(Fortune Magazine) — One of the bright spots in the troubled record industry has been licensing songs to videogames like “Guitar Hero” that enable users to play along with the classics. Now music-networking sites are looking to jump on the trend by letting fans contribute to rock stars’ albums.
Veteran producer Scott Humphrey, who has worked with Rob Zombie and the Crystal Method, launched a site in September called the Public Record that invites users to collaborate with Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee on his new album.
Every week Lee posts his own “stems,” which are stripped-down song components such as vocals and drum tracks. Fans submit homemade parts to complete the songs, and Lee chooses his favorites to mix into them. All submissions become his property. [CNN Money]
Port O’Brien’s second studio album sounds just fine coming out of computer speakers or iPod headphones, but the best way to appreciate these darkly ambient, heartily ramshackle indie-folk songs is around a campfire. Working with Earlimart’s Aaron Espinoza, the band stitch together threads of hearty Pacific Northwest indie, West Coast rock, and rustic creak-folk to create a loose, at times uneasy intimacy that allows for murky ambience as well as raucous sing-alongs.
Van Pierszalowski still strains earnestly, adding gravity to “Oslo Campfire” and “Sour Milk/Salt Water,” but it’s Cambria Goodwin—a greater presence here than on previous outings—sews the most intriguing patterns on “Tree Bones” and “High Without Hope 3,” her spectral vocals at times barely discernible but commanding in their otherworldliness. Again addressing themes of geographical and emotional isolation, Threadbare sounds like a band trying to find its place in the world, whether on land or at sea. [Paste Magazine]
In the late days of June 2007, R.E.M. hunkered down at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. For the week that followed they performed a series of shows (dubbed the “experiment in terror”) featuring some entirely new songs that would eventually be released on Accelerate. The fruits of these sessions have given birth to R.E.M. Live at The Olympia, a 2-CD, 39-song live album just announced for an Oct. 26 release.
A special edition release of the album will include a live DVD of the shows, filmed by the duo Vincent Moon and Jeremiah. The two last worked with the band on the video archive Ninetynights, documentary Six Days, and the video for “Supernatural Superserious.” A streaming preview of the album is available over at the R.E.M. Dublin website. R.E.M. Live at The Olympia is out Oct. 26 on Warner Bros. [Paste Magazine]
As we’ve gotten to know Bradford Cox over the last couple of years through shows, interviews, and blog posts, one of the Deerhunter frontman’s most appealing qualities is his deep and nuanced appreciation of the music of others. Some musicians listen to records to see how they work, check out the competition, or trawl for ideas; by all available evidence, Cox feels records, deeply. If he was born without musical gifts and couldn’t sing or play an instrument, one can imagine him working at a record store, amassing an enviable collection while driving people on a message board crazy with the sureness of his detailed opinions. Whatever you think of his exploits as an indie rock media figure, Cox’s music fandom is easy to identify with and also offers a portal into his own work. [More]
YouTube is continuing its push into the live video streaming realm, despite assurances it gave last year that it wouldn’t enter the space because it was too expensive.
The Google-owned video website has streamed the Outside Lands concert and an Obama press conference in recent months, but now it’s going to stream the Rose Bowl concert of one of the world’s most popular bands: U2
The live streaming event, which begins on Sunday, October 25th at 8:30 PM PT, will be available in 16 countries. The live feed will be available on the U2 Official Channel, and feature a live Twitter feed of chatter about the concert, exactly like what the company did for its full-length viewing of Taxi Driver.
A U2 concert is one of the best events to live stream, in our opinion, given the band’s massive popularity. The question we’re still asking is: What exactly is the company’s plan with live streaming? In the meantime, we want to know: will you watch the concert? Let us know in the comments. [Mashable]
On early listens, I’m enjoying “Hearing Damage” a lot more than much of the other product from Thom Yorke’s recent “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses” 12″, simply because it’s more direct. “Damage” is as compact as one would expect a Yorke song from Twilight: New Moon soundtrack to be: Rather than go for broke by ramping up the the dissonance, running the vocals backwards, or throwing the whole thing into some weird time signature, “Hearing Damage” remains relatively straight-laced. Its wobbled synths, formidable low-end, and echo-spiked vocals (“A tear in my brain allows the voices in,” etc.) are all wrapped up tidily in 4/4. Surely this wasn’t going to curry much favor with your niece anyways, so why try and attempt to edge out Death Cab for bedroom wall space in the face of “Meet Me on the Equinox”? [More]
[Audio http://social-digest.com/massmusic-mp3/thom-yorke-hearing-damage.mp3]
According to postage stamp collector site (!) Norvic Philatelics, ten (mostly) classic British albums covers will get turned into UK stamps on January 7, 2010. (Via NME)
As pictured above, they are (clockwise from top left): Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head, Blur’s Parklife, New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies, the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Led Zeppelin’s IV, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, and the Clash’s London Calling. Massive Mike Oldfield fans over at England’s stamp headquarters, apparently. [More]
photo by Lindsey Best
According to an L.A. Times report, the Flaming Lips are set to follow-up their life- (and death)-affirming LP Embryonic with a full-album redo of Pink Floyd‘s gazillion-selling 1973 psych-rock classic Dark Side of the Moon.
The Lips version of Dark Side is a collaboration with the band Stardeath and White Dwarfs (which includes Wayne Coyne’s nephew Dennis Coyne as a member), and features guest spots from Henry Rollins and Peaches. It will most probably be an iTunes-only release. [More]
Who: Band of Skulls, a British trio whose shit-kicking, bare-bones brand of gritty rock & roll earned them a spot on the hugely anticipated soundtrack to the next Twilight movie, New Moon.
Sounds Like: White Stripes fans will dig Band of Skulls’ swampy, heavily blues-influenced jams, especially the psychedelic stomp of “Light of the Morning” and the hard-charging “I Know What I Am.” But these guys aren’t just blues-rock formalists: they occasionally veer into complex prog-rock territory on tracks like the sprawling, appropriately-titled “Impossible.” [More]
Here’s one for fans of the late, great Unsolved Mysteries (and the still-crankin’, not quite as great Ghost Hunters): A photograph taken in 1997 at the French cemetery where Doors frontman Jim Morrison is buried features a ghostly apparition that appears to be Morrison. Are you with us? We may lose you here: the photo has been deemed authentic, the U.K.’s Daily Express reports (via Spinner). The snapshot shows rock historian Brett Meisner standing next to Morrison’s grave at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, and in the background, there’s a white figure with its arms seemingly outstretched. Apparently, Morrison did break on through to the other side. [More]
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