Great song, cool remix.  I’ve been seeing these embedded waveform and music playback widgets by SoundCloud.  Deadmau5 also uses this services for posting experimental clips.  I like the in-timeline comments.

The good news is that soon we may find hardened amber containing DNA from this long evolved-past website.  Following this, a white bearded father figure may start a park on a remote island in South America seeking to recreate the fantasy of this long departed wild animal leading to an escape and adventure beyond our wildest expectations.

Here’s a link to check out the new album:  http://www.myspace.com/mia

Just saw MIA’s Born Free video for the first time.  It contains life-like violence and is difficult to watch.  But it yields a striking combination of sound and imagery with a purpose. Boing Boing has info on the tune.  Amazing how this artist can flex from a $100 music video of her dancing in lasers to a complex short film with plenty of cash behind it.  [watch on vimeo]

Aaron Fechter the President of Creative Engineering, Inc has been reprogramming a working animatronic bear-band set up.  It looks like the company created it for a line of restraunts similar to Chuck E. Cheese.  He’s currently taking cash bids to do syncing or “choreography” for the band members.

The way the performance is filmed and presented are awesome.  Shakey prolonged shots, quick pulls outward.  The overall video quality is low and the colors look a bit washed out.  Everything is blurry and the bear with the guitar has a spooky shadow.   Great media.

I had the distinct and rare chance to be in the audience for the Jandek / Thurston Moore show at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland this past week.  What follows is an introduction to Jandek and a debrief of what the show was like.

What is Jandek?

Jandek aka the Representative from Corwood Industries is an obscure, uncompromising musician who creates music where many would hear only noise.    His recordings have been prolific, releasing at least one album almost every year since 1978.

Jandek has given two phone interviews, one with Irwin Chusid in 1980 and a second with Spin in 1985.  In 1993, Kurt Cobain’s interview with Spin addressed Jandek: “He’s not pretentious, but only pretentious people like his music.”  Someone managed to track him down in 1999 but they were asked to have no one contact him again.

It wouldn’t be until 2004 before he revealed himself at a performance in Scotland. Since then Jandek has performed only a few times a year.  The Hollywood Theatre in Portland hosted Jandek once previously in 2006.

The Representative is private, and shields himself from press and fans by  the P.O. box of the label, Corwood Industries. You can learn a lot more about Jandek from his wikipedia page, though I would recommend Aaron Goldberg’s Postcards from the depths of a subrban wasteland, which serves as an approachable entry point for learning about Jandek.

The Tickets

I feel somewhat compelled to mention tickets for the show, which were sold only as physical items by the two Jackpot Records locations.  Given the hype around the matchup of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore with Jandek, you would have thought the tickets would have sold out earlier than the day of the show. Alas, before the show started there was still someone outside trying to lose their extras.  The show began a few minutes after 7pm with no opener.

The Setup

Jackpot Records owner, Issac Slusarenko took the stage and took a moment to read off a fairly lengthy list of sponsors of which I remember none.  Our seats were third row center, so we had a great view.  It was clear that Mr. Slusrenko was just a tad on edge, but who wouldn’t be giving an introduction for a living legend.  MC confidence aside we likely have Mr. Slusarenko to thank for the LP reissue of Jandek’s original release, Ready for the House.

Mr. Slusarenko made an appeal for everyone to turn off their ringers and that no one take photos or video of the performer.  He mentioned that the show was being recorded. I didn’t notice anyone misbehave, in fact people sat very still.

The stage was setup with amps and monitors for both Thurston and Jandek.  When they entered from stage right, they both carried their guitar cases and patch chords with them.  The audience applauded for a time and silence ensued as they spent about four minutes setting up their equipment.  They did not stop to retune instruments.

