The Rock-afire Explosion were an animatronic band comprised of anthropomorphic animals that played in Showbiz Pizza Place restaurants in the USA through the 1980s. After closing down many of these setups found their way to enthusiasts. Here’s one such setup, performing MGMT’s Electric Feel.
Perhaps even more obscurely, a documentary is currently being produced about car-salesman Chris Thrash, a guy who recently purchased the rights to Rock-afire Explosion with an aim to resurrect them and the Showbiz Pizza Place. (via Penny Arcade)
Ex-Test Icicle Lightspeed Champion performed their track Galaxy of Lost Souls in full Star Wars garb at this week’s NME Awards show. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a video of it online anywhere but did instead stumble across this gem. Lightspeed Chamption performing the Imperial March and Star Wars theme. Lovely.
I had read about this some time before Christmas, but hadn’t checked it out until today. RCRD LBL is an online network of record labels by Engadet/Gizmodo co-founder Peter Rojas and Josh Deutsch from Downtown Records… which sort of poses as a kind of blog thing.
A lot of the music is free to download as DRM-free 196kbps MP3s and bands are paid through the website’s sponsorship. You’re welcome to download anything you like from the site and use it in any non-commercial way you want under a Creative Commons license.
The whole thing is stuffed full of RSS feeds to allow you to follow pretty much anything you’re interested in following and Ivan Pope will love that they have whole bunch of widgets to grab, like this little fella (which, uh, sadly seems to break with the Antikewl Daily stylesheet. Oops! Hopefully they’ll fix that at some point!)…
It’s always interesting to see new distribution ideas in the twisted and scary world of the music industry and I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this one to see how it pans out. (via Wired)
“There aren’t enough Youtube video re-posts around here,” you say? Here’s another one.
Mike Long, a self-proclaimed “social rocktivist”, plans to perform once dance a day around the world and post each video up on YouTube for the next two years. I can’t think of a better idea. (via It’s Nice That)
With a slight danger of AKD becoming a YouTube video dumping ground, here’s a clip of Cornelius performing Count Five or Six live on hipster kids TV show Yo Gabba Gabba.
To conclude my end-of-2007 music post trilogy (well, 2.5-ogy) I intended to do a top ten albums of the year. I wrote a list, but it was too long. I pulled a few out… it was still too long. So I gave up on the top ten idea.
Here’s a bunch of albums I liked in 2007 in no particular order. There’s more than ten, and I probably missed some really good ones.
In what’s now becoming an annual tradition, here’s what last.fm considers my top 20 most listened to artists of 2007. Some serious surprises in there. I’ve listened to a lot of music this year and some of these I hardly remember hearing at all.
It doesn’t look like DoCopenhagen have compiled their own list of top music videos for this year so you’re going to have to make do with this top 50 from Pitchfork. Still marvellous. | Comments (1) »
Apple have just announced, as many have predicted, the iPod Touch. Basically an iPhone without the phone. It comes in 8Gb and 16Gb flavours (which is far too small a capacity for me to even consider buying — I have enough trouble with 60Gb!) and has built-in wifi for browsing the web and spending your hard-earned cash at iTunes while you wait for your delayed train (or while at their new friend Starbucks’ place). Still, it looks cool.
Also announced:
An all-metal 160Gb iPod classic
A chubby new 8 or 16Gb iPod nano (with coverflow and video playback)
iPod nano in new colours
and a cheaper 8Gb iPhone (no 4Gb, it seems)
If you want more geekery, Engadget have a hands-on with both the iPod nano and iPod touch.
Musician and friend Andy Fosberry, the guy behind Ironlight River, has just (well, a couple of weeks ago!) released his very first EP, “Earthlights Through A Wind Coloured Glass”. Check out the tracks for yourself on his myspace page.
Here’s my top 20 artists of 2006 according to play counts from last.fm. It’s not entirely representative because it doesn’t record tracks played on my iPod, or in the lounge at home, but interesting(ish) none the less!
Here we are again at the only time of year where you can get away with playing cheesy shmaltz without friends and family questioning your taste/sanity/sexuality. What, you have no Bing Crosby lying around at home? Don’t worry, there’s a solution.
I really should have mentioned Pandora before because it’s a fantastic way of finding new music or listening to the kind of music you like when you don’t have your collection to hand. This, of course, means you have endless access to as much Bing, Nat, Louis and, uh, Regis Philbin as you can possibly handle this holiday season. Here’s the trick from lifehacker.com:
Think of someone you’d like to hear some holiday cheer from, say, Bing Crosby. Tell Pandora you want to create a new station, but instead of just writing in the artist’s name, type in “Bing Crosby (holiday)”.
If you really want to show everyone what a Christmas mood you’re in, you can log your Pandora plays to your last.fm profile with the ingeniously named pandora.fm.
Go now, and enjoy that endless Christmas crooning!
DoCopenhagen has their Top 50 Music Videos Of 2006 up. All 50 are YouTubed into the one page so you can easily flick through at your leisure! There are some great videos (and music) in there. | Comments (2) »
Firstly, scratchy playback. This I managed to fix by opening up Quicktime preferences and turning off safe mode, which had inexplicably turned itself on after upgrading.
Secondly, and more annoyingly, I store some of my older music tracks on an external network drive. When I used to fire up iTunes 6 with my iPod installed and had forgotten to turn the drive on, iTunes would happily skip those tracks. They’d still be listed in iTunes and on my iPod, but they just wouldn’t update. Which was all good.
Now, with v7, if I want start iTunes with my iPod connected I have to make sure I’ve started up my network drive, opened the drive in Windows Explorer and then start iTunes… or it’ll just hang using 100% CPU. I have to then force quit the application and the helper before starting it up again.
For some reason I’ve had this friggin’ song in my head for weeks. The Waitresses were a bit of a one-hit wonder (two, of course, if you count Christmas Wrapping) and this video, even by the 80s standards, is pretty damn awful!
