By the end of every week there are a bunch of music-related stories, cool links, videos, and other internet ditties that we haven’t managed to get to throughout the week.
As a remedy to this, we’re happy to introduce our new column Friday Fun – our avenue for sharing cool music tidbits we’ve come across for you to nibble on before the glory of the weekend. Dig in!
You Can Make Your CDs Smell Like Pizza
Ok so technically it was done with DVDs but the technology would be just the same on their audio counterpart. In partnership with Domino’s pizza in Brazil, a number of DVDs were stamped with thermal ink and flavored varnish, both sensitive to heat, says Creativity Online. While people were watching the movie, the heat of the DVD player affected the disc. When the movie ended and they ejected the disc, they smelled pizza. They also saw pizza: the discs were printed to look like mini pies, and carried the message: “Did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino’s Pizza.” Imagine spinning your favourite new band then being soothed ut of our music-induced coma by the smell of hot, fresh-from-the-oven pizza. That’s a special kinda haven.
James Murphy Designs An Actual Soundsystem
Since LCD Soundsystem disbanded over two years ago, frontman and all around kooky guy James Murphy has turned his attention to other projects including filmmaking and opening his own cafe/luggage store. Most recently though Murphy has spent months designing a soundsystem for Manchester International Festival Consequence Of Sound reports. Serving as a throwback to the early days of DJing (y’know where, it was actually a skill), the stacks will be placed in a circle for listeners to walk directly into, and will bump jazz, rock, and an assortment of varied genres to counteract dance music’s current slew of “tinny, sad, hyper-aggressive” says Murphy. The vinyl-only system, called Despacio (spanish for slowly), will make its debut this July at the Manchester International Festival.
What does a £2,500 Record Sound Like?
It’s fair to say the majority audiofiles obsessed with collecting vinyl will search for classics or rare pressings of music made post 1930. But one guy in Britain, who has admitted he has an addiction to wax, decided to take his obsession one step further by organising the manufacturing of classical music to the medium. Pete Hutchison (founder of Peacefrog) started The Electric Recording Co. which pressed hard to find recordings of composers, they’re cut from the original tapes and using only valve equipment.His second pressing, a seven-dic set of Mozart’s Parisian works were limited to 300 copies will cost you £2,495, reports The Guardian. Better get to saving!
Kate Bush Fans Officially The Weirdest Fans Of All The Fans
Like many a-chanteuse, the ever-quirky Kate Bush has been known to have some obsessive fans. But recently at the Brighton Fringe Festival 300 men and women took their obsession of the songstress one step further by re-creating the songwriter’s famed video to her 1978 hit ‘Wuthering Heights’. The group, who call themselves Shambush, have their own website and instructional video and while the red-adorned fans are novel, it all seems a little obsessive… Check out the website and instructional video here.
Dude Rocks Out On Guitar While Getting Brain Surgery
When he found out he would need to be awake while recieving brain surgery to treat Parkinsons-induces tremors, Brad Carter thought he might have some issues staying up. His answer? To shred on the guitar while doctors pokes away at his noodle. As AUX states, it worked,too. Staying awake helped surgeons know that they’d put the pacemaker in the right part of his noggin. Luckily for us, Carter and his doctors live tweeted the whole thing, and captured it all on Vine.
Some People Spend Their Weekends Raving To Algorithms
Some things were made to be combined; ketchup and mustard; peanut butter and jelly; Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello. Now, raving and mathematical algorithms? Apparently. Dubbed ‘algoraves’ some cool cat decided it would be really fun to bring maths to parties. Boing Boing states “”Algoraves are parties where people come together to dance to algorithms. It generally involves some live coding but any producers making music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals’ are welcome.” These ‘parties’ have taken place everywhere from Mexico to here in Australia. We know what we’re doing this weekend.
Turntable Plays ‘Rings’ Of A Tree
Bartholomäus Traubeck’s “Years” is a modified record player that “plays” a slice of a tree, converting (and transforming) year ring data into piano music, states Boing Boing. The artist says “A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.”