The Performance

Jandek wore lightly shined black shoes, black pants, a dark red shirt a watch and a hat.  Jandek is very thin.  His movements on stage seemed deliberate and could be broken up thusly: he vigorously played his guitar with his right hand.  His left was used to build chords.  He tapped his foot, though not in beat necessarily, and he bobbed and swayed seemingly independent of all other motion.

During the third and final song, Jandek sat down cross legged, somewhat facing his amplifier.  I got the sense that this was his natural practicing position.  Craning his body over his guitar, letting the loud sounds wash over his compacted physical form.

If you like Jandek I think it is important to watch him perform.  You need to be there and watch for when he finds a bit of the song to fixate on.  At those times, despite the dissonance and fog of war created by Thurston, you could hear progressions repeated. Hidden in the noise but set by the pace of his strumming I heard rock and roll.  Although sometimes the more trackable Jandek’s strumming would get, the more Thurston would challenge the audience with his own layer of sound.

Thurston Moore was a pleasure to watch, he seemed truly at home on stage with Jandek, which must speak to his own eccentricity as it does his knowledge of Jandek’s style.  On the second of the three songs performed, Jandek stopped about twenty seconds before Thurston, giving the audience and Jandek a chance to observe the musician close a song.  I’d say there would be a lot of pressure to make the right sounds yet Thurston made the the action seem easy.

I was lucky enough to be accompanied by my friend Lauren, who had heard about Jandek only the afternoon prior to the show.  In our ensuing discussion of what had transpired, we came to an agreement that Jandek’s music is sort of “sexy ugly.”  Sexy ugly is described by the Urban Dictionary as “someone who is not conventionally good-looking, but possesses an appealing personality, style or talent and is thus considered sexually attractive by many.”  Jandek’s music is something you might love to hate.

The End?

The end of the performance was very interesting.  A couple of things happened.  Jandek and Thurston stopped playing roughly at the same time.  During the applause, Thurston held his guitar and for the first time and looked intently at Jandek to see if the show was truly over.  Watching Thurston’s face you could see recognition that both the show was over and that Jandek was beginning to take down his equipment.  People were still clapping.

For the first time, Thurston walked across the stage and spoke to Jandek.  I am almost certain that he told Jandek to leave his guitar and that someone would come and take care of it, and that they should leave the stage.  Jandek appeared to smile and otherwise respond non-verbally, leaving his equipment and following Thurston back across the stage down the stairs and exiting stage right to continued applause.

The After Party

The set clocked in around 80 minutes and no one seemed willing to move until house music faded in indicating that no encore was forthcoming.  As people departed, I could not tell what the general reception was. It was like after a serious movie where people quietly share their opinions while filing out the doors. We did not linger, but instead proceed to the nearby Moon and Sixpence tavern.

Once arriving, I was told by a staff member that the table I had chosen was reserved.  I thought nothing of it and moved to another table in the bar sitting with my back to the front door.  We were nearly done with our drinks when all of a sudden Lauren’s eyes got really big and her body language said a lot.  Something big was happening behind me.

I waited quietly and low and behold a party of six took their seats right next to us, one of whom was Jandek himself.  I tweeted afterwards that the energy of having him come in and sit down and see him up close was pretty incredible.  It was strange to know that most of the people in the bar had no idea how rare and strange it was to see Jandek in a casual environment.  After a while the weird Jandek spell seemed to wear off so we stuck around for another drink to witness Jandek somehow blending in to the bar scene.

Epilogue

Seeing Jandek was something of a dream come true and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the edge of alternative music and capturing a rare performance.

Since the concert, I had a chance to visit with Gary Houston of Voo Doo Catbox to talk about Rock Show, an iPad app I’ve been working on.  Gary coincidentally did the limited run of 100 screen printed Jandek / Thurston Moore posters.  You can currently pick these up at one of the Jackpot Records stores here in Portland.

Apple enthusiasts are often quick to point out that the iPhone would run out of batteries too quickly or the processor would not be strong enough to support snappy use of multiple applications.  This proves true in testing a jailbroken iPhone.  But the iPad Apple tablet does not get the same defense.  The carefully touted A4 chip should have no problem running a sophisticated 3rd party application and the native mail client at the same time.

