Faster than light!

With topics such as fracture, fatigue and failure analysis, Materials Science is certainly the most depressing course ever conceived. The blog update rate has declined recently due to high stress.

Here's a song to tide you over:

Tuxedomoon - What Use

Updates should come later this week when Jeff gets his side of the LOW BITRATE MP3 ULTIMATE SOFTWARE DANCE MIX 2006 BATTLE together.

I wish it could snow inside

Piano Magic are taking submissions for songs that people would like to hear at their last ever concert. I read this and it made me near-infinitely sad, for I thought that the end must be near, like a bad diagnosis. To have them stop making music would be like an organ removed (and not a mere kidney or appendix). They are playing in Belgium in April, hopefully not for the last time.

Mm, I am not often sentimental.

Panic Amigo - There's no need for us to be alone (Future 3 mix)

wake up and drink

Today was one of the top two weirdest days of my life. The weirdest was getting off a plane in fucking New Delhi.

6:33am: Wake up. I set my alarm for weird times

6:42am: Wake up again.

6:54am: Yellow car in my driveway, I go in it. I'm not really with it yet.

7:12am: Arrive at somebody's house. Begin drinking. PS, I am wearing plaid Ralph Lauren pants and fucking... oh, I don't even know, I have such a headache.

9:40am: Usually at this time I have class, and not a quart of gin in me. We leave the house and I fall down immediately.

10:15am: Arrive somewhere. I have no idea at this point. People are going to work. It isn't nice to piss on the street.

10:25am: Switching to second hand account because I don't remember this. We go to the Dean's office, as he taught us at one point and we are there to harrass him, because this is our day, dammit! I fall down and pass out outside his office. Apparently I am truly swell when drunk and require several people to carry me (because I'm heavier than I look, thanks).

Noon or something: I am carried approx 2.5km to someone's house.

4:12pm: Wake up somewhere. My slippers are gone. Someone found them on the road later. Oh yeah, I was wearing slippers the whole time, because I am a 'tard.

4:22pm: I get driven to my parents' house, thanks. "ISMY SUIOTE IORONED INEED TO GO TO A AFUCKING SEREMONY". The ceremony's at 5. I fall down in the shower.

5:07pm: I'm there. Thanks, Rick. Rick leaves. Oh yeah, for the ceremony I need the envelope they gave me last week and that's definitely at the house.

5:11pm: I call collect: "INEED MY NOTHEOBOK THE ENVELOPES IN IT' My mother is like what the fuck. I call again because I forgot what I had said. She was about to deliver my laptop, so that's good. I am wearing a suit and look smashing.

5:30pm: I've missed the boring part of the ceremony. The next part is the creepy part. I am in an auditorium with random chains strewn everywhere and everyone standing in the isles. The speaker is drawing on a rich variety of sources for this presentation - the bible, Jon Stewart, some poet &c. - he is also periodically striking an anvil with a hammer. I am wondering if I am doing a good job of standing up. I can't discuss the next part, because it's sacred.

6:35pm: I emerge from the auditorium an engineer.

Here's a song: Piano Magic - For Engineers A. It's kind of weird, but isn't anything?




Singing in the shower

ta ta ta ta ta tadaaa da ta ta ta tada you’re a needy giiirl. That was last night before getting drunk at some burlesque party in my underwear.

My head hurts, so I've been searching for mellow music (not a very difficult endeavor). Here is something lovely: Donato Wharton - Trabanten. I guess devoted to the incredible bit of East-German engineering seen below:


Trabanten reminds me a lot of Four Tet and Koushik, except hopefully DW won't venture into any horrible, horrible hip hop remixes.

Some songs:

Donato Wharton - Built to Fail
Donato Wharton - Silvester

I can't believe the latter didn't make the Valentine's Day mix. It's really pretty.

If you think you can handle it, here is a Trabant commercial courtesy of the WFMU blog. First car I ever drove, no joke.

Claro Intelecto

I feel like I have to hold on to something when I listen to this Cadillac. It's like a drug entering your system.

Claro Intelecto - Contact

Best heard at a very loud club or on your headphones in a dark room.

How horrifying

This turns me off synthesis immensely. Here's a song with guitars:

Spiritualized - Shine a Light

Snow Day

First, some music:

Piano Magic - Snowfall Soon
Swayzak - Snowblind
Herrmann & Kleine - Catch a Snowflake
The Remote Viewer - Snow Falls On It
Donna Regina - Snow is Only Frozen Water
Opiate - Snow Story
ISAN - Snowdrops and Phlox
Belle & Sebastian - Fox in the Snow

and a track I made a long time ago that kind of deals with snow in a way... here.

Today I'm going to listen to the above songs via headphones. This will make me fall asleep, but I'll wake up because of the huge headphones on my head, and I'll probably want to eat yesterday's pad thai out of a styrofoam container. Then I'll think about chess and fall asleep again. Snow.

Music to fall in love with

There is, apparently, a new movement called 'Steak and a Blowjob Day', which is sort of a male-oriented analogue to Valentine's Day.

