Plutonium

It’s the summer of Anticon in my house. Song of the week has to be this remix of Sole’s Plutonium. Look out for the white girl suicide bomber. Indeed.

Begone Dull Care

The bfi has released its Norman McLaren 2 DVD ‘Collector’s Edition’ set. Mine turned up today. Beautiful. Fantastic transfer, and good selection of films. Lines Horizontal (1961), Mosaic (1965) and Synchromy (1971) are extraordinary visual toccatas. Expensive, but worth it. Buy a video projector, tape down the curtains, and turn up the volume.

Apple's Music Service

Apple is planning to move into online msuic distribution. I’m hoping their plans are something more exciting than another click-to-buy website with iTunes support. Radio-of-Me, possibly?

Radio-of-Me

Lean-back media brings content to the user, rather than the user having to actively engange with complex systems and delayed gratification. Some thoughts on the experience of ‘traditional’ lean-back media, and how collaborative filtering and DRM could bring the power of p2p to that expereince in a way that the music industry could actually support and encourage.

uniqueliveevents.com

Last night, care of Helen, we blagged our way to a viewing of The Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House, organised as a promotional evening by uniqueliveevents.com, a newish consortium formed by BT Broadcast Services and Shooting Partners. The opera was broadcast live from France, and displayed projected via JVC’s QX1 projector (“the highest quality image currently available in the world using DILA technology”). Where we were seated, there was a lot of fan noise from the projector, but the image and sound quality was very good, and the whole uniqueliveevents.com proposition is an interesting one. Their pitch …

Music Piracy a Blip, says Lessig

From Associated Press: Washington politicians would make a grave mistake in crafting new copy-protection laws based on Internet patterns today, an influential Stanford law professor warned. The professor, Lawrence Lessig, pointed out Wednesday that millions of consumers are downloading music and other materials onto their computers because slow dial-up connections make it tough to stream content quickly to a variety of devices. That’s bound to change within a few years as connections get faster, he said, making today’s debate irrelevant. “In the future, it will be easier to pay for subscription services than to be an amateur database administrator who …

The Humming Air

The second event from the TATE & EGG project – this
Friday and Saturday sees the collaboration between
Anish Kapoor, the contemporary composer Arvo P䲴
and theatre director Peter Sellars. This project originates
from a suggestion by Anish Kapoor to “temporarily
transform” his epic sculpture in the Tate Modern’s Turbine
Hall “into an instrument and invite a composer to play it”.

Small World Music?

Why has internetworking failed to facilitate flash musical trends, and a more hybrid global music?