This is big trouble as more complex games for the device are introduced.  For example Grand Theft Auto, The China Town Wars, is a complex 3D game recently released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. GTA: CTW has the potential to lose mission progress by dropping you back to your apartment every time the game is left unexpectedly.  While this clearly negatively affects the gamer experience, imagine how frequent push notifications begging gamers to leave for just a moment will affect more persistent, longer-session games like World of Warcraft.

The A4 is pretty tough chip and conceivably should have the ability to safely run multiple iPhone and iPod Touch applications, if not the more weighty future iPad-specfic titles.  So why isn’t multitasking being allowed?

Apple does not want people to use streaming music services like Pandora and Last.fm until it is ready with its own cloud-based, Genius-powered streaming music recommendation engine a seamless listening experience through the iPod application and iTunes.

Currently, the only ways to play back audio while running another application (crippled multitasking) are:

• Using the iPod application
• Downloading an mp3 or other audio attachment from an email and hitting play. (Plays back from within the mail application)
• Downloading an mp3 or other audio from the web. (Safari plays it back)

Similarly, the only way to playback streaming audio is using the Last.fm application, the Pandora application or a few other apps that use a recommendation engine to create lists of songs you do not own and stream them to you.  If Apple were to allow you to playback Pandora today on the iPad and work with the iLife suite to author documents they will be training you not to use iTunes!

“But they can’t get away with that!” That’s right, they can’t.  That’s why Apple will introduce its cloud-based iTunes offering either before or in tandem with the release of the next generation iPhone this coming around June. Using the brains acquired in the purchase of Lala, Apple will be introducing a mixed-mode local and cloudbased listening experience where any iTunes music collection can be played back in part on the locally stored disk or streamed from the cloud using an iPad.

Apple will use Genius to identify and stream audio to iPad users in its own competitive play against Pandora and Last.fm.  Once a strong streaming, Genius-powered solution is available to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users future devices will be able to multi-task all applications, including the most threatening, streaming audio services.

Jobs made it a point to illustrate Apple has 125 million credit cards on file through iTunes.  Every streaming audio selection that is in turn bought by the user can be facilitated using that payment information.  Not the case with Pandora or Last.fm!  Denying these applications the ability to gain traction gives the iTunes ecosystem time to evolve to include their services.  This will make the future allowance of multitasking apps delivering this music less impactful in pulling users away from greatest cash cow in software’s history: iTunes.

Something I liked about the article was that it gave context to a technical social mashup idea I’ve been exploring, which is the increased use of near field communication (NFC) to increase one’s visibility in a meaningful way.  More specifically, people will use RFID tag readers in a mobile device like the iPhone to alert the world of their participation in entertainment experiences.

In The End of Solitude, Deresiewicz suggests the culture of celebrity is connected to the video camera, which I connect to broadcast television.  Regretfully, in the year when we could least afford it, reality TV gave rise to pointless distractions like the Balloon Boy and the White House Party Crashers.  But the article also describes the culture of connectivity as a product of the evolving use of computers and mobile communications in society.  As something of an evangelist for new media and a critique of old media, it is somewhat humbling for me to read Deresiewicz’s grouping of celebrity with connectivity in the contemporary self:

“Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.  It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

The value of different participatory entertainment activities runs the gamut.  A film at your local movie theater requires you to only buy a ticket before the film is sold out and ensure you show up at the scheduled time.  Getting yourself twenty feet from the stage at The Dead on July 4th at Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan requires a significantly greater level of planning.  But the relative interest in the social grid in any given activity is less important than the simple declaration to the post modern self that you “did it.”  People want to shout from the top of their literal or figurative mountains, “I am about to (or have just)  ____ at _____.”

