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Drunk Dial 2

Posted in Music on July 8th, 2009 by Toby – 1 Comment

Sundialtone - Drunk Dial 2 (Half Price Special).mp3

Sundialtone - Drunk Dial 2 (Instrumental).mp3

Swimming in the Ocean

Posted in Music on June 28th, 2009 by Toby – Be the first to comment

Sundialtone - Swimming in the Ocean.mp3

Non-Stop Metro

Posted in Music on June 16th, 2009 by Toby – 2 Comments

Sundialtone - Non-Stop Metro.mp3

Sharpened Art

Posted in Art, Movies, Music on May 21st, 2009 by Toby – Be the first to comment

Momus is one of my favorite songwriters. (He’s also a favorite of Belle & Sebastian, Of Montreal, and Vampire Weekend). I got into Momus through his connections with Cornelius and Kahimi Karie. He had a couple top tens in Japan with the songs he wrote for K.

Last night I saw Momus, accompanied by ipod, chronologically karaoke through a career-spanning retrospective. I knew about half the songs. All of the backing arrangements were completely fresh to me though.

Throughout the performance, Aki Sasamoto did interpretive dance dressed as a Kubuki stagehand. Aki is an amazing, intuitive dancer! I especially liked when she started taking all the spare mic stands in back and ceremoniously adjusting and arranging them on stage. She and Momus have a great dynamic together, playing with the fact that you know they’re making it up as they go long. They are fresh out of a long-running improvisational performance piece in New York.

I think what makes Momus special is that he can sustain an idea (usually a language-formal idea or literary-cultural comment) for several verses while consistently keeping the language pushed to its limit, never wasting a word. His melodies and arrangements always support the lyrics absolutely (he’s strongly words first, music second). And his choruses never disappoint (a problem with many other talented songwriters).

It always amazes me to see an artist present a singular concept while pulling all the stops constantly, effortlessly. Roman Polanski does this for me too. His movies are full of cinematic memes, like the creepy guy hiding in a private space glimpsed in a mirror and then he’s not there, the voyeuristic neighbor in the background who watches the main action until he’s spotted, or the camera following a character through a busy street with jazz in the soundtrack (all examples from Repulsion). But these effects are always done in service of the story, never for their own sake.

All too often in my own creative endeavors, I think of an effect and build a piece around that, whereas I should start with a concept and use effects to enable the concept to be born. I suppose the key is to internalize a repertoire through practice and experience, to make it intuitive.

Open Music Store

Posted in Halfbakery, Music, Technology on May 15th, 2009 by Toby – 2 Comments

Open source framework for selling music online

The (my?) problem with the online music marketplace is that almost all transactions go through a few large players (iTunes or Amazon, for example).

This state of affairs–the premise that large, centralized resources were needed to distribute music–is a legacy of the pre-Internet era.

I propose an open source project that makes it super simple to set up a self-hosted online music store.

There’s no reason this needs to be hard. Musician loads the software onto her website, opens up the admin UI. Uploads mp3s, graphics, etc. Sets prices. Save Changes and presto music store.

Now when her fans go to her website, they buy music directly from her. None of the money gets sucked into the vortex.

Well, there are still a few costs but there’s reason to believe these are trending toward minimal:

- She has to pay for bandwidth and web hosting.

- Out of convenience, she opts to use a third-party credit card processor. There is, after all, a plugin framework and a community of developers who make add-ons that let your music store integrate with other services.

Oh, and our musician is multi-media-talented, she also sells videos and other digits.