Oh Internet

Via Kung Fu Grippe: YouTube vids of Hüsker Dü playing at the Camden Ballroom (now Koko)
Just… completely magnificent. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

The iPod, or any media player, really, could use a feature in its shuffle mode to allow you to tag a song as always being followed by a specific song of your choosing.
Most adjacent songs on albums don’t flow together so much that you’d notice or care, but when they do it’s horribly jarring when [...]

Joy: My long-lost and never-ripped-to-mp3 copy of Downward is Heavenward turned up in a box of stuff that I apparently haven’t opened during the last 5 house moves.
Despondency: In that time it has succumbed to the dreaded CD-rot and is unplayable.
Paid-for Joy: Amazon second-hand sellers in the U.S. rescue the situation, and promise to ship [...]

Keeping up a fine tradition, I went to 3 of the 4 Mirrorball programmes at the Edinburgh Film Festival this year. (The 4th was sold out, boo!)
For the uninitiated, the shows are themed collections of the best music videos of the year and tend to range from the fantastic to the WTF? This