GlitchNYC.com

Getting it Out There

I've been listening to C.C. Chapman's Accident Hash, a new indie music Podcast, for a few months now. He describes his show as "the best mix in podsafe music" and boy is he right. My musical tastes are fairly varied, but I certainly found myself liking his "mellow" themed shows a bit more than his normal all over the map mix.

So when C.C. launched U-Turn cafe, a podcast with nothing but chilled, mellow music, I was psyched. Listening to the first few shows, I heard his call for artists to sit down with a guitar and a mic and just record something raw and fresh, and well, I went and got myself inspired.

Saturday night, I fired up my iRiver 899 and sang + played my heart out. The result is undoubtedly the most professional recording I've ever managed. This is slightly ironic because it was done in 1 shot with a small mic and a little device, rather than the hundreds of dollars of recording equipment I have ready for the task, and the hours I usually spend futilely trying to get a good mix.

I've also gotten in touch with some of my favorite indie artists to encourage them to join the podsafe music network and get their music out there for anyone to play. Edie Carey has taken me up on my suggestion, and her amazing music is now available there. Anyone can go take a listen, and podcasters can download her tracks to play on their show!

I sent C.C. my song with a quick message attached, and pointed him to Edie's music, wasn't sure if I'd get a reply. After all, C.C. is a very busy guy. Was I ever ecstatic when I read his email:

Ok dude, there is WAY to much goodness in this one single e-mail.

Thank you for it all. Everything is perfect.

I checked out Edie's music last night. I was editing together all sorts of music segments that will be played on IT Conversations stream of the Pop!Tech conference so I made sure to get her in there so that she'd have her first play and thus start showing up in the Featured Artist rotation on the site. Damn is she talented.

Now I need to find some time to do another u-Turn. I'm getting such great music!

I LOVE what you did with your whole intro and then the song. I need more people to do that.

PERFECT! Thank you!

-C.C.

That email made my morning.

Now, I realize, I have to get things ready around here - I don't even have a proper music page to point people to!

3:51 pm | permalink | /life/music | 0 writebacks |

My Brain is Trying a Mutiny, Screaming Pirate Slander

It's been a long time since I've written a really good song. I have 2 or 3 in my collection that I really consider worthwhile with the distance of a few years from them, and I haven't written one that fits that description since around 1999.

About a year ago at work I became comfortable enough in fact that no one can hear me as I sing, just barely audibly, with my mp3 collection. I paid no attention to the fact that I was singing softly 3 or 4 hours a day, and simply did it for the love of it.

It seems that my little pastime has been a covert training program, as in the past 3 months, I've re-found my voice and pitch control, and I've had a new stream of songs come directly into my head without pre-meditation. I simply start singing to myself and then "pop" there it is, chords, chorus, and a vague idea of where the verse should go.

I've finally filled in the details for one of these little instant ditties, and it's raw, punky, geeky and ultimately pop. I wish I could record and produce a version that matched what I hear in my head, but I have yet to master the art of production. I'm actually considering renting a studio and hiring an engineer to help lay this one down in professional style.

Anyone know a cheap and decent studio in NYC?

Here's the rough-cut mp3 of "Heavy Eyelids". As with everything else on this site, it's under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, so feel free to share, remix, re-record, and even sell it - just be sure that any work you do based on this is under the same license, and you give proper attribution. It's open source music.

Speaking of, if you'd like to see the "source code," Here's the lyrics + chord sheet. If anyone would like to try their hand at remixing this from the original tracks, contact me at WebFront2005 AT Glitchnyc D0T com.

UPDATE: I've remixed it with some serious tweaking to the electric guitar. It was far to "fuzzy" to be enjoyable before. I also played with the levels a bit. Still not pro, but much better. Click on the link above to download the updated version.

1:50 am | permalink | /life/music | 0 writebacks |

Meg Hutchinson's "The Crossing" Released

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I've been waiting for this album for over 2 years.