I can't give you either, but I give you all the Valentine's Day mix. Put this on, light some candles, get out the Sears catalog...

Tracklist:

1. Bill Wells, Stephan Schneider and Annie Whitehead - The Dust of Months (Pick Up Sticks - Leaf '04)
2. Mapstation - Vergessen (Sleep Engine, Sleep - Staubgold '00)
3. Kuchen - Steamboat Travels (Kids With Sticks - Karaoke Kalk '01)
4. Boy Robot - The Last Dance (Glamorizing Corporate Lifestyle - CCO '03)
5. Blindfold - I see you through me (Blindfold - Resonant '05)
6. Misty Dixon - The Beautiful Ones (If I Was Prince - Rex '01)
7. Stereolab - Brigitte (ABC Music - Strange Fruit '02)
8. Apeiron - Zia (Todo Sigue Intacto - ? '02)
9. Jens Lekman - Someone to share my life with (Maple Leaves - Secretly Canadian '04)
10. This Mortal Coil - You and Your Sister (Blood - 4AD '91)
11. Piano Magic - Comets (The Troubled Sleep - Green UFOs '03)
12. The Pastels - Viaduct (Illumination - Domino '97)
13. Static - Inside Your Heaven (Flavour has no name - CCO '03)
14. Arovane - Tides (Tides - CCO '00)
15. To Rococo Rot - Die Dinge Des Lebens (The Amateur View - City Slang '99)
16. Populous - Ext. Rhodes Bank (Quipo - Morr '02)
17. Boards of Canada - Sunshine Recorder (Geogaddi - Warp '02)
18. Junior Boys - More Than Real (Last Exit - Domino '03)
19. DFA 1979 - Sexy Results (MSTRKRFT mix - no idea)

This is made to just barely fit on a CD, if you're retro.

Cheney-bot breaks first law of robotics

Goes hunting, shoots his friend. I love it. Honda engineers are baffled as to how their creation could have malfunctioned.

Kraftwerk - The Robots

Romance, sigh

Saw MSTRKRFT on Friday. Holy moly. It was very interesting, perhaps aided by various reality-altering factors. One such factor was a story told to me by Zabala earlier in the evening. This story vies well in the heavily-to-extremely-haggard category - just a warning. Okay:

It's a beautiful misty evening in Kitchener, Ontario. Zabala has just painted some trains and is now walking somewhere and feeling romantic. Maybe it's something in the air, maybe it's the four tallboys he just gunned, it's difficult to say. As luck would have it, he runs into an old lover. She greets him: "Yo, I'm homeless can you get me some food, or some money?" Zabala, still humming an old Sarah Vaughn tune, considers this carefully. "I'll give you two dollars to suck my dick". She gazes into his eyes and nods eagerly. They hide from the diffuse glow of February Christmas lights, and proceed to a dark, shitty alley, where they become fervently amorous. The music now changes to Three-6 Mafia - Slob on my Knob (lyrics). The finale is best told by Zabala: "I busted a huge nut all over her face and then I BOUNCED!" Without even giving her the two dollars - how tactless!

After hearing this, I commented on Zabala's enormously dilated pupils. He offered the following explanation: "I'm on drugs."

PS: If anyone is interested, I know where to get Notorious BIG bootlegs for 4 dollars.
PPS: Valentine's day mix coming soon.

Music for Midterms

MC Paul Barman - Salvation Barmy

There's a foot of snow out and you have no more midterms this week. You roll a loose joint, and suddenly this becomes funny.

The Juan Maclean

Saw this band at the Horseshoe last night. I'm not the absolute biggest fan (though I love the song Dance With Me), but was fairly sold after last night. Electronic-based acts are often shitty live, especially if dancing is not an option. Usually too much invisible stuff is going on for the crowd to really be moved. For instance, much as I really loved watching Ulrich Schnauss on fire at his controller, it would've been better had I been sitting down in a cork-panelled auditorium. Juan Maclean was more... mandatory dance. There was still a lot of invisible stuff going on (i.e. no one was playing the bass line), but there was such a sheer mass of mixers, MPC hooked up to Korg synth hooked up to Nord synth hooked up to two rack synths hooked up to some exotic rotary interface hooked up to who knows what... that the crowd was stunned at the complexity, the canopy of patch cords on stage. And the theremin. That is like the third time that's come up in a blog entry this week - horror. I didn't really know what was going on, but that's because I had a nice buzz and decided to giv'er on the dancefloor.

Here's a song: The Juan Maclean - Crush the Revolution. Please don't dance to it.

Oh, almost forgot. Bounce's secret twin was the the show last night, throwing strobey Cory-ass punches and generally acting mental. We yelled out her name, because we thought she was Bounce herself, but apparently two similar creatures lurk in Toronto's seedy underbelly. The latest (aka Bizarro Bounce) proved to be significantly less offensive... nevertheless, forever tainted by the Bounce resemblence.

