Category: Music

Sometimes you hear a snatch of a song, and you just know you love it. While we were out in town this afternoon, we were making our way out of the Gardens onto Princes Street, and from above us came the sound of a screaming fiddle. Not a folk fiddle: a wild jazz fiddle. As we climbed further, the bassline became more pronounced, and the funky drums tickled the rhythm centres of my brain. It was a band called Puncs (pronounced poontsch–they’re Hungarian), who had set up their kit out of the back of a van on Castle Street.

That’s the drummer in the back of the van.

We stood around and listened to the rest of the song, and man, it just grooved. They had a guy selling their CD “Your Idea Since 15”, and I bought one straight away. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet. It’s possible that the pleasantness of the day, and the Festival atmosphere gave their performance a buzz that won’t shine through in the recorded material, but I hope not. If I like it enough, I might see if I can grab tickets for one of their shows. They’re playing at Studio 24 on Calton Road until next Friday. Their flyer reads:

“fruitpunch from Hungary, balkan ice cream. mixed world music in rock cream. fast and slow, swirl of jazz, rhythms like crushed cookies. as prokected through an impressive jazz violinist, crazy vox, a dinosaur on bass, and an imp on drums.

Very cool. Coming across bands like this is one of the reasons I love the Festival.

Just booked tickets to see Sarah McLachlan at the Edinburgh Usher Hall in October. Cool.

About time, too. At this point, I can’t really see myself buying whole albums from the service, but that might change depending on how easy it is to turn the protected AAC files into unprotected MP3s. (I usually go through several Windows reinstalls and multiple PC hardware upgrades each year, and I can really do without the hassle of reacquiring and reinstalling even more licenses and keys.) I suspect that I’ll mostly be buying single tracks, both new and old. 79p a track is really not that bad.

Update: …and iTunes 4.6 still can’t sodding properly refresh CD-ROM drives that don’t have autoplay enabled.

Second update: …okay, so it does refresh CD-ROM drives, sort of. Here’s how:

1. Eject disc
2. Switch to a different application
3. Switch back to iTunes
4. The old CD should now wink out of existence
5. Insert new CD
6. Switch to a different application
7. Switch back to iTunes
8. The new CD should now be recognised

This, to my mind, is still far from “proper” refreshing. Still, for all the chunky goodness that is available in iTunes, I can forgive the programmers this minor oversight.

As I was checking my news over breakfast this morning, I noticed a new post on the Barenaked Ladies Blog:

“The tour in the UK was great–it was very nice to be back after over three years to a place we once knew so well.”

Splutter. Diet caffeinated beverage all over the screen. Excuse me? The BNL were over in the UK on tour for the first time in three years AND I MISSED IT?

I use the RSS feed for their blog, but they have been silent since the beginning of April or so. When I last checked in on their message board (some time in March, I think?) to see if there was word of a UK tour, all the UK fans were still gnashing their teeth over the absence of plans. I’m subscribed to their email newsletter list, but I never received any notice of the tour dates. (Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever had anything from their mailing list, which makes me wonder about their list administration.)

They played Glasgow and Aberdeen last week (both within easy reach for me), and word is that they rocked. So please excuse me a moment while I swear.

COCK.

I splurged on music a bit at the weekend, branching out into some stuff that would normally be a little off my radar. I picked up Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips, Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros, Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle and Sebastian, and Afterglow by Sarah McLachlan. Okay, so the Sarah Mclachlan isn’t much of a branching-out for me, but I bought the CD as much for a challenge as anything else. It’s not a CD, see.

At first glance, iTunes didn’t have any problem recognising the disc as a music CD and ripping it to MP3. Upon listening to it all the way through, though, there are a couple of tracks that have a very short (a fraction of a second) burst of static at the start. I’ll try re-ripping to see if this was just a coincidence, and if that doesn’t work, it’ll be a job for the low-tech line out/line in analog solution. Ho hum.

First impressions of the albums: Afterglow sounds like standard Sarah McLachlan at her most mellow. No immediate stand-out tracks. Yoshimi seems to vary from the experimental to the meanderingly inane. Some good melodies, and a lovely drum-driven squelchy electronic cacophony in “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Part 2”. Agaetis Byrjun is too slow and laid back for it to have fully registered on me yet. It may be a sleeper, but so far it’s just sleepy. Dead Catastrophe Waitress makes me wonder why I’ve never sampled Belle and Sebastian before. They’ve got some delicious lightweight indy-pop going on here.

Exactly one year ago, I wrote a blog entry about an experiment by a music promoter to start selling professionally recorded versions of concerts on CD-R immediately after the gig. I thought it was a stupendous idea–I still do–but I haven’t heard anything more about it. Until today.

The Barenaked Ladies are currently on tour, and according to their blog they are going to be running with this idea themselves rather than leaving it to their promoters:

“We’re going to be recording most of the shows on this tour, and they will be available for sale online for download or we’ll send you a CD. Check out www.barenakedladies.com next week, and you’ll see more info. We intend to have these available about 2 days after each show – hopefully you like this new addition to our tours, and hopefully the sound quality is better than your cellphone or minidisk player, etc. We’ve got an engineer on the road with us who will be recording the shows to multitrack and mixing them specifically for CD, which should make each disc more of the Rock Spectacle quality and less like a board tape, which rarely sound great, simply because they’re mixed for the venue, not for home listening.”

Okay, so the recordings won’t be on sale immediately as you leave the gig, and the practice of artists themselves selling recordings of individual concerts after the fact is not new. But it’s still not exactly common. Big yay to the BNL for giving it a try.