I first became a Meg Hutchinson fan about 5 years ago now when handed a CD of hers by a friend from back home, where she'd seen her play. I was immediately taken by Meg's high, sweet, smile-tainted voice and evocative and image-heavy lyrics. It was a very solid independent album, and Meg found herself on the cover of the metro, the Time Warner Cable Access music show "Sounding Board" and the winner of 4 "New Folk" and songwriter awards in 2000.

Against the Grey stayed in my playlist for over 3 years, even outlasting most of my Ani Collection and various other flavors of the moment. When I finally got a chance to see her live around 6 months ago, I was thrilled, and somewhat star struck.

The thing that floored me - still floors me, in fact - is the amazing different between Meg live and on CD. Her music on CD is catchy, sweet, and nice. Her music in person is emotional if not religious, and her soft voice draws you so far in that watching her perform is like watching a powerful movie. You don't mean to be so involved, and you have occasional moments of clarity where you realize where you are, but for the rest of the time, you're completely lost in the world of the performance.

Meg performed various songs from her live album which I bought the next day and alluded to the imminent release of her new CD, the crossing, which made up the rest of the music she played that evening.

I got the CD in the mail today, after many studio delays and the time it took to ship, and it's nothing short of awesome.

This isn't just a good folk CD - this is a good folk CD with two or three radio-worthy singles on it. I'm half excited and half terrified that this could be Meg's breakout album, propelling her to folk stardom in the next few months.

The first three tracks on the album alone have definite grooves, I really feel that the titular single could climb the charts.

8:34 pm | permalink | /life/music | 1 writebacks |

Pretty Girls Make Graves

And pretty good music apparently

This is why I love bittorrent.

I've been surfing around Suprnova.org (leave out the e for.. umm... extraneous lawsuits?) looking for some new music for a few days, and not only have I been finding lots of bands that I've always meant to listen to, but I've been finding complete albums and discographies.

Getting the whole album - not just popular songs, or mislabeled mp3's or bad live recordings - is freaking awesome. This was the reason that I converted my CD collection to MP3 back in '96. I wanted an easy way to play the music that I liked, and had already paid for. Because most of my collection is legit, I've got everything organized by Artists and then full albums, so having random downloaded singles in there is a pain.

We saw Pretty Girls Make Graves open for The Atari's a while back and I found myself liking them but hadn't gotten a chance to listen to their stuff. Listening to it now, I can say that I like the whole album, and I'll both look for more PGMG shows now and will probably buy CD's and merch there to support them.

I thought Napster and other programs were neat, but because my collection is generally of complete albums I already owned, I really never used them to download gobs of music.

The "bandwidth is free" culture of Bittorrent where people are encouraged to make complete collections and link them all together as a torrent has finally peaked my interest as a downloader, and I feel does a lot more for the artists involved because it gets people to listen to their whole body of work and become fans, rather than just grabbing the single and forgetting who sings it.

The "no central server" principals of Bittorrent should also keep it going against the efforts of the RIAA, so long as sites like suprnova don't become too central. There's also an implied safety to downloading with BitTorrent - It's not encrypted or secret, you can still be sued, but with BT, you're going in and making surgical downloading strikes. You get what you want, share it back while you're downloading it and a little bit after, and then get out.

BT is also the first filesharing system to really have a case as a legitimate file sharing tool - I've used it to download the last few versions of Knoppix and Fedora Core, and it's just flown along. Keep your eyes on it, I feel like things are about to get really interesting.

3:44 pm | permalink | /life/music | 0 writebacks |

Great Independent Artists - Edie Carey

Over the course of the past few years, I have managed to find a couple great independent artits, and I'm going to start profiling them a bit here to share them with others and hopefully promote good, non-RIAA art.

I stumbled opon Edie Carey on CDbaby.com while buying another indie CD, and really liked her stuff. Little did I know that Sara had also found Edie on MP3.com years ago when she burned me a custom "indie artists" cd for christmas.

I listened to her free sample playlist, really liked it, and got the full cd. Turns out, it's even better than the little snippits CDbaby gives you listen to. Very nice stuff.

See more ...

4:51 pm | permalink | /life/music | 1 writebacks |