put into his Clojure-language really utilized some knowledge and nailed down some programming idioms for concurrency - in a much more useable manner - than what I've been used to seeing at academic conferences. Yes - it's hard; yes - threads and locks are a terribly bare-bones model to work with concurrency; yes - you really need to use immutable state. He essentially isolated four gradually more advanced forms of concurrency: An atom - essentially a cell, where you are given a synchronous read-and-set operation to work with it; a var - a persistent reference to a value that might change but is isolated inside a thread; a ref - a mutable storage location, which allows synchronous access, but only through transactions (segue to buzzword-compliant software transactional memory); and, agents which provide asynchronous access to mutable state. These idioms are available via fairly simple built-in keywords - inside a LISP-variant language (which is ok, but not reeeally to my liking, I'm more an ML/Haskell-kind-of-guy).

As Rich Hickey is not in academia - but develops programs for real customers, he needs to make these things actually work. He's chosen - wisely, I think - to target virtual machines. Building on top of custom Java libraries and compiling to bytecode running on the JVM, but also - via collaborators - aiming to target the CLR. This was so refreshing. He'd essentially made this language, because - as a consultant - he was extremely tired of developing concurrent programs in languages like Java, C++, and C#. How alien to an old fallen academic like myself. Actually having a problem before looking for a solution!

Ah - gotta run now. But in passing, I should mention also that I have - I promise myself this time (for the 5th time) - to go check out Erlang.
The guest from Erlang - Ulf Wiger - essentially shut up all the other participants on the Concurrency discussion panel, when he dryly remarked that Erlang-people had trouble comprehending concurrent programs running hundreds of threads; they were used to programs running hundreds of thousands of threads...

Ph.D.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah....

'Nuff said.

Energy

These fine gentlemen (The Mars Volta) are fairly energetic. Exactly the opposite of how I feel. I would care to wager that they do drugs.



And here is a version with better sound. Though it lacks the live feeeel, that I so diiig. (My apologies. As is well-known, it is obligatory to use at least one slang-expression, when discussing musicians with helmet-hair.)

Mandatory cutesy baby pics

Here's some cute pics of our little sleepy bear:

How to spend five weeks

Well, well, well. I've been away for a few weeks. I've been busy stuff in the the non-virtual world, not the least preparing for becoming a dad in three weeks.

But well, what do you know - my son decided he couldn't wait, so early Monday morning (3.45 am), I became the proud and somewhat surprised father to a healthy boy! We'd heard that many give birth too late the first time, so we were really caught somewhat surprised. We've just come home from the hospital now - we're extremely happy - but still somewhat puzzled by the events that have pooled up over the last few days. We should probably start by finally selecting a name - he hasn't got one yet, as we thought we had plenty of time to think about that. We also have to buy the last few things, and assemble a lot of stuff. But hey; most importantly, both he and Lena are in fine shape.

I'll try to upload some pictures in the next post.

Now I have to go change a diaper...