Given that a lot of people love to share their experiences, many are simply limited by the inconvenience.  I’ve given some detail to my sense that there is a big splash still yet to be made by Apple’s touch platform.  And that the Touch lineup of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iSlate we will see a revolution in mobile computing.  They will allow us to enjoy the impulses of the modern self which are to take part in connectivity and some element of celebrity.

A topic that hasn’t been explored enough is the effect of including an RFID reader in a breakthrough device like the iPhone.  There is reason to believe that an RFID reader will be incorporated in the near future.   I believe that the inclusion of such hardware will open up opportunities to more quickly identify and disseminate interesting information about the entertainment spaces we’re inhabiting.

To illustrate a point, when I was writing the above paragraph I searched twitter for “Sherlock Holmes” which premiered this past weekend.  The third tweet from the top was from a student I’ve never heard of or met named Nicholas King.  From his Twitter bio, we know Nicholas is a student at Eastern Michigan and studies business.  Quite simply, Nicholas tweeted:

A quick search reveals that Trillium is a cinemas in Grand Blanc, Michigan and Nick was keeping his followers up to date with a text message from his phone.  While a text message accomplishes the goal of updating his thirty or so followers, it falls down for a few reasons:

1. Part of being fully connected is also having your information quickly sorted and grouped with similar data.  Twitter provides a reverse method for grouping information through its search.twitter.com functionality.  Users are capable of directly grouping their tweets with hashtags.  Both of those methods suffer the potential for data entry error.  I wouldn’t have known about Nick’s experience achievement if he had spelled it “Shelock Holmes.”
2. Manually updating your followers with the activity you’re participating in requires extended effort.  If you’re walking in the door of an RJD2 show you might have a drink in one hand and a gaggle of pals pulling you forward with the other. It isn’t always possible or at least socially acceptable to whip out your phone and type out an update.

The concept is this.  Sherlock Holmes is being distributed to theaters by Warner Bros Pictures.  In addition to sending out reels of film, Warner Bros would also send a small stand up display that is to be placed near the entrance to the theatre showing the movie.  If Nick carried an iPhone with an RFID reader, he would need only to wave his phone at the entrance and it would automatically pick up his preferences for sharing his location and the movie title he’s seeing via Twitter or Facebook.  More interesting things would be to automatically enter you in a contest for people who attended an Sherlock Holmes on opening weekend.

Another illustration to the benefits of adding an RFID reader to the iPhone in the realm of participatory entertainment is in live music or very large public entertainment events.  For instance, scanning the RFID tag in your section at a football game will identify the mobile capability to an application that could cue everyone to hold up their phones at a given time, display a particular set of images on the screen and turn the entire stadium into a megatron.  At a music festival like Rothbury, it might allow people to collect virtual zoo keys which turn an already amazing Sherwood Forest into something that is digitally enchanted.

The total extent to what could be done with connected devices incorporating RFID tags in combination with the impulse to reinforce personal visibility is impossible to see right now.  What is clear is that culture, technology and the increasing value of participatory entertainment rapidly is converging with all-in-one devices like the iPhone and iSlate.

Update 12/30/09:  A few additional things: 1. There is a strong sense that RFID will be most valuable for payment and wireless financial transactions.  The basis of my interest in RFID has been from seeing the NFC-enabled registers at places like McDonalds and Regal Cinemas.   When I first started seeing them, I would ask how often they took payment using the NFC at POS and I’d get blank stares from the employees.  MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay have been around for a while but have mostly only survived market tests as far as I can tell.

To look at how NFC/RFID payments and entertainment overlap, I love what it could do to damage the secondary ticket market.  I’ve long felt that secondary ticketing and scalping does more harm than good on the average would-be live entertainment participant.  Locking tickets to phones is a great way to help track and possibly reduce scalping while still allowing some flexibility in transferability.

