Updates and Such-like

It's been a busy month. A busy, busy month. This fella is something we bought a while ago with our tax return, but I love it so, and thought I'd post a bit about it. It's a full 88 weighted keys that feel very much like a real live piano, and the sounds it makes are quite satisfactorily piano-y as well. It has MIDI outs, so I can theoretically plug into the computer and record various things as I think of music. While nothing can replace the creaks and warmth of an ancient, slightly out-of-tune upright piano, this is a perfectly great digital stand-in for now.

Other (not really that momentous) events:

We now have a second car, so exploring a wider area of the city during the day is possible. Thrills! I'd like to do some camera excursions in order to take photos with which to play with HDR and fake tilt-shift photography. I will not let the ridiculously awesome examples of these things I've seen online make me throw up my hands and read a book instead.

Holy cripes! I went to the dentist today. For the first time in...well, a shamefully long time (as in, years). Thankfully, (and somewhat shockingly) there was absolutely nothing wrong with my teeth a little plaque removal didn't fix.

Speaking of teef, this is a sweet little comic I linked from Facebook a little while ago. I really wish I knew where the little ceramic figurines came from. I know they're vintage, but I had no luck finding out about them online.

Speaking of Facebook, that's where I've mostly been in the past while. Because of my lack of time, bite (or byte--haw haw) sized updates are what work best right now. The ability to pop online, check on what people are up to, dash through a sentence-sized updated and be off... is a good thing at the moment.

Projects currently on the go:

I found a shirt I particularly liked the cut of, except that that fabric was super-cheap and kept getting holes in it. So I dissected the shirt, made a pattern from it, and have been working on modifying it to make new shirts. It's actually pretty simple, but I'm sure I'll manage to screw it up somehow. I've done one new shirt so far. It turned out okay for a first attempt, and I see what I need to change next time around. At $1.25 / yd, it's not very costly to make a mistake.

I've also gotten some t-shirts and fabric paint and will be doing some shirt illustrating. Hopefully there'll be something decent enough to post a picture of.

Miniatures: The Boy bought a bunch of tiny Eldar Army figurines which need to be assembled and painted. Since he would like the stategy-gaming with them, and I would like the painting better, guess who's doing what?

Homemade flaxseed hair gel: I know this sounds kind of awful. I was talking to a sister today about exactly what chemicals we dump onto our scalps, and after consulting the Internets, I figured I'd try making something a little more simple. If you've ever eaten a plain Flaxseed, you've probably noticed they're a little ...slippery is a good way to describe them, I guess. It's very slightly tacky, and has a very slight oiliness to it. Mostly, it's just slick. It shares the same properties as silicone, which is in a lot of the styling products I use for curly or frizzy hair.

When boiled, Flaxseed (or Linseed in England) emits a substance that thickens the liquid and makes it usable as a de-frizzing gel. You can cook it to the right consistency, strain the actual seeds out, cool it down, and add essential oils for a nice smell. The flax seeds are re-boilable as well. You can keep them in the fridge and boil them three of four times before they "stop working." If you leave it cooking on the stove, it practically turns into a firm jello, I hear. (Off-topic--I wonder if that would be a tasty base for vegan jello rather than animal based gelatin? ) I picked up some seeds tonight, and I'll be boiling them down tomorrow. I'll try to do picture documentation, and I'll relate my findings.

And now...bed, bed, bed.

Little Quail

Here's a sweet little thing... It's a tiny zither. From the info I've been able to find on them, they're often made of birch or ash (this one seems to be birch?), and they have several names throughout the world--board zither, kantele, lap harp, etc. This one is a simple little instrument with 15 strings (7 wrapped around to double up, and one single) and tuned to either G or C major. It hails from Belarus via Перепелочка (or Perepelochka), whose logos I've discovered I love. Perepelochka means "Little bird" or "little quail" in Russian, and is also the name of a traditional Russian folk song. (Sadly, the zither is not represented in the recording I linked, though it is a fun song.)

It'll be interesting to see what sorts of sounds I can get out of this little fella.

A Lovely Little Diversion: Auditorium

We all just have too much time on our hands, right? I mean, the holidays are coming up, and we're just sitting around, completely done with everything we need to do. Not an ounce of stress or busyness.

Really, what we need is a time waster. Yes. Too much time is certainly a problem, but I'm here to help.

Here is a lovely little gem of a game for you. Auditorium is very pretty process that requires you to simply move spheres around to redirect the flow (Of water? Energy? Do not question.) through little blocks of audio levels to activate the sounds they contain. You can increase or decrease the size of the spheres for different effects. The whole thing is rather mesmerizing and meditative.

Big in Japan. And Texas. (and in my house)

Bravo to El Paso, Texas for being cool enough to surprise Tom Waits onstage and present him with a key to the city.

Apparently, during the show, Mr. Waits had just finished pounding away at the piano when a uniformed officer of the El Paso Police department walked onstage to announce the presentation from an El Paso council woman, who came onstage and presented a nicely mounted key to the city to Good Ol' Tom as the crowd roared in applause. Despite the surprise, Mr. Waits kept his characteristic quick wit, thanking the city and saying,

"Apparently this fits every lock in El Paso. If you find me in your living room in my underwear, we have an understanding."

Proof of Keenness

And as a follow-up to the below post, here's one of my favorite songs from the hardworking Mr. Bird at the moment.

The good stuff

RCRD LBL is an online record label (Surpise! Vowels!) that offers free MP3 downloads of its artists in true hipster fashion. In fact, here is one of my current favorite songs from Caribou. Here. He looks like a high school science teacher, but in fact, he makes lush and lovely music.

While you are listening, why not read a book? I'm currently reading The Terror, by Dan Simmons. It tells the story of the 1845 Franklin Expedition to the Arctic to search for the Northwest passage using the two steamships, The HMS Erubus, and The HMS Terror. There is a lot of ice involved. So far, I have needed to curl up in very warm blankets in order to read it. It's vaguely a historical novel, however, I'm not sure whatever it is that is plaguing the two ships in their ill-fated voyage is entirely natural. The story so far is intelligent, interesting, and creepy.

The fortitude of the men traveling to the far reaches of the globe so long ago must have been incredible. Imagine voluntarily sailing off, knowing it would be years before you'd see home again, and knowing there was a strong possibility you'd be burying some of your friends and crewmates at sea, or chipping into the arctic ice in an effort to put their bodies to rest.

Now, (unless you're WomanNorth, and you didn't need to imagine the Arctic) stop imagining, and make yourself a nice cup of steaming hot cocoa.

Mesmerizing

Solar from flight404 on Vimeo.

People have been making lovely music visualizations using Processing 1.0. Here's one from a user called flight404 on Vimeo.

The Darkest Night of the Year

So, it being Christmas-time, and this being Cincinnati, this Saturday we made the first step in what we hope will be a long-standing tradition of yearly attendance at the homecoming (from tour) show put on by Over the Rhine at the Taft Theater. The show was breathtakingly lovely, as is the norm for OTR, though I hadn't seen them in several years.

It's been so long since we've been to a proper show. There are several potential opportunities coming up, though, so we'll have to get off our duffs and go to one or more. Yo La Tengo, the Bravery, Band of Horses, etc. We're lousy hipsters. Not that that's anything new.

Speaking of musics and such-lot, I've added a last.fm player to the blog here. I'm having a bit of fun with that, since it logs everything you listen to, making it possible to create playlists and "radio stations" of your songs online from whatever ones they also have in the Last.fm library. I have high hopes, though undoubtedly the player will pick out some random embarrassing song and just play that over and over. I'll regret forever looking up the theme song for "Hong Kong Phooey" or whatever. Actually though, I'm sure what you'll find is a big chunk of Christmas music, since I just loaded the player this week, and have been listening to a lot of Sufjan Stevens holiday songs. Hopefully you'll find it gets more diverse eventually.

Something to look forward to

I think I posted about the Music Now Festival previously, specifically about the most excellent Take Away Show with Sufjan Stevens filmed at it. Well, planning is underway for the third incarnation of the festival in 2008, and I'm twitchy and excited about it already.

I haven't yet been to Memorial Hall, where the last festival was held, but it looks like a pretty stunning place. It's about 15 minutes from where we live, which makes it all the more excellent.

We found out recently that The National are from Cincinnati, which would explain their involvement in the project.

A Lovely Noise

Lately I've been listening to a lot of Gravenhurst. There's something about those bell-like vocals and the something between Nick Drake and Creation Records era shoegaze that is just tasty.

Below is a Take Away Show Gravenhurst did for La Blogothèque. I recommend browsing around that site any time. I love it, and it's a great way to find interesting music and get to know musicians in a more simple and personal setting. (on that note, they've just done a neat set of songs with Loney Dear in Paris. We saw Loney Dear with Low back in the spring, and I've been curious about them since.)



And here is a pretty little film Gravenhurst made using a Super8 camera. It's slightly "collegy," but the song is lovely, though it sort of cuts off a but abruptly at the end.



I do recommend taking a look at their other videos on Youtube. It's good Autumn music.

A City Like Cincinnati

The most recent Take Away Show from La Blogothèque is their fiftieth, and they determined to make it something special. My, but they've suceeded.

It was filmed in Memorial Hall--one of Cincinnati's old concert venues--a meandering walk behind the scenes, beginning on the roof, and wandering down through dusty storage rooms filled with antique chairs to find the Czech duo, Havlovi quietly making music amongst forgotten set pieces. As their song fades out, the watcher is slowly drawn down the hall to find Sufjan Stevens plucking a delicate and solomn song next to a window, and so on and on, we stumble onto one gorgeous, quiet performance after another, as if we were walking on a lazy afternoon through a beautiful, rambling building with people who just happened to be performing in every stairwell and nook.

Also included on the page is a lovely film of Sufjan Stevens up on the roof of the building singing The Lakes of Canada by Innocence Mission.

All the Take Away Shows are special (see The Arcade Fire, and Alan Sparhawk particularly), but this 50th one just swept me along with it.

I Wanna Tell the Stars to Get in Line

Recently, as I was poking through the archives of Dresden Codak (which could deserve a post of its own), I noticed a link directing me to the site of the band Balthrop, Alabama. I dutifully clicked, and was rewarded with the discovery of some free and interesting music.

If you sign up for their mailing list, you receive a link to download their double cd debut album, "Your Big Plans & Our Little Town." I think that is very cool of them to offer. Way to acknowlege the digital era, guys (not sarcastic). No matter what their music sounds like, I'd have to give them props for that. So...um...Go Balthrop, Alabama!

As things turned out, I was pleasantly surprised. I'm actually listening to the album right now, and quite enjoying it. There's a pretty big range of influences packed in there, so it's difficult to just drop a couple references to describe it. Imagine a hearty dose of the irony and melodic-ness (is that a word?) of Belle and Sebastian, with occasional pretty boy/girl harmonies and horns that also vaguely remind me of our Scottish pals, along with a few touches of the lazy, cracky vocals of Songs: Ohia (which does tend to grate on occasional songs), and the nonchalant flow of My Morning Jacket, and occasional inklings of early REM.

It's part acoustic, part americana, part indie-rock, and most of it is just a treat. A couple of the songs I could live without, but that's pretty par for the course when it comes to any double disc album. Balthrop, Alabama have done themselves proud here, especially for a debut. I recommend the songs "Tell the Stars" for a happy, vintage pop experience, and "Another Hell to Live In" for a melodic, lazy, americana-tinged experience.

And, uh.. heck - just give it all a listen.