When you're having more than one

Holy fuck. Click on it.

This was featured in an 'amazing' Moog documentary. What makes it 'amazing' is the level of discomfort apparent in every single person interviewed. Bob Moog picking vegetables and trying to piece together a half-assed analogy between synths and vegetables, DJ Spooky trying to smile as he delivers his written answers, then Herb Deutsch and his Zoolander-ass goatee, then Tim Gane looking really bothered by the interviewer.

Every chapter ends with a Moog-intensive performance by bands I've never heard of. These bands are all different, but have the following common characteristics:

• they appear to be playing stadiums
• they have on average 12 people on stage, all playing a single chord on as many monophonic Minimoogs
• an array of laptops is always present
• two dormant turntables are always present
• the set sounds like shit

The sole exception was the Stereolab bit, where Laetitia plays a very cool backlit Moog. Stereolab and Tortoise composed some original work for the movie, which kind of blends in with the otherwise horrendous soundtrack.

So homeless

9:34 Arrive in Toronto
9:58 I begin drinking straight gin
11:33 I am fucking hammered
12:04 Arrive at Queenshead
12:26 Extremely drunk girl reeking of Bounce sheets begins grinding in my general direction, I refuse to grind with her, but she doesn't leave.
1:38 I am certifiably too drunk to stand up. The music isn't very good, except now they're playing DFA1979 - Sexy Results, which I surprisingly like a lot [the mstrkrft mix, otherwise no]. I resolve to continue standing up through this one song.
2:04 We gather on the street corner to commence leaving the bar. Bounce girl approaches me. Inquires if I am the guy from Anagram. I am. Do I play bass? I play the theremin. And I'm the lead singer. She says that Chris, another member of Anagram, is a really shitty guy. I explain that Ben is our producer and he fired him last week. When asked if she knows what Anagram means, she says yes, but really doesn't. She is severely made fun of. She wants to go home with me. There is no way that is happening. Ben begins to fake-grind her as she is talking to me about coming home. She turns around: "I can't look at you, because then I think of sex, and I think with you being the producer, and the whole Chris situation..." We nearly die laughing. Avery, as she is about to leave: "One last question... is it Bounce?" She says no. It's fucking Bounce. She can't remember what it actually is (because she is literally wearing Bounce sheets).
2:28 We're rid of Bounce girl & getting pizza. I don't need pizza. I buy two slices. Ben decides suddenly that he is homeless (and later) mentally handicapped. He tells a patron this. "I am under 24 and homeless" Josh at that point tosses Ben out of the pizza joint and on the rainy street. Woman who's been touched by Ben's story gets angry at this, proceeds to curse at us ad infinitum, remarks that we all have nice clothes and good haircuts (not true) and thus don't know what it's like. This woman could be homeless. Avery: "He's homeless, he can't pay for pizza" This infuriates her. A potentially homeless man on the street offers Ben the protection of the 20 or so homeless fellows in the area. Ben at this point begins to act mentally challenged and runs off somewhere. We decide to leave. Crazy-ass woman won't stop hollering at us. She chases us down and does an 'affluent dance', which involves jumping up and down and yelling things like "oooh, I have a place to sleep tonight, aren't I special? Aren't I smart? We should just gas those homeless people, they're no good" No one in our group expected this. We are shocked. I recover and join the dance. I start jumping up and down, adding "I'm also better because I recycle" and throw my cardboad plate in someone's blue bin. We contemplate calling Ben's celly and having him pick it up in front of all the homeless-defenders. We do this, but he's out of sight. He then runs by, retarded, with some kind of pole he found in some alley. Josh chases him down. I don't know what happend after that, I was near-comatose from laughing. I think we had a pizza crust thrown at us (it missed).

I feel somewhat horrible for the above, as the people who were screaming at us actually had an honourable cause.

Another Nifty Trick

Sitting in the rare book room at the library, everyone has their notebook out, probably doing... this. So, who in the room is my friend? Apparently iTunes now has a thing that links to others' computers and you can see their playlist and play things off it. This feature is very useful if you enjoy Modest Mouse or Arcade Fire, i.e. not very useful.

Save your skins

Did some bad yoga last night. Fucked me up. My rhomboideus minor is juuust pounding. Also, I have a major cold. What to do in such a predicament?

Materials:

2 pink pomelos
1 giant bag of Lego
1 fat resi nug
9 sofa cushions
3 Murcof albums

Procedure:
1. Roll and smoke a tappy spliff
2. Eat pomelos, get sick, eat everything else in the house
3. Dump the fucking bag of lego all over the floor
4. Remove every cushion from every couch in the house. Build giant sofa fort around area where lego is dispersed. Wear slippers, it hurts to step on.
5. Put on first Murcof album. It's kind of boring. Put on something else.
6. Eventually settle on Phonem's Hydroelectric album and start building mad mechanisms.
7. Get cold, look for fireplace remote for 45 minutes
8. Fall asleep in sofa fort, on top of lego