The Spanish general election will take place in 10 days. Since my country is so fucked up, and all human candidates are either retarded, senile, or both, the Great Cthulhu finally woke up in R’lyeh to offer the only sane political option for any Spaniard right now. He is the Leader for the Non-Euclidean Party (PNOE in Spanish), a new political party that will make the end of our days less stupid, more meaningful, and much shorter.
I finally have a Real Leader to vote for in my country.
Vote for PNOE on 11/20!
Cthulhu for president!
Party in R’lyeh to celebrate the end of our days!
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Songle is the new impressive application by Masataka Goto that presented this past weekend in ISMIR 2011. There has been a lot of buzz about crowd sourcing for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) lately.
What Goto has published is a tool to display automatically extracted chords, segments, pitch, onsets, beats, of any uploaded song. Not only that, but it also makes it easy to edit the annotations yourself, making this app a ultimate tool towards a crowd sourcing ground truth for MIR. Even though the catalogue of songs is still -disappointingly- small, and there are still some issues with its interface (I get an error when I try to sign up with my OpenID!), I think this application has the power to make a (small?) MIR revolution using the power of crowd sourcing in the shortcoming future.
In this picture we can see the extracted vocal melody (red lines), chords, parts of the song (blue and orange tracks), onsets and beats (triangles on the bottom), … I’m simply amazed right now. What a great piece of software!
I’ve been playing this one for a long time. It’s one of my favorite Opeth songs. I finally recorded it with a (relatively) decent equipment at Jarl’em All Studios, and when Eyal Amir, from ProjectRnL, listened to it, he proposed me to do a video of this cover.
And it’s the best solo video I’ve ever had. And here it is. And I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating it:
Some people keep asking me why I still believe that Iceland is the most beautiful place on Earth. In the next video you can find hundreds (if not thousands) of reasons:
By living in the US I get to talk quite a bit about what Catalonia is within Spain with a lot of american people. And it always turns out to be a a very interesting conversation (at least for me!). Most of them don’t know what Catalonia or the Catalan language is, but when I tell them that some catalans would like Catalonia to become an independent state within the EU they usually react with surprise and skepticism. As if something like this could never happen to Spain, a country seen by many americans as united and indivisible.
Here it is a very interesting 40-min documentary by Gary Gibson about what is going on in Catalonia and in the rest of Spain right now. I think it tried to be as objective as possible, even though it’s highly biased towards the catalans. It is important to keep in mind that not all catalans want the independence, and not all spaniards hate catalonia. Apart from that, it is really interesting watching very influential spanish people (from both sides) talking about the subject.
Maybe it only matters to me on this side of the world, but I really found it interesting and worth watching. I wish everyone I have talked to about this in america could watch this video.
Yesterday at MARL (Music and Audio Research Laboratory at NYU) we had the pleasure to have a talk by Eyal Amir, the musician, composer, and producer behind ProjectRnL.
He talked about how he “decomposes” a simple song from a musical style that he might not be familiar with and then he brings it to his own world, a world full of impossible rhythms, jazzy chords, and without any tempo / harmony restrictions.
He focused on his extraordinary cover of Slim Shady (by Eminem), and he showed us his original mix, and how he deals with the new rhythms, based on Eminem’s lead vocals line. It was so great to have Eyal in the department, people were fascinated with his job.
I have been featured in the new album by The Cloud Runner, a band from the UK with the great Andy Feehan as its leader and composer.
My voice is on the 9th track of the album, a song called Haunter. The lyrics are about the epic A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. I was reading the second book of this amazing saga when I wrote the lyrics.
Here you have the song:
( http://www.youtube.com/embed/5biC-t0av8M )
The voices were recorded at Jarl’em All Studios, where the rest of the music was recorded, mixed and mastered by Andy Feehan somewhere in the UK.
La semana pasada fui a probablemente el mejor concierto del año. Opeth presentaban su nuevo Heritage. Y Katatonia no presentaban nada, pero no hace falta, pues su catálogo me vuelve tan loco que por mí se pueden dedicar a no sacar discos y tocar muchas veces, que yo voy a seguir yendo.
Me gustó tanto que escribí una crónica algo nogueriana del concierto para Ovella Negra Rock. La podéis leer aquí (gracias por publicarla Ritxi!).
Madre mía, pero qué grandes, los dos grupos. No os perdáis el Heritage, que es increíble. Por supuesto, Steven Wilson lo ha producido. Lo cual confirma mi teoría de que cada cosa que toca este tío la convierte en una obra maestra. Jodidamente bueno.
It’s time to grow a beard. This is actually a serious video. An official video. The music makes the rockstar you have inside feel alive. Makes you grow your rockstar beard. The fame and fortune and the manly insides you have long forgotten will rise again. So gay. So good. So manly. So pioneer. So american.
