Archive for the 'Music' Category

Portugal. The Man, again

Published
by
richard
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Music
. 0 Comments

Went and saw Portugal.The Man again, this time at WUK. The venue is a bit smaller and doesn’t have the sound system of Flex, but I like it better, not least due to the absence of superfluous security “guarding” whatever there is to guard.

The concert was everything and more I expected it to be. Even the support was amazing, an Austrian collective by the name of Steaming Satellites. This being an entry about music, I guess images don’t to the whole event justice, but still, I took pictures, not least because I can’t help it and also because I like to fatten up my meagre writing with graphics. People like graphics, I’ve read once. So, here goes:

Steaming Satellites

Steaming Satellites

The Steaming Satellites. It took a song or two for them, or us, to warm up, but in the end they did a fantastic job getting people all hot and bothered for Portugal.The Man.

Portugal.The Man

Portugal.The Man

Well, those are the only photos I managed to take during the actual concert. It was wild, it was noisy and their rendition of Helter Skelter took my shoes off. Well, not literally. Actually, literally. No, I’m just kidding. It’s a metaphor.

Portugal. The Lights Fog Accountant Man

Finally, after the concert, we managed to get ahold of one of the band-members. You wouldn’t believe it, but not only does he rock the stage with lights and fog, he’s also something like an accountant for the band. He was most gracious, but after I took his picture, he hurried back into the venue to do money stuff. I just hope he’s not on the run. If he is, I’m sorry for blowing his cover. But hey, touring with a band when you’re on the run? Not such a good idea, unless the band is called James-Younger Gang and you’re Jesse James. In which case the whole band is on the run, so playing public concerts would be out of the question, and they’d rather be interested in robbing banks than covering the Beatles. I guess.

Jazz

Published
by
richard
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Music and Savoir Vivre
. 0 Comments

The Jazzfest Wien is very generous. They invite artists to play and people don’t even have to pay to see them. Like yesterday, when we went and saw Melody Gardot, a 23 year old singer with quite a past.

The bluesy jazz she sang was betrayed by her rather witty, self-deprecating demeanor on stage. Her band, consisting of three black-clad guys, looked like they were having a really good time too.

With the concert being free of charge, the audience was not ideal, but fortunately, the accustics in front of the city hall are remarkably crisp, where even the hushed notes were discernible. Thus, even the fucking cunt (excuse my French, but the Internets is where I can vent. In real life I’m far too timid) behind us who couldn’t stop blabbing away on her phone about the “super jazz” she was listening to right now, wasn’t that much of a problem.

Here’s photos:
Jazz
The bass player is the proud owner of the best beard of all times.

Jazz II
Melody Gardot forgot, or maybe pretended to, the chords and lyrics to a song they were about to play. Very charming.

Dance!

Published
by
richard
6 months ago
in Impressions and Music
. 1 Comment

Just to assure you that I’m not just yet a raging alcoholic, I’ll post a little clip of me taping what can only be described as music somewhere in the streets outside our window. Please note the shaking of the camera, imitating what it would have looked like had I danced to the music:

Here’s to NIN

Published
by
richard
7 months, 1 week ago
in Music
. 2 Comments

Do you remember when Radiohead released their latest album online, giving it away for whatever price people saw fit? Well, NIN just did the same, with the difference that unlike Radiohead, you can download their newest album “Ghosts” via BitTorrent, without having to go through a credit-card transaction (even though people could opt for paying nothing, they still had to pay the transaction fee…which I think is perfectly alright, it’s just more hassle than just firing up your preferred torrent-client).

And here’s another difference: while the Radiohead album In Rainbows was a full download, NIN only gives away the first 9 songs of the album for free. But as Mashable reports, you can download a longer version of the album on the NIN website for 5$ or buy the physical album for 10$ or buy limited super-deluxe hyper versions for 70 or 300$. It should be noted that the 5$ download of the complete album is accompanied by a 40 page PDF booklet and a whole lot of artwork. Apart from the mp3s, Radiohead’s download contained nothing at all, not even a cover-image (spawning contests for coverart, like here). And what else should be noted is that 10$ for a whole 2CD-album AND a link for immediate download of the whole album is a fucking steal (shipping and handling is 13$, at least to Vienna, but that’s still not more expensive than I’d normally pay for a physical album).

So here you go. Yet another one of the biggest bands of our days has decided to leverage what power, fame and fortune they have to totally revolutionize how music is distributed. Fantastic!

Last.fm subscriptions - worth it?

Published
by
richard
7 months, 3 weeks ago
in Internet and Music
. 3 Comments

A posting on Michael Kamleitner’s blog once again brought to my attention last.fm’s subscription model. Next to Flickr and Diigo, last.fm is one of the rare services I actually use daily. And apart from Flickr, there is no webservice I’m actually paying money for.

The question is, why change that by paying 2,50€/month for last.fm? Well, here are the reasons given by last.fm:

Subscription Benefits

  1. Blue icon status
    Trade your grey user icon in for a blue one.
  2. No ads
    You won’t see them; visitors to your page won’t see them. No one will, because they won’t exist.
  3. Recent Visitors
    See who’s been visiting your profile page.
  4. Personal radio paradise
    Turn your profile page and tags into a portable radio station you and others can listen to from anywhere. It’s like a smart playlist for the music you’ve tagged.
  5. Share the Love
    Your “Loved Tracks” become a listenable radio station for you and others.
  6. Red carpet treatment
    Get top priority with our webservers and radio servers at peak traffic times.
  7. Top secret beta access
    Be the first to know and try what we’re working on and help shape the development of the site. You’ll see a subscriber-only announcement during beta.

Well, here’s what I think:

  1. The Blue icon really does have me sold already. That’s it, I’m buying!
  2. That I like. Even though, quite frankly, certain Firefox plugins take care of that already.
  3. That I like as well. I love knowing who’s been checking out my sexy music collection, so that’s worth at least, say, 0,5€.
  4. This is it, that’s one reason that’ll make me pay, if I decide to. The current radio limitations for unpaid members are a drag.
  5. That’s where the last.fm marketing guy cheated a bit. Because, actually, that’s part of the above point. Still worth 0,5€.
  6. Considering that the last.fm website is sometimes so slow, it makes a snail look fast (pretty good image, right? witty even), this one is worth the 2,50€ alone.*
  7. You know me, I like me a bit of secret betas once in a while. I can’t really say how much that is worth, as I haven’t ever paid for access to betas (it’s unfinished software after all), but I’ll give it a symbolic 0,1 €. *Selling tolerable speed is actually a bit cheeky. Not able to scale your service? Not my problem. In the end though, you won’t get more speed by complaining, so you might as well hand over those 2,5€.

Well, after this lengthy and thorough analysis, a last.fm subscription actually adds up to 6,1€. Which is considerably more than 2,5€, in case you haven’t noticed.

So, teleologically speaking, a last.fm subscription is worth it. Which of course doesn’t mean I’ll buy it, but at least I won’t feel like a total ass once I do.

Any subjective opinions out there as well? Leave them in the comments!

Update: I just ventured forth and subscribed for a month. Doing is better than blogging, as the old saying goes. I’ll see how I like it.

Stormgrass is powered by WordPress 2.6.1 and K2