Matt Marks Music

Ok, I heard about Microsoft Songsmith – thought it sounded like an absolute abortion of an idea. This video not only proves that the program is worse than I could have imagined, the video itself makes me want to… it makes me want to eat glass. It makes me want to chew and swallow shards of glass, if only to somehow be able to fathom another sensation overshadowing the sacharrine, failed-tongue-in-cheek, naive freaking holocaust of an ad campaign I just viewed.

Enjoy!

This looks like a fun little piece of hardware. Only 200 bucks. More info at CDM.

This is why people don’t take you seriously anymore.

This is why people don’t take you seriously anymore.

“Terror – what Hunter Thompson calls ‘fear and loathing’ – often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal – if it hits you around the heart – then it lodges in the memory as a complete set. Just the fact that almost everyone remembers where he/she was at the instant he/she heard the news of the Kennedy assassination is something I find almost as interesting as the fact that one nurd with a mail-order gun was able to change the entire course of world history in just fourteen seconds or so. That moment of knowledge and the three-day spasm of stunned grief which followed it is perhaps the closest any people in history has ever come to a total period of mass consciousness and mass empathy and – in retrospect – mass memory: two hundred million people in a living frieze. Love cannot achieve that sort of across-the-board hammerstrike of emotion, apparently. More’s the pity.”

– Steven King, Danse Macabre

“Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything.”

–Terrence Malick on filming Badlands, which is set in the oft over-romanticized 1950s.

K, sorry to gloat when I’m right, but GUH-DUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

This is hypnotic…

Are you’re a unabashed fan of Christmas/Holiday music, but you are sick and tired of hearing the same versions of the same songs over and over and over – especially when they’re suddenly interrupted 2 bars before the end with one of those annoying “K-Earth 101!! Holiday Favorites on the Radio!!!!!” shockers?

Yeah. Me too.

Well, that’s all over.

Tune into my favorite internet radio station, The 1920s Radio Network.

Every holiday season they play the best in little-known Christmas gems and obscure versions of holiday classics from the early part of the 20th century. You are always sure to hear stuff you’ve never heard before, and it’s all wonderful.

Create a nice holiday environment in your place without having to hear that damn Wham song 19 times.

I’m in Cali now visiting my family for the first time in a year (!). It’s beautiful outside, but Long Beach isn’t exactly a Winter Wonderland, so I need all the old-timey Christmasin’ I can get!

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times has listed the JACK Quartet’s Xenakis show at Le Poisson Rouge as one of “the most memorable classical music presentations of 2008”:

The Jack Quartet, an ensemble of young string players devoted to contemporary music, played the club in October. I would never have expected to see a young crowd at a downtown nightclub erupting with whoops after performances of the four hypercomplex, cutting-edge string quartets by Iannis Xenakis. But in this setting these dense and kinetic works came across to this open-minded audience as just more hip, wild, out-there contemporary music.

Awesome, boys! Unfortunately, I missed this particular show. But I, and you, can catch them at their next NYC concert on March 1st at Tenri.

Click here to hear JACK killin’ some Xenakis.