Scott Rettberg

Cybraphon is a project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman). Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.

Cybraphon Demo Song from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

Just a quick post here to say I think Beck gets the Web in ways that a lot of contemporary recording artists don’t. While a lot of bands give you discographies and tour dates and bios and the like, maybe a few sample tracks, I’m impressed with the Web strategy Beck is embracing on his site. As far as I can tell, he is not directly promoting his albums, his tour dates, or his merchandising on is site at all. Instead, he is using the Web site as an occasion to make and distribute cool stuff with his friends. His new site has features including Record Club, a project to informally re-record a classic album in a day with other musicians, and release a new track on the site every week. Irrelevant Topics will feature Beck informally interviewing other musicians at length about whatever comes to mind, released in serial installments. The first part of the first interview, with Tom Waits, is a fantastic discussion with one of America’s best songwriters. Planned Obsolescence is a weekly DJ set mixed by Beck’s crew. In an age when anybody can put on a pirate hat and download any album without paying a dime, this type of creative approach to using the web as a experimental platform for music and its environments is exactly the type of thing that might make me want to support an artist by buying his CD or MP3 or concert ticket or T-shirt. Beck’s crew is using Web 2.0ish tools and social media like facebook and vimeo to reach their fan base and share their funky new readymades.

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “Venus In Furs” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Harry Shearer offers this musical tribute to one of George Bush's debate mantras: It's Hard Work being the President of the United States of America.

Wow — at home Monday night, I downloaded the Grey Album, a remix of the Beatles “White Album” with Rapper Jay-Z's “Black Album” done by DJ Dangermouse, without even realizing I was taking part in a global protest against censorship and unreasonable restrictions on sampling. A friend sent me one of those “click here this is cool” emails.

I listened to it once and then, you know, destroyed it.

I'm wondering though, if I owned a copy of the White Album and the Black Album, would the Grey Album still be illegal?

Over at Scribbling.net, ran across this post on an interview Björk gave as part of the New Yorker Festival in September. I didn't even know she moved to New York. The post includes several short video clips of the interview. My favorite moment is when Björk comments on New York that people only walk on the bridges when there's been a terrorist incident or a blackout, and that you can sing on one of the bridges at the top of your lungs and no one can hear you. There's something I love about the idea of Björk sneaking out onto the Brooklyn Bridge late at night to sing where no one can hear her.

Just a quick music appreciation note. I've been selling off some old CDs on half.com and allowed myself a few indulgent new music purchases. My favorite new albums are Verve Remixed 1 and 2. In a very smart postmodern gesture, Verve, the label that includes in its backlist many of the Jazz greats — Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday — opened its archives to some of the most talented DJs/remixers to produces new mixes of jazz standards. Among my favorites are the exceedingly haunting lynching song “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday remixed by Tricky, “Summertime” by Sarah Vaughn remixed by UFO, “Whatever Lola Wants” remixed by the Gotan Project, and “Here's that Rainy Day” remixed by Koop. Verve has also released unmixed versions of the originals on Verve Unmixed 1 and 2. I hope this starts a trend. It'd be cool to see what the kids could do with Blue Note, Motown Records, or Decca. It also reminds me what a shame it is that the recent extension of copyright has robbed many artists of the current generation of the opportunity to use the rich cultural archive of the twentieth century as building materials for their own new work.

Here's a review of Verve Remixed 2 from NPR's All Things Considered.

I finally made the leap to OSX a few months back, and I'm finding that iTunes is one of the first computer programs I've run across in a long time that has actually changed one of my regular life behaviors — the way that I listen to and think about music. I've been ripping all my old CDs to the hard drive. Having the bulk of my music collection available and visible at all times is completely different from having the CDs stashed away in a drawer, five of them playing at any given time. I suppose that most of the time that I played music on my little home stereo, I was listening to the the five CDs in the changer, usually the ones I'd purchased most recently, alternated with a few standbys. But now it's all always onhand, and searchable. iTunes let you search and sort by a bunch of different criteria — Artist, Title, Album, Date, Genre, your rating, etc., and allows you to generate smart playlists that automatically update — so for instance I have smart playlists for artists (Beatles, Bjork, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Johnny Cash), for genres, both those predefined by iTunes (Blues, Jazz, Latin) and those that I define (Funky, Songwriters, even those of a particular record label — Bloodshot). In some ways iTunes has given me access to my musical memory — the music of my teenage years mixed with my Blues period mixed with the bit of Latin and insurgent country and Built to Spill from my last Chicago period). A new hard-drive, a wireless connection, and suddently I'm always on my laptop and hardly ever sitting in front of the desktop. And I'm listening to music I forgot I even owned.

Last week Apple released the Windows version of iTunes. The iTunes, iTunes music store and iPod software/hardware cluster may turn out to be the smartest thing the company has done in its history.

In addition to the iTunes software itself, there are a bunch of little freeware and shareware programs for OSX to modify and enhance the iTunes experience. Clutter is one of my favorite of these. Clutter searches the amazon.com database for cover art of music in your library, allowing you to download the art into Clutter and iTunes, and in a neat gesture of retro-remediation, lets you stack the covers on your desktop and play them as you would CDs by clicking on any of the covers cluttered on your desktop. Kung-Tunes is a little widget that generates a webpage showing the current and last five songs played on iTunes and ftps it up to your server. I've had it running for the last few days, and threw a link to the playlist up on the left there. I'm not sure if anyone reading this blog would be interested in what I happen to be listening to at any given time — but why not? Similarly, iChatStatus is a little program that displays the current iTunes song on your iChat buddy list. iLyric is a cool idea — a script that searches for the lyrics of the song currently playing in iTunes — though the results I've come up with are often inaccurate or unsatisfactory.

In yet another sign that this century is going to be completely weird, the Beastie Boys, who once sang “You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party,” have released a new track “In a World Gone Mad” (lyrics) as an MP3 ahead of the release of their album. Could this be a protest anthem? Phil Ochs it's not, but it's got a decent beat and you can protest to it.