There are some articles about how an RFID, NFC enabled phone are useful outside of entertainment which are worth linking to.  Here’s one that simply gooses the idea.  Here’s a second article that talks explicitly in terms of marketing opportunities.

I showed Dave a print of an owl in a suit I bought at  Crafty Wonderland barely touching on variety in the vendors and size of the crowds out that day to explore the local fare.  I remember walking among the booths, looking at a velvet painting of Michael Jackson and hearing The Thermals playing overhead.  It was Portland art celebrating Portland art.

Something I’ve noticed through an array of networking and business meetings I’ve set up is that Portland has attracted a powerhouse of technological and artistic talent.  There aren’t a lot of jobs, but there is a creative class of people ambitious to combine creativity with entrepreneurial behavior to produce amazing things. This is starting to attract publicity.

James Mercer, The Shins and Broken Bells

What does all this have to do with Broken Bells? Let’s take a look at the context around the release.  James Mercer, frontman for The Shins, decided to move to Portland a few years back. Recently keyboardist Marty Crandall and Drummer Jesse Sandoval were replaced by by Fruit Bats’ bassist Ron Lewis and Modest Mouse’s Joe Plummer.

Mercer suggested in May that a new Shins album could come in early 2010, but then in September announced a collaborative project with Brian Joseph Burton aka Dangermouse titled Broken Bells. The release of the first single off Broken Bells, “The High Road” on the 21st of this month was quickly overshadowed by what some are calling the “best Christmas present ever,” the complete leak of the album.

One listen and it is clear that Mercer aimed for and delivered a dashing mix of phonics and verse, doing well to combine his creative style with a bang up set of instrumentation from Burton.  When the album makes its official debut it is certain to be a hit.

In light of this new work it seems hard to believe a new Shins album will be dropping any time soon.  And to celebrate Broken Bells as a Portland achievement hold less water than to simply say it is heavily in association with the city.  The idea that Portland would influence the creation of an effort like Broken Bells seems to jive with what I’m seeing on the ground.  There are no doubt wonderful things yet to come from this city and I’m excited to see what else shakes out.

I struggled with April’s song of the month, “Gifted,” which appears on the album  Spirit of Apollo by N.A.S.A.  N.A.S.A (North America / South America) is a project of Sam Spiegel aka Squeak E. Clean and  Brazilian DJ Zego spent five years assembling a gang of artists spilling across genres.

Performers on this record include:  George Clinton, David Byrne, Cee-Lo, Seu Jorge, Sean Lennon, RHCP, Tom Waits, Ol’ Dirty, RZA, Method Man, oh and Kanye West.

The struggle with choosing “Gifted” was that Kanye is on the track.  I was into Kanye before he failed his Bonnaroo performance so miserably in 2008.  Since then, I’ve felt the inclination to leave a room where his music is playing at a party.

Then South Park came and swatted Kanye down this past week.  It was a public thrashing that no one else could deliver, because he admitted to bad behavior and said “I need to just get past myself.  Drop the bravado and just make dope product.”

Speaking of the astounding effect of animation, the music video forGifted is an awesome work by Three Legged Legs.  Done in just three weeks, they put together a story of a crashlanded spaceman stuck on a deserted planet.  It has a sort of a Heavy Metal feel only scarier.  A full writeup on the video is available on their website.  They also have a full HD version available for download.

Congrats to everyone who went into creating Gifted and for Kanye for just barely not screwing it up for everyone.

For now I wanted to push down my last post about gmail being down with something suitably awesome.  Just before leaving for Norway, my pal Rob Teel tipped me off to a new music video from Peter Bjorn and John titled, “Nothing to Worry About.”

A comment by “Joe” on Booooom.com described it thus:  ”These guys are in their element, and they put alot of their money into it, but they feel relax and have no worries when they are doing their thing.

Others would call them crazy for their lifestyle but it’s what they want and like th lyrics says: aint got nothing to worry about.”

I don’t think I can put it much better than that. This serves as the song of the month for March.