A blog about music and technology by Jordan Hirsch
 |
| SK Holiday Open House by flickr user vastateparksstaff |
Before I leave town for a few weeks (pity me, I'll be in Hawaii), I figured I should leave you all with something to read. Here you go!
 |
| "Halloween" by flickr user Nate Hofer |
 |
| "Fallen Leaves" by flickr user Cherice |
. Higher level of production and tighter songwriting than I've heard from these guys before, and all of it sounds fab. Plus they're really nice in person!
with Mirah Zeitlyn, and it was produced by Merrill Garbus (of tUnE-YarDs), who really wasn't shy about letting her rather distinctive style seep into the duo's sound.
grew on me slowly but surely, but it's really a beautiful, tender album and shows some subtle but sure growth for this great band. If you get the chance to see them live, don't miss it.
came out earlier this year, I was definitely skeptical, and I actually wrote it off at first as a failed experiment. But somehow over repeated listens, the songs started to open up to me in a new way, and that experiment started really working for me. I saw them play live the other night at the Williamsburg Waterfront, and they blew me away. They had a great mix of styles on display and the band's sense of fun really came out. Definitely one of the better live shows I've ever seen. This song in particular took on a whole new life for me last night - makes me wish they would release a live album.
is a nice mix of electronica and good old rock and roll.
, and now that they have, I am pleased.
is better than I expected, and has an edge to the production that wasn't there on previous efforts.
, obviously you should go buy it.
is both an excellent return to form for Malkmus & the Jicks as well as an exploration of some interesting new ground. Elsewhere on the web, much has been made of Beck's influence as a producer on this album, so I'll leave it at this: it's good.
is their best effort in a while. Still not quite what I know they're capable of, but really good nonetheless and definitely worth a listen.Yay, it's time for another news roundup! I just got back from a few weeks out of town (apparently the universe did not like the fact that I was out of New York, and decided to get all pouty and start throwing around earthquakes and hurricanes - hopefully now that I'm back, things will settle down considerably).
Anyway, here's what's been happening lately in the digital music world:
' use of extreme compression as a purposeful technique as opposed to a last resort to make a record sound louder than it really is.This one's for all the web developers out there...
I'm on a "working vacation" for a couple weeks up in Belfast, ME, staying in a house on the bay. Somehow working from here doesn't feel quite as much like work as it does when I work from my usual office location. However, events have conspired to make it feel as much like work as it possibly could - namely, a client has been doing their best to make sure that no piece of code I write this week is ever actually done, due to the specifications changing daily, not unlike clouds shifting in a summer breeze.
So I wrote this song to explain how I feel. [This isn't all about this particular project, but that was a good starting point.]
This is a live recording made down by the water.
Lyrics:
They changed the specs again
Just when I was nearly finished
Said the client changed their mind
I don't know if I can take this
They changed the specs again
I've already written so much code
And the thought of starting over
Makes my sanity erode
Chorus:
Why won't they just let me finish?
Why can't I just be done?
Why won't they just let me finish?
Is this their idea of fun?
They changed the specs again
Pushed the launch up by 2 weeks
They've added a shopping cart
God, my knees are feeling weak
They changed the specs again
To match the new designs
They want it to just "work like Google"
Lord, I'm losing my mind
[Chorus]
I give up, I give up.
I give up, I give up.
Let's add some features, I give up.
Let's build a CMS from scratch, I give up.
Let's refactor every function, I give up.
Let's start calling ourselves agile, I give up.
Let's have a status meeting, I give up.
Let's adopt a framework, I give up.
Let's add members' only area, I give up.
Let's change databases, I give up.
Let's review my timesheet, I give up.
Let's never document anything, I give up.
Let's outsource to India
Like a lot of people, I've spent some time over the past couple of weeks trying out Spotify (and no, I don't have an invite to give you, sorry). And I've reached a conclusion: namely, that while Spotify offers a lot, I will never switch all my music to a rental/streaming model. I was already pretty sure of that, and then last week's Netflix streaming outage (on the heels of jacking up their prices to push users towards streaming-only plans) convinced me. Access to music is simply too important to me for me to rely on a rental model where I'm at the whim of a company who is subject to outages, price increases, changes in Terms of Service, etc. But that's not to say there's nothing good about Spotify; on the contrary, it's a pretty amazing service, and I'm glad it's finally available in the US. Here's how my experience with Spotify has gone so far:
I was delighted to get the invite in my inbox. I installed it immediately, and watched as it scanned my music folder (without asking me) and added the music files on my computer to its local database. Well, not all the music files - only the MP3s. For me, this was a big drawback. Most of my music is in FLAC, and so Spotify only picked up about 40% of my local files. This is important not just for playing those files locally, but because Spotify uses the presence of a file in your local library to determine whether or not to play ads to you while you listen - for example, say I searched for "Viva Voce" in Spotify. If their new album
Speaking of those ads, they are horrible. My first 24 hours or so with Spotify was a beautiful, ad-free music playground. I looked up artists I'd wanted to hear more of, I could quickly find bands that a friend had recommended to me, etc. all without hearing or seeing a single ad. Then at some point I closed and restarted Spotify, and when it came back, it was more like listening to commercial radio while browsing the web without AdBlock. The ads were typically either for the latest album from some horrible nu-metal band (rather jarring to hear in the middle of an otherwise nice playlist) or for Spotify Premium. Sometimes the music would just stop after an ad played, and the interface would show me a message saying that my music would resume after the ad had played. I had to restart to fix that.
