New Music Festival Just Large Empty Field To Do Drugs In

25 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts, On a Lighter Note Tags:

drugs

(via The Onion)

MOUNT STERLING, KY—Declaring the event a rousing success so far, organizers confirmed more than 45,000 people turned out Wednesday for the first annual Cavalcade Folk and Roots Festival, a four-day gathering that consists solely of a big empty field to do drugs in.

Held on a farm in the foothills of eastern Kentucky, the festival, which continues through Friday and features no live performances of any kind, reportedly offers “something for every type of music lover,” specifically a fenced-off, 300-acre pasture in which to consume a broad array of mind-altering substances.

“We thought it’d be awesome to host a festival that would attract people from all over the country who just want to kick back and ingest narcotics for 96 hours straight,” festival organizer Randy Felder said of the event that takes place on a barren expanse of land with no stages, sound equipment, lighting, art, or vendors. “Cavalcade is all about creating a venue where live music fans can come together, hang out, and do what they love most. Whether you want to toke up, huff, or take a few hits of E, we’ve got you covered.”

Read more: http://www.theonion.com/article/new-music-festival-just-large-empty-field-do-drugs-50565

5 Hit Songs, Translated

21 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

trans

(via mental_floss) by Erik van Rheenen

Foreign language hits don’t often break onto Top 40 airwaves, but when they do, they’re usually loaded with earworms and make terrific karaoke fodder. But when we start singing along, what exactly are we saying? Probably not what you think. Here are five hit songs in other languages and what the heck they actually mean once they’re translated.

1. Nena, “99 Luftballons”

Run Nena’s chirpy 1983 pop song through a translator, and the cheery German hit gets pretty sinister, pretty quickly. Nena guitar slinger Carlos Karges drew inspiration for the anti-war protest tune when he watched an army of balloons get released at a 1982 Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin.

His musings on the balloons’ ascension over the Berlin Wall (“99 balloons on their way to the horizon / People think they’re UFOs from space”) and into the Soviet Bloc gave way to lyrics about war and paranoia—99 luftballons become 99 fighter jets, war ministers, and years of war as the hysterical overreactions in the lyrics escalate.

Nena recorded an English version, retitled “99 Red Balloons,” but argued that the satirical rewrite felt unfaithful to the German meaning. The less cutesy German cut became an American smash, peaking at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100…

Read more: http://mentalfloss.com/article/50792/5-hit-songs-translated

May 21, 1971: Chicago’s Peter Cetera Attacked by Marines

20 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

cetera

(via Ultimate Classic Rock)

45 years ago, former Chicago bassist/vocalist Peter Cetera found out the hard way that the phrase, ‘root, root, root for the home team,’ isn’t just a catchy line from a beloved song. It’s a real-world warning.

On May 20, 1969, following the completion of a grueling tour opening for Jimi Hendrix, Cetera, along with saxophonist Walter Parazaider, guitarist Terry Kath and drummer Danny Seraphine decided to take a trip to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles to take in a day of baseball. The bassist’s beloved Chicago Cubs were set to take on the L.A. team in the first of a three-game series. The Cubbies completely dominated the Dodgers that day and won 7-0. As bad as the beat down was, however, perhaps the biggest loser in the park was Cetera when he came upon a group of servicemen…

Read more: http://ultimateclassicrock.com/peter-cetera-attacked-marines/

 

“Where Do We Go From Here?”

George Martin and the Beatles: A Producer’s Impact, in Five Songs

18 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

martin

(via The New York Times Music)

March 9, 2016

When we hear a great recording, we tend to think of the music as having sprung fully developed from the imagination of the musician or band that cut the tracks. But that ignores the role of the producer, who translates the musician’s vision into the sound we experience.

The contributions that George Martin, who died Tuesday at 90, made to the Beatles’ recorded catalog were crucial, and although he was the first to say that most of the credit belongs to the band, many of the group’s greatest songs owe their sound and character to his inspired behind-the-scenes work. Here are a few of his most telling musical fingerprints:

Read more: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/arts/music/george-martin-and-the-beatles-a-producers-impact-in-five-songs.html?_r=0

Music-Map: The Tourist Map of Music

13 May 2016 2 Comments

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts, Recommended Sites Tags:

Obsessive music fans, we think we’ve found your next rabbit hole.

Music-Map is a music discovery visualization tool which, when an artist or band name is entered, presents a network of other artists mapped out based (presumably) on proximity of relationship or similarity.

The flaw? It almost certainly lacks the authoritative credibility of, for example, the ambitious Music Genome Project® which powers Pandora’s music recommendation service. In fact (though the site provides little or no info on the sources of its recommendations) the suspicion here is that it is merely plugged into the “related searches” from a site such as Amazon.com.

This would explain why KC and the Sunshine Band cozy right up against The Mamas & The Papas and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are the closest band on the map when you search The Beatles. Also, the cosmos surrounding The Mills Brothers contains the Texas Tornados and Donovan, yet the Ames Brothers are nowhere to be found. And Queen really doesn’t come to mind as the closest thing to Pink Floyd. And so on.

Methinks this is just another way to use Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought” feature. But it does lay searches/recommendations out in visual terms, and splashes lots of artists on the page. So in that sense it’s arguably more practical, and definitely more fun.

http://www.music-map.com/

Amazon Cloud Player’s Major Fail

13 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

cloud player

Just a week ago we reprinted this article calling out Apple’s iCloud Music Library for its failings as a custodian of your music collection. Now Amazon Cloud Player is evaluated by Music Plasma and, similarly, deficiencies arise:

(via Music Plasma)

MusicPlasma.com has been diligently watching the heated competition between Apple, Amazon, and Google as each tries to provide their best “music in the cloud” offering. Each has its own pros and cons. After a thorough analysis of all of the available reviews and specifications, MusicPlasma.com decided to test out Amazon’s Cloud Player Premium since it appeared to offer the best solution for the majority of our visitors. For $25/Yr, Amazon claims to do the following:

  • Store 250,000 of your songs online
  • Stream all of your songs from a web browser or iPhone/Android app
  • Allow you to download and or stream any of your matched songs in MP3 format at 256K bit rate
  • Upgrade any low quality songs it can match to 256Kb bit rate quality
  • Import songs and playlists from Windows Media Player and iTunes

If Amazon could execute on these tasks, it would surely be the superior cloud music offering. Unfortunately, it comes up woefully short on the last 2 bullet items. We conducted a very realistic test which involved importing a typical user’s music library consisting of about 12000 songs and 50 playlists into Amazon’s Cloud Player Premium. Here are the results…

Read more: http://www.musicplasma.com/amazon-cloud-players-major-fail/

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