Draw some lines and feel the ping: BallDroppings is a geometric music maker.
It’s built with the open-source Processing java software, “a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts.” Check this other Processing production: Bicycle Built for 2000 with “over 2000 human voices recorded via the Internet, assembled to sing” a song. (Interview w/ programmer.)
WMFU’s Blog posted Loony Tunes for Kooky Times (MP3s), 21 tunes about being loosing it, done by everyone from Dolly Parton to Dinah Washington, Screaming Jay Hawkins to The Sensational Alex Harvey. “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!” is there, by Napoleon XIV (“I know you laughed. I heard you laugh. You laughed, you laughed and laughed and then you left. But now you know I’m utterly mad.”) As is Lenny Bruce’s “Psychopathia Sexualis.” And these punk and jazz classics:
A Scott Carrier (2006) article in Mother Jones, “Rock the Junta; In Burma, a band of heavy metal Christians speaks of liberty between the lines”:
Burma is a forgotten country. You might have a hard time finding it on a map, and it may not even be called Burma on the map you’re looking at. It might be called Myanmar, as that’s the official name for it now. It’s an extremely fucked-up place, the size of Texas, located between Thailand and India, south of China. For the past 44 years, it’s been cut off from the rest of the world by a junta of xenophobic and superstitious generals calling themselves the State Peace and Development Council. Others call them mendacious assholes and hungry ghosts.
At this summer’s World Science Festival, Bobby McFerrin plays with the pentatonic scale and audience participation during the session “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”:
Just got the new Funny Car flyer from Drag Racing Underground. Reminded me of their musical side, the band Big Stick. Their tunes are audio auto crashups, fusing dragster sounds, race track announcers, race engine specs, driver intervus, and full throttle rock n’ roll.
Their 1895 sonic salute to summer, “Drag Racing,” went top ten in the U.K.. The tune was one of the select singles in John Peel’s Record Box. And its lyrics are a single line of pure poetry: “In the summer I wear my tube top, and Eddie takes me to the drag strip.”
For the next few weeks, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering MP3 downloads of the the entire Mojo catalog for FREEEeee. Don’t know why, but do know it’s time to d/l some Mojo.
David Brynes likes bikes, and has a new book about it, Bicycle Diaires.
His music tour travels with a few folding bikes, and the crew pedals around the world’s towns where they’re playing. Here’s the NPR interview, and book excerpt, “David Byrne’s Wild Wild (Biking) Life” (9:31 mp3):
Just found out about the Lucky Dragons: sound-tech-music-visual collage artists. Lotsa listening and downloads of LD trax at the Free Music Archive and their site: Lukey Dargons (LD = Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara).
Welcome to Soundville, a Sony audio performance project:
In March 2009 a small town in Iceland was filled with speakers. The Seydisfjordur village was turned into an extraordinary sound-system for a week. Sounds by Richard Fearless ( Death in Vegas ) Mum, Bob Dylan, Toumani Diabate, Roberto Goyeneche, Murcof, Federico Cabral, Guillemots, etc.
This film by Juan Cabral of London’s Fallon agency documents the town-turned-into-tunes:
Listen : John Cage – in love with sound / silence -01
Transcript of the interview with John Cage in the film “Ecoute” (Listen) by Miroslav Sebestik:
[part 1]
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic, here on 6th avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things.
I am completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me. We don’t see much difference between time and space. We don’t know where one begins and the other stops. So that most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of being in space. More…
1969, the year in an hour, another in the Shortcuts series by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up:
From Woodstock to Altamont, Washington to Vietnam, Chappaquidick to Chicago with stops at Stonewall, Hyde Park, Shea Stadium, The Super Bowl, Memphis, Times Square, Sesame Street, and the Moon. Featuring commentary from John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Roman Polanski, Richard Nixon, JFK, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Burgess Meredith, Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Lang, “Topaz Caucasion”, Chip Monck, Dave Marsh, Joe Boyd, Rob Kirkpatrick, Carl Capotorto, Arlo Guthrie, Hugh Romney, Harry Reasoner, Nile Rogers, various FBI and police agents, The Black Panthers, The Weather Underground, The Zodiac Killer, Apollo 11 astronauts and many others.
Music from Hair, Midnight Cowboy, Sly and the Family Stone, The 5th Dimension, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, James Brown, David Bowie, The Who, Les McCann & Eddie Harris, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Blind Faith, Roy Budd, The Plastic Ono Band, The Jefferson Airplane, Arlo Guthrie, Canned Heat, The Beach Boys, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, Beautiful People, Jimi Hendrix, Procol Harum, Henry Mancini and The Stooges! More…
My hometown houses the Museum of the Rockies with “one of the finest paleontology collections in North America.” Several dinosaur diggers are frens of mine.
So was happy to hear their career glorified on They Might Be Giants new double kids CD/DVD Here Comes Science. The song is “I Am a Paleontologist (with Danny Weinkauf)” (2:32 mp3):
Another TMBG sci-song: “Electric Car”
They Might Be Giants (vocals: Robin Goldwasser)
The band The Gregory Brothers are turning newscasters, pundits and politicians into “unintentional” pop-singers by auto-tuning their spoken voices into sung melodies. Their “Auto-Tune the News” series are videos on YouTube and songs on Amie Street.
Michael and Evan Gregory tell us about artificially (art-officially?) interacting with the media’s talking heads. Aired on PRI Studio 360; by producer Barrett Golding, “Auto-Tuned News (edit)” (6:26 mp3):
S360 was a bit time-constrained, so couldn’t present the whole piece, including the G-Bros series Songified History (free d/l at Amie Street), w/ JFK, MLK, & Churchill. Here’s the full vers…
Name: christopher
Subject: field recordings in the sahel
Message: greetings – currently tramping around the desert recording music and sounds. thought something you all might find particularly interesting.
‘Deed I did find the site interesting. Lots of great street and county music from Africa. Like “Mohammad accompanies Boubacar, a Songhai guitarist, in a group in Timbouctou.”
What: Living and traveling through West Africa along the fringes of the Sahara. Collecting sounds and music in guerilla recordings and unorthodox ethnomusicology. Place: nouakchott, timbouctou Tools: zoom h2 recorder and folk guitar
“The traditional music of Fouta is based on the Hoddu; but many traditional ‘universal’ songs have been adapted to the guitar.”
NPR may be a huge mega media monolith but ya gotta luv ’em for dreaming up this ever so small, homey, humble and intoxicating way to convey new music: the Tiny Desk Concerts. Sit some musicmakers down in front of Bob Boilin’s desk at the NPR music offices and let ’em sing a few — no surround sound mega-amps, no pyrotechnic lightshows; just some folk with their strings and voices playing around at work.
Draw some lines and feel the ping: BallDroppings is a geometric music maker.
WMFU’s Blog posted 
Just got the new Funny Car flyer from
Just found out about the 
The band 
Got an email yesterday:
