Music – Page 10 – Zoopraxiscope

Shipwrecked

The audio player that I’ve been using no longer works, so I’m trying a new one. Let me know if this doesn’t work for you.

The tune is “Captain Murasa,” yet another piece from the vast Touhou project. I worked on the arrangement for a while, then got sidetracked on other projects. I doubt that I’ll do more with it, so here is my not-quite-satisfactory version as it is. (It’s not entirely my own work; parts of it are almost verbatim from the transcription I worked from. Also, that’s my computer playing, not me.)

Incidentally, if Minamitsu Murasa asks you for a ladle, be sure the one you give her has a hole in it.

(The illustration is from here.)

Update: The new player doesn’t work so well when there are many tunes on a page. Let’s try a different one.

Update II: Uploaded a better-sounding recording.

Musical immaturity?

If you’re worried about losing your love of new music, your fears are justified. That’s according to new research that finds listeners reach “maturity” around age 33. In other words, you’re done with discovering new music when you reach your mid-thirties.

Is that so?

On my way home from Overland Park this past weekend, I listened to Be Bop Deluxe, who fall within the 33-year limit. However, on the way up I listened to Floating Cloud and Onmyouza, both of whom are recent bands active in the 21st century. I recently compiled an iTunes playlist of favorite non-classical tunes. It includes plenty of pieces from my youth by Fairport Convention, Frank Zappa, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Spirit, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, Cream and so on. But there are also such artists as the Hot Club of Cowtown, Jun Togawa, ((Hers is the only version of “Pachelbel’s Canon” I can tolerate.)) No Strings Attached, Gjallarhorn, Yuki Kajiura, Rare Air, Mayumi Kojima, Susumu Hirasawa and others whom I never heard until well after my 33rd year.

In fact, I’ve found more music in the past 15 years than in all my years in the previous century, thanks to the internet. I may be atypical, but I don’t think I’m unique. I seriously doubt that I’m the only person my age who actively searches for new music to listen to.

(Via Dustbury.)

Music at the horizon

Those who enjoy the soundtrack to Someday’s Dreamers might find the second video here of interest.

Another one gone

I’ve been listening to John Renbourn ever since I first heard Pentangle’s cover of “Sally Go Round the Roses” back in ancient times. He passed away yesterday at the age of 70.

Continue reading “Another one gone”

CM7 CMm7 Cm7 | Am7♭5/C Cdim7 FMm7/C

My friend Roger the Fiddler has begun a weblog, Cold Jazz. If you’re interested in how music works, it’s worth a visit. (John Salmon, are you still around?)

Another one gone

Today it’s Michael Brown, keyboardist and songwriter of The Left Banke half a century ago.

(Via Dustbury.)

Addendum: Surely someone has made an AMV combining “Pretty Ballerina” with Princess Tutu, but a search at AMV.org comes up dry. I did find a video with Russian animation.

What kind of monster?

(Via the Borderline Boys.)

Metallica may be a Big Name in metal, but I’ve never been able to take them seriously. ((When I do listen to their songs, I prefer Apocalyptica’s covers to the originals.)) Severian also finds them a bit silly, in an academic way.

Ukulele and tuba

Masaki Kurihara and his cohorts recently turned up at Wonderduck’s, which gives me an excuse to post a few favorites.

Continue reading “Ukulele and tuba”

Porkypalooza II

A couple of old favorites by Blodwyn Pig, the band guitarist Mick Abrahams formed after his departure from Jethro Tull. Jack Lancaster plays saxes, plural and often simultaneously. The bass and drums are by Andy Pyle and Ron Berg.

Wring that dishrag

Here’s a song for Steven, sung by John McCutcheon.

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Barefoot Boy with Boots On.mp3]

Zooming along

Back in the 1980s, it took immense amounts of computer time to generate fractal images. If you wanted to see pretty pictures of recursively-generated figures, you borrowed books such as The Beauty of Fractals, or watched Nothing But Zooms if you knew someone with the video. Computers and software have come a long way since then, and nowadays you can easily create your own fractal images on your laptop. I experimented with a couple of applications for Macs this weekend, Xaos and UltraFractal.

Xaos is freeware, and it comes in Windows and Linux versions as well. It’s fairly easy to use, though you might want to bookmark the online documentation. It’s what I used to make the video above. It doesn’t actually make movies. Instead, it outputs a series of .png files, which you can import into Final Cut or something similar. (Be aware that at 30 frames per second, there are 1800 images per minute. You’re going to be working with a lot of files.)

Ultra Fractal has some Photoshop-style image manipulation features. It’s more complicated than Xaos but not really difficult to figure out. However, it’s a bit pricey; if you want to do animations, it will cost you $130. I think I’ll make do with Xaos for now.

A little Maiden in the morning

There’s a lot of bluegrass metal around these days. Perhaps that’s not so strange; bluegrass has been called “acoustic shred,” and sometimes that definition fits. Here are a couple of examples, the one above from Finland and the other possibly from somewhere ‘way down south.

Louder than Lang Lang

Before there were sequencers, there were player pianos. The American Fotoplayer also incorporated a forerunner of the drum machine.

There are many more examples here.

(Via the Borderline Boy.)

Twit rock

So Green Day is worthy of the Rock and Roll Hall of “Fame” but Johnny Winter (ELP, Yes, Fairport Convention, Roy Buchanan, King Crimson …) is not. Bah.

Another one gone

Today it’s Ian McLagan, keyboardist for the Small Faces half a lifetime ago.

Vexed

There are all kinds of strange things on YouTube. For instance, this recording of Erik Satie’s notorious “Vexations.” Normally a complete performance runs from 14 to 24 hours. Nicholas Horvath plays the 840 repeats in less than ten hours, which is blazingly fast for a piece marked “très lent.” (No, I’m not counting them, and I don’t expect to listen to the whole thing.) On another occasion, Horvath took 35 hours to play the piece. That performance was probably closer to the proper tempo.

Not every pianist who attempts a solo “Vexations” succeeds. From The New Yorker:

An Australian pianist named Peter Evans abandoned a 1970 solo performance after five hundred and ninety-five repetitions because he claimed he was being overtaken by evil thoughts and noticed strange creatures emerging from the sheet music. “People who play it do so at their own peril,” he said afterward.