Archive for the ‘music’ Category

Music Reviews and Time Portals

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on September 27th, 2007

Current mood: time-warped

The review I posted yesterday of Sex Club Reject’s new album was criticized by some as being too full of hyperbole. To those naysayers, I would refer this article I just read hot of the AP:

Thursday, Sept 27. Researchers in Italy published a new paper suggesting that the Renaissance, a historical period of cultural and artistic advances which brought Europe out of the Dark Ages, may have in fact been triggered when a five second clip of a Sex Club Reject song accidentally fell backwards through a rift in time from Hesperia California in 2018 back to the city of Florence in the late 13th century.

In related news, other research from the same team suggests that the Permian–Triassic extinction event may have in fact been triggered when a 13 second clip from a Sadjelko track fell back through a time rift from New York 2006 to somewhere in the middle of Pangaea 251,400,000 BC

GXP12L-Q-R5 Hyper Mega Ultra World-Destroyer Cannon

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on September 26th, 2007

Current mood: Filled with musical notes

For the past week I have been enjoying the new Sex Club Reject album. My friend Josh is the mastermind behind SCR, and he asked me to do the spoken-word vocals on track 07 “Pow Boom No!” It strikes me as fascinating that so many of my favorite musicians are actually people I actually know, and even count as friends. For the past few decades, the world of music has been about big stars, and I see that big-star-world crumbling. The big stars can’t realistically compete with the myrmidon tiny stars anymore. Not for my ear anyway.

Sex Club Reject

SCR’s music covers a wide range of styles. It exhibits more versatility than what I see out of most other bands, as it touches upon rock, and metal, and emo, and dance, and techno, and love-ballads, and desert-rock, and beatles-esque rock and punk and industrial and many points in-between, while managing to be good on all fronts, and getting steadily better every time I hear more of it. I am obviously not an impartial source here since I have known the band’s lead since we were both in grade-school, and my voice is featured on the new album, but still, with all the impartiality I can muster, I insist that this album is several different kinds of awesome, and if Josh’s music keeps steadily increasing in awesomeness at the same rate that it has increased over the past ten years, then by 2012 he will reach a level of widespread acclaim that is the post-RIAA-apocalypse year-2012-equivalent of superstardom*, and by 2017, Sex Club Reject music will cure blindness, eradicate cancer, and cause military dictatorships to crumble.

Anyway, thanks to the magic of the interwub, you don’t need to take my only-mildly-hyperbolic word for it, you can simply listen for yourself.

*After the ashes of the RIAA-Apocalypse settle, I expect that the leather-clad spike-covered vigilantes and mutants who survive will enjoy a landscape of music appreciation similar to the one described by John Titor where the lines between making music and listening to it are blurred. Where even the greatest talents in the world still have to work a day job, yet even the modest beginners get a chance to jam along with everyone else, and music merges with daily life in an integral way that will almost become spiritual… So basically kinda like Jazz, except for *all* music.

Dadaist Music from Doron Sadja

 Posted by Bob the Hamster on April 26th, 2005

One of my favorite musicians is Doron Sadja. He is most well known* for his ultra-obscure CD A Piece of String, a Sunset, which features a 12 minute track which includes a single 12 minute musical tone which begins in a frequency above the range of human hearing, dropping into the range of painful “good-lord-what-is-that-screeching?” human hearing several minutes into the song, and continuing soothingly** down below the range of human hearing.

For a limited time (sorry, i don’t know exactly how long), you can download for free Doron’s latest work, with his band ChOcklate CaKE from http://shinkoyo.com/wormhole/test.html Sadjeljko from http://sadjeljko.com/ it is not as acoustically aggressive as some of his other work, and people with no previous experience with this kind of experimental music can actually enjoy this.

This style of music is difficult to categorize, but if I had to do it, I would call it Dadaist music. Dadaism is a mid-20th century art movement, characterized by “Deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art”, which is a pretty good description of what Doron’s music is all about.

But don’t take my word for it, Listen to it for yourself.

* By “well known”, I mean that there are actually other people besides me who have heard of it, but the number of people who have heard of it in comparison with the overall music listening population of the world is statistically insignificant; less than a sampling error.

** The end of track 01 of “A Sunset a Piece of String” can only be described as “soothing” on the forgiving scale of comparison. When something has been causing you pain for the better part of eleven-and-a-half minutes, and suddenly it is gone, the sensation you experience is quite a pleasant one

[Edit: corrected album title. “A Piece of String, a Sunset”, not “A Sunset, A Piece of String”. I am dyslexic]

[Edit: Link to Doron’s new band instead]