I basically 180-degree disagree with H. Perry H on the watchability of such a film—I would watch the shit out of this!—but love the opening graff of his post:
The internet is a Sarlacc pit of information: stuff goes in and it never comes out, the bodies just keep piling one atop another until they’re all digested into a sludge the individual elements of which are indistinguishable, it’s just a big, messy, congealed pile of videos, social media posts, other assorted viral moments, and mostly porn.
Artists: Even if you are lukewarm on Weezer, this interview with Rivers Cuomo (the band’s frontman) is so worth your time. I’ve got more than a little experience with collaboration, creativity under duress, constrained writing techniques, and Oulipo-like methods, and yet I’ve never come across a process like this, which is at once ornately technical (spreadsheets, demo files, something akin to A/B testing) and is so meticulous in the interest of harnessing randomness and stripping context and formal planning out of the creative process.
Weezerians: To those who dig Weezer already, know this: The stories in their songs are not stories they wrote, but stories you wrote in response to the fragments they gathered and the formulae they use to collect and organize those fragments.
Public Service Announcement:Song Exploder is consistently awesome (for example, it introduced my 9yo to Iggy Pop and made him an instant fan). So worth subscribing and supporting.
Note that the different Chladni (say “clad-knee”) Figures he generates corresponds to different pitches (i..e, frequencies) and timbres (think “flavors of sound”), and that he does this by creating a node (which is technically any point in a wave where it crosses zero, and literally the places where a vibrating thing—like a guitar or cello string—is not moving).
All of which is neat, but mostly I just posted it because it looks hella sweeeeet!
I’ve been wrapping up my new book, which dedicates an entire section to “Junkshop Percussion”: washboards and cajons and spoons and buckets, and all the great “instruments” that are just detritus-plus-panache.
So, folks like this–who take a musical form that arose from digitization and mechanization via insanely expensive studio gear, then make it a dirt-cheap, no-tech, hands-on, all-acoustic expressive art form–just tickle me pink.
Like this guy, he’s a pure delight with the speed, steadiness, and raw sweat of that drum-n-bass:
Around the 2:15 mark this guy emulates a classic EMD filter sweep with his foot muting a bar; wünderbar!!!
Or check out the Pipe Guy’s PVC-and-flip-fop electro trance:
OMFG! I *love* old-school analog drum machine claps (like you get on a Roland 808, or my treasured Boss DR-110)–and he’s getting that sound from a goddamned flip-flop! *Outstanding!* I especially dig the point near 2:55, where dude launches into a cover of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”, then abruptly segues into the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” (although I’m kinda disappointed that this never becomes a cover of the Knight Rider theme, ’cause it hovers right at the cusp of doing so).
There is a future where these dudes appear on a Skynet-hosted show called HUMANS GOT TALENT. Howie Mandel continues to host, because he is a cylon.
At any rate, more to the point: If you dig things like these dudes are doing, then you might dig my next book (out in July). If you can’t wait to start building instruments and making sweet-ass sounds, you can start *right now* with a free download of the two most popular music projects from my fist DIY book:
