A Thing or Two

Simon and Susan: a match made in heaven

DJ C.Flo places 2nd nationally at WMC's 2009 VJ Challenge

My son Coleman Howard remixes music videos live in West Coast clubs, under the name DJ C.Flo. Mixing videos live is different from what video DJs (VJs) do. Typically, a VJ will create video effects while someone else runs the audio. Live music video remixing is pretty new.

Coleman competed in Miami this March in a VJ challenge at the World Music Conference and placed 2nd, with a completely different set than was expected.

Check out his winning set here:
Video DJ C.FLO in Miami
(Note: video is 8 minutes 41 seconds long)

Kutiman = YouTube mashups + compositional talent

I can't stop going to Thru-You.com and streaming the musical selections created by Kutiman.

This is, basically, an "album" of 7 new and original songs, created fresh by putting bits and pieces of YouTube videos together. One song is soul/funk style, another is reggae, another is a sweeet ballad, and so on.

Brilliant!

Tower Records sign comes down

Today in Sacramento, the original home of Tower Records, the big yellow and red sign was taken down.

Russ Solomon started the Tower empire in the 1950's, selling records out of his father's pharmacy on Broadway in Sacramento. The Tower Records store at Watt and El Camino was one of his first, opened in 1960. The big yellow and red sign neon appeared a year later.

Tower expanded through the decades, with stores in major U.S. cities and eventually in Europe, Central and South America, and Asia. But all good things must come to an end, and the introduction of MP3 technology hastened the demise of the mainstay part of the business—recorded music. As the CBS TV coverage points out, Russ Solomon is still selling music, now in a newer store called R5, located at 16th and Broadway in Sacramento.

I worked for Tower from 1975 to 1977 as a Jazz LPs (that's vinyl) buyer in Campbell, California. After a brief stint at Columbia Records in San Francisco, I came home again to the Tower family, and worked as a Tower Books manager from 1978 to 1979, both in Mountain View and then later in Berkeley.

I always thought that logo needed updating, but boy, you could see those yellow and red plastic bags from a mile away.

(Thanks for the tip, Uncle Mick.)

Homophobia video, from Chumbawamba in 1994

A timeless and inspiring video from the ever-fabulous Chumbawamba.

Recipe for mad beats

I love this video. Maybe you will too!

Link: YouTube - Kitchen diaries.

Dialtones (A Telesymphony) - Mobile Phone Concert

Click to enlarge the diagram!

In an appropriate acoustic environment, the sporadic triggering of calls to mobile phones can evoke the placid chirps and trills of crickets, cicadas, frogs and birds. If hundreds or even thousands of mobile phones were to ring simultaneously, by contrast, the result would be an unimaginably seething, engulfing cacophony. Between these two textural extremes lies an enormous terrain of more musically familiar possibilities: gently shifting diatonic chord progressions, distributed and aggregate melodies, roving clouds of spatialized sound-clusters, and pointillistic hyper-polyphonies. Over the course of its half-hour duration, Dialtones explores sequences and combinations of each of these possibilities, scaffolded throughout by a set of recurring harmonic themes and slowly-evolving melodic phrases. Ultimately, the exact composition of Dialtones is a function of both the scored performance produced by the project's staff, and the specific settings of the phones brought by the concert's attendees.

Link: Dialtones (A Telesymphony) - Mobile Phone Concert.