April 2012

Now *this* is a guitar wankfest I can get behind

Ben Lapps was in his mid-teens when this was made. There’s a few things I really like about it. The first is the way he hears the request, pauses, thinks about it, looks down at the guitar and kid of shrugs his shoulders and begins. The second is the fun he’s having, most guitar wankers are so serious and look as if they are passing gas or something worse. The third delight is the apparent obliviousness of the roadies setting up the equipment behind him. Ben Lapps playing Going to California via YouTube Most music fans are sensible enough to…


Is Jack White mad, clever, or just trying to fuck with record collector scum worldwide?

From the YouTube page: Three weeks before his “Blunderbuss” album hits the streets, Third Man Records decided to make the Jack White album track “Freedom at 21” premier exclusively via flexi-disc records attached to helium balloons launched from the label headquarters in Nashville on April 1st, 2012. Envisioned as an experiment exploring non-traditional forms of record distribution and a way to get records in the hands of people who don’t visit record shops, the label was sure to use biodegradable latex balloons and all-natural twine in the process. Accompanying the balloons were custom post cards with instructions for the finders…


Who Cares When Your Record Was Digitally Remastered?

Excellent screed/rant by Dave Mandl over on Rumpus.net. Neatly explains the sore point of incorrect dating on music streaming and download sites. Who Cares When Your Record Was Digitally Remastered? – The Rumpus.net. Interestingly, one of the commenters says that the reason why the labels feed this incorrect information to the streaming databases is so that they get the (tiny) payment registered to the more recent release. Presumably this make accounting easier for the labels. From a cursory look around a few other services, it appears that those using the All Music API do get the dates correct.