skud

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

• How Headphones Changed the World – "A short philosophical history of personal music", at The Atlantic
• Amanda Palmer And Steve Albini On ‘Piracy’: It Only Helps Musicians – Surprise! (NB: not actually surprising) Steve Albini "rejects the term piracy" and thinks sharing music for free helps musicians, especially those who tour and play lots of live gigs. BTW, if you've never read Steve's rant about where money goes when you sign with a major label (linked from this article) then you definitely should.
• A respose to Tom Tom’s OSM FUD – Tom Tom (the satnav provider) tries to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about OpenStreetMap; here's a great takedown of their claims. Via David Gerard.
• Commodore 64 Bass Guitar by Jeri Ellsworth – A bass guitar made out of an old C64. Nuff said.
• Internet Arbitration | Judge.me – I honestly don't know whether this is an excellent disruption of a broken system, or a sign that we're heading even faster into an SFnal dystopian future. The fact you can pay by bitcoin makes me think the latter's more likely.

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Friday night, my friend Molly and I went to see Zoe Keating and Kaki King performing at Yoshi’s, and I wanted to take a moment to rec both of these amazing artists.

Zoe Keating is an avant-garde cellist whose work I discovered when hunting for music for a Sherlock Holmes fanvid. She uses her cello, her Macbook, and an array of pedals to loop layers of sound over each other, building atmospheric, haunting music. You can see her doing it live in this video of her playing “Escape Artist”, which (she said on Friday night) is about running away to the forest, or possibly from the forest:

During Friday’s show, Zoe described Kaki King as “the only guitarist in the world who I’d let surround me with a bunch of guitars on stage,” which I guess means something coming from a cellist. Kaki plays a range of different guitars, most of them strange, like the seriously freaky-looking harp guitar or the 7-stringed, fan-fretted guitar she had custom made and showed off during her performance. She had about 5 different guitars, in total, for her performance. Her playing style is rhythmic and unusual, and I spent most of the time at the show thinking “how the hell does she do that?” Check this out:

Zoe and Kaki have finished up their tour now — Friday was the second last date on it — but if you get the chance to see either of them perform live next time they come round, I highly recommend it.