Now for the good: their music library is nearly unlimited. I've had a hard time stumping it (but when I did, it wasn't always with something obscure - for example, they have The Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" but not Dylan's), and so I've enjoyed exploring the back catalogue of some artists I like. The queuing system is convenient and intuitive, it's simple to make (and share) a playlist, and in general, it works the way you'd expect it to, which is nice. Speaking of playlists, "shared playlists" are a very cool feature - that's the ability to see playlists that your Facebook friends have put together. If their playlists contain songs from their local library that Spotify doesn't have in their rights network, you can't play them, but you can play everything else, so it adds a nice social aspect to the experience. I do wish that it didn't enable sharing of your playlists by default, though - I don't necessarily want to share every random playlist I throw together. But it is cool to see the list of Facebook friends growing as more and more people get access to invites.
Speaking of shared playlists, they made me realize that for me, Spotify is missing a key feature: recommendations. I found myself looking to shared playlists as a way to find some new music, or something that I might like (the old-fashioned way, i.e. "what are my friends into?"). I know that recommendation isn't in Spotify's core path, and that makes sense...but I was hit with the conundrum of "now I have access to nearly every song, ever....what the hell do I listen to?" Fortunately, I found Spotibot, which generates Spotify playlists for you based on various information from your Last.FM profile. This is just one of many mashups and integrations that Spotify highlights here. All of this is made possible via the Spotify Metadata API, which appears to be pretty great - though I'm not sure yet how it compares to the one from Echo Nest in terms of depth of data.
After playing with Spotify for a while, I did notice some unexplained UI things that were not intuitive to me (and not well explained in their documentation) - e.g. the music note icon (which I think means that a file is in your local library), the "Unlink Tracks" context-menu item, the "Go To Replacement" context-menu item, and a few others. But on the whole, Spotify is a great addition to the world of digital music players/streamers/aggregators. With the ads playing, I can't see myself using the free version every day - it's just too annoying. And I can't really see paying for access to thousands and thousands of tracks I don't want to listen to just to get access to a few more that I do.
How about you? Have you used it yet? What did you think? What's great? What's missing? Tell me in the comments.
Summertime doesn't just mean Mother Nature training a red-hot death laser on us with no end in sight, it also heralds the return of 50/90, which is the summertime cousin of FAWM. Basically it's a web-based community who are taking on the challenge of writing 50 songs in 90 days. Yes, it's crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I have never attempted it, but I do try and write a few songs each summer, in large part because I find that in the absence of a deadline of some sort, my songwriting tends to grind to an unglamorous halt.
Well, now that the heat and air quality have made going outside quite possibly the last thing I will ever do, I spent some time over the past week or so hiding indoors working on a new song. I've had the background music for this one rattling around my head for months, and finally decided to do something with it. The melody line was inspired by 2 things: 1) I recently received this awesome Rode microphone (my first condenser mic!) as a birthday present and needed something with a lot of soaring high notes to justify it, and 2) my wife nudging me to "write something that shows off [my] voice." I don't know if this satisfies #2, but I tried. As usual with my songs when I'm just starting one of these songwriting cycles, the lyrics are more or less about getting off your ass and doing something creative, etc.
The song is called "Set You Free." Enjoy!
 |
| Cloud wisps by flickr user turtlemom4bacon |
After reading some interesting reviews of Google's new "cloud"-based music service, [Editor's note: can we please stop calling anything hosted online "cloud-based?"] imagine my delight (go ahead, imagine it) when a beta invitation arrived in my inbox yesterday. I was particularly interested in its playlisting abilities - i.e. how well it performs in the task of "recommend a bunch of songs from my own collection that have qualities in common with the seed song/artist/album." Over at Echo Nest, Paul Lamere (one of my music tech heroes, who's involved with a really cool company) did an in-depth head-to-head comparison of Google Music, iTunes Genius, and the Echo Nest's own API. The result: Google Music fails what Paul calls the "WTF Test." Meaning, way too many songs in Google's playlists would cause the listener to say "WTF? This has nothing in common with my seed song."
I've written about music recommendation engines in this space before, and generally I've found them to be a mixed bag. While I do sometimes hear about new artists I might not have heard otherwise from the web-based tools, these days I'm actually more interested in diving deep into my own collection. I have about 80,000 tracks in my digital collection. I use a variety of tools to manage this beast, primarily SqueezeCenter, which is the software that enables streaming to a device such as the Squeezebox. One of my favorite features of SqueezeCenter is its integration with a nifty little product called MusicIP. MusicIP used to be a great tool for generating playlists based out of your own music library. It's perfect for someone like me with more tracks than I can handle. It finds hidden gems, reminds me of things I forgot I had, and of course generates a few WTF moments. Sadly, the folks over at Amplifind Music Services discontinued support for this product a long time ago, thus ensuring that some of its most maddening bugs (my personal favorite is the one where it has trouble analyzing FLAC files on a network drive, but can analyze those same files perfectly on a local drive) will never be fixed. Kudos to folks like whoever runs Spicefly, who keep the torch burning for MusicIP, but the fact is, it's never going to get any better. And I haven't yet had the time to devote to learning the Echo Nest API enough to have it analyze my whole collection and thus fulfill the same function for me. Which brings me back to Google Music.
Despite its purportedly high "WTF factor," and the fact that you can only upload 20,000 tracks, and the fact that they will delete any track that Google deems to have violated copyright (I'd love to know how they know which track is the one I ripped from my own CD, and which is the copy I might have given to someone), I was still hopeful that Google Music might, one day, fill the coming void in my life when I finally upgrade Windows and MusicIP breaks down altogether. So now that you've imagined my delight at receiving an invitation to the beta, imagine my disgust when the stupid thing told me I already more than 2 authorized user accounts tied to my current device, whatever that might mean. This for software that I've never installed before. So I consulted their help page, which told me to simply go to my Google Music settings in my browser, and de-authorize my devices. Now, finally, imagine the words I uttered upon discovering that, according to Google, my authorized devices numbered exactly zero. I wrote to support, but haven't heard back yet. So for now, Google Music doesn't even have a chance to fail the WTF test for me, it's too busy failing the WFI test (Won't Fucking Install).
Anyone else used this thing? Let me know in the comments.
UPDATE: Google support got back to me, apparently this was an issue where by default the software assumed if you had any virtual machines on your computer that you were already using Google Music. They have released a fix, so I'll be trying again soon.
Hello loyal readers. I'd like to take a break from my usual spotty coverage of music and technology plus the occasional playlist to let you all know that next weekend, I will get not 1 but 2 opportunities to do one of my favorite things in the world: perform musical improv in front of an audience. And if you're going to be in New York City the weekend of May 20th, I'd love for you to come out and see me.
Friday May 20 @ 8:00 PM
Vox Pop Presents: An Evening of Musical Improv
Good news, everyone, the Friday Playlist is back! Today's edition features mostly bands I heard about this year at SXSW, with some old favorites thrown in for good measure. Enjoy!
from musician Merrill Garbus is really incredible, and is everything the last Dirty Projectors album
should have been. She also recently produced and penned a few songs for the latest Thao Nguyen album, which (in my not-so-humble opinion) has made Thao more interesting than ever.
. It's really beautiful but never boring. Excellent.
is great, and this song in particular showcases his lyrical prowess, flow, and ear for a good sample.
if you were around for the real thing.
. But it's still a cool song.
, and I like that they haven't decided on one yet, it makes for a more interesting sound.
hold true to that description, but enough do that I feel OK with it.
sound so goddamn square?
, but I don't recommend listening to it on a long drive that you start at 7:00 AM (like I did). After the previous night's excitement, I was ready for some R & R on my last day in Austin. R & R meaning, of course, rock and roll. [Editor's note: not my best work, humor-wise. Forgive me.] The ER doctor, while stitching up my wife's face, told us about "the best coffee shop in Austin" where there was going to be a whole afternoon of free music the next day, "more in a folky, bluegrassy vein." And this woman knew veins. [Editor's note: that was funnier, right?] So off we went to the Once Over Coffee Bar, stopping along the way for some delicious tacos from - you guessed it - a food truck right in front of the coffee shop. Once inside, we secured some beers, then made our way to the back deck where a lady with a ukelele was just starting her set.
It turns out that lady - Datri Bean - was going to become one of my wife's new favorite artists. On her web site, Bean describes her music as "music for a lazy afternoon on the porch" and I couldn't agree more. We spent a nice long while basking in the Texas sunshine, nursing our beers (and, for some of us, our head wounds), and happily grooving on Datri Bean's folky, jazzy tunes as she switched from ukelele to accordian and back again. It was heavenly. We stayed for a few more groups afterwards (unfortunately, I can't recall their names) and really enjoyed ourselves, finally heading indoors for some of the excellent coffee and a surprisingly good bagel. All in all, a good afternoon.
 |
| Datri Bean and her accordion |
 |
| Damien Jurado, rocking out |
 |
| Her Space Holiday, pre-retirement |
 |
| Damien Jurado, hanging out |
 |
| Wall art/musical instrument from our Austin rental condo |
Now that I'm safely back at home in the near-freezing fog of Brooklyn, I can tell you guys all about my second day of SXSW Music, which was pretty darned eventful. The day began at a reasonably late hour, due to staying up past my bedtime the night before. When I did finally make my way over to the Austin Convention Center (or "ACC" to those of us in the know), I got there in time for a panel all about how to get your music featured in commercials. Apparently the short answer is, "it's hard." The longer answer is, "it's really hard, but keep at it and good luck!" After that dose of realism, I wandered down to the Flatstock Poster Exhibition where I immediately wanted to spend every last dollar I have (which wouldn't have taken long) on amazing rock posters, t-shirts, and art for me and a lot of people I know. If you're reading this, chances are I saw I a poster I wanted to buy you. But I showed remarkable restraint and only bought myself one robot t-shirt from this guy.
 |
| Please buy me this |
 |
| Letting Up Despite Great Faults - dig that giant beard! |
This year marks my 4th time at SXSW, and my first time at SXSW Music (thanks to a gift from my lovely and talented wife). I didn't really know what to expect, and with something like 2000 bands playing over a handful of days, planning out my evenings has been not unlike planning a small military operation. Every band I want to see is playing at the same time at different venues and nothing starts on time and everything's crazy and everyone's everywhere etc. etc. etc. So far, this has been a good experience in learning to let go of expectations, because all the planning can really go out the window once you try actually navigating the drunken hordes on Austin's 6th Street at 1:00 AM to get over to that one club with the really cool band playing.
But despite all the craziness, I've seen some great stuff so far, and I'm here to tell you all about it!
Wednesday night I caught a very short set from Canadian hip-hopper 4th Pyramid (I think he was told about 8 minutes into his set that the entire set would only be 10 minutes long). After that, I hopped on my bike and headed over to catch college-age rappers Chiddy Bang at the "Vibe SXSW House Party," whatever that was. They were listed as going on at 9:15, but the signs posted near the men's room indicated that they would be taking the stage closer to 12:15 (that's AM, people), so after sticking around for an hour of middling-quality West Coast hip hop acts, I ditched the House Party to host my very own gourmet sliders party at a local food truck.
Once sated, I parked myself at my final destination for the evening and saw three bands in a row, 2/3 of whom hail from Brooklyn these days, just like me. First up was The Vandelles, who seemed to have left most of their effects rack at home, so (despite turning the reverb way up on their amps) they did not manage to fully re-create their spacey psychedelic surf-rock vibe on a live stage, but they did feature 2 female band members sporting dangerously hip levels of bangs, so there's that. Next up was The Antlers, who easily won the coveted "Jordan's Favorite Band Of The Night" award with a killer set drenched in beautiful effects, high-pitched emotional vocals, and an overall sense of quality. Here's a totally legal video that someone who is totally not me shot of their closing number, (a personal favorite of whomever took this video), "Two" [Editor's note: the sound quality on this video is, to put it technically, not very good. But it's still cool.]:
"Two" - The Antlers at SXSW 2011 from Jordan Hirsch on Vimeo.
The Antlers performing their song "Two" at the Parish during SXSW 2011 (3/16/2011).
The first thing I learned was that when people remind you all day to set your clocks ahead an hour on Sunday night, you should probably do that. Instead, I woke up the next morning thinking I had plenty of time to make it to Paul Lamere's panel "Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery" only to discover that it was, in fact, happening at that very moment, thanks to the ridiculous scam that is Daylight Savings Time. Fortunately, Paul has posted his slides over at Music Machinery (linked from his name, above) and so when I have some more time I am going to try to piece together what he talked about based on a smattering of pictures and text.
I also learned that the SXSW Animated Shorts are not as good as the ones at Sundance that I was lucky enough to see a few years back, and in retrospect I should have skipped them entirely to attend the "Bloggers Fight Back: Legal Workshop for Music Bloggers" panel. But since I didn't, don't be surprised when I start writing this blog from jail.
When I finally got into some panels, I learned even more. Mainly, I learned that metadata is the magic word of the day. First up was the "Love, Music & APIs" panel featuring speakers from Echo Nest and SoundCloud. Their main point was that APIs are the new currency in music apps, and if you don't have one, you're not really playing in the same game as everyone else. They had a slide listing all sorts of cool music companies with APIs - interestingly enough, Pandora wasn't listed. I wondered why not, as they seemed to be in the heart of the music recommendation space, and my friend Lori quickly realized "they must not have an API." I felt so sad for them. The panelists talked a lot about Music Hack Days, finally answering the question of what actually happens at those things. The answer: a lot of smart people make a lot of really interesting and cool music apps in a very short amount of time, nearly all of them based around APIs. And what do those APIs revolve around? Metadata. That was also the topic of the second music-related panel I attended that day, "Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain The Same?" The panelists here used a pretty broad definition of "metadata," using it to cover everything from the spelling of a song's title (apparently when users submit their own titles to most metadata repositories like MusicBrainz or the old CDDB, you can end up with 176 spellings of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door") to things like a song's cultural impact or a singer's unique and recognizable turns of phrase. The main takeaway is that metadata may start out in the hands of the artist, but quickly becomes "owned" by listeners, users, remixers, etc. Metadata is cultural currency in much the same way that APIs are technical currency. Combined, they are helping make this a fascinating and wonderful time to be a music nerd.
The last thing I learned is that the line to see Surfer Blood was too long last night, so I will be trying again tonight. Of course, there are about 50 bands (and a movie) that I want to see all playing at the same time tonight, so I have no idea what I'll end up seeing, but I'll tell you all about it here!
Well, almost. It officially starts tomorrow, and that's when I'm heading to Austin. Amanda and I are going to be leading a session called "Improv For Everyone" on Tuesday 3/15 at 3:30 PM. It's about how the lessons of improvised comedy can actually help you (yes, even you!) get more out life. But that's not what this blog is about. This blog is about music, so let's talk about that.
My awesome wife gave me an upgrade to SXSW Music, and I have spent the past week trying to decide which of the 400 or so bands that are playing I want to try and see. Every time I've gone to SXSW in the past, we've been leaving Austin just as all the bands arrive, and I've always wanted to stay for the music portion of the festival. Now that I have that option, I'm overwhelmed. There's tons of bands, and all the bands I like are playing at the same time, and there's so many bands I've never heard of that I can't possibly get myself up to speed on all of them in time to make an informed decision. So what's a music fan to do?
One thing I can do (and so can you) is check out All Songs Considered's SXSW Preview, featuring a playlist of some of the bands that they think are great and that most people probably aren't already familiar with. During the festival, you can also stay tuned to NPR's SXSW page, where they will be live-streaming many of the shows. If you want to dive deeper, check out the "Unofficial" SXSW Torrents Page, which features collections of songs from nearly every band that's playing SXSW this year, as well as archives going back to 2005.
And of course, keep your dial right here, because I will be posting about any shows I see, and all the music panels I'm able to get to. It should be a great week.
I've written before in this space about Paul Lamere, a deep thinker about music and technology and the director of the application developer community for The Echo Nest, a "music intelligence company" that is pushing the boundaries of what technology can tell us about the music we listen to. They recently got some love from Fast Company in a piece that highlights some things they've been up to recently, including the following snippet:
The Echo Nest crawls the web in search of music and writing about music; it also partners with major labels like Universal and aggregators like 7Digital. It then devours data about the music, on both the "acoustic side"--tempo, key, etc. (Echo Nest's system crunches that sort of data in about 10 seconds for a song)--and the "cultural side"--what reviewers are saying about the music for instance. It crawls the web, Google-style, ravenous for new musical information. If you tweet about the band you saw last night, "we have that in our databases within the hour," says Whitman.Not only are they listening to everything we're saying about music, and listening to the music itself, but currently the Echo Nest has information about 30 million songs in its database. 30 million! I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between the 30 million songs that you can query about using their API vs. the 1 million in the "Million Song Dataset" they just announced, but either way, this is really, really cool. [Editor's note: I think the API gives you access to song information only, while the Million Song Dataset actually gives you access to 30-second samples for each song, so developers and researchers can actually perform automated musical analysis on those samples.]
 |
| This robot just needs to be loved |
 |
| Cosmo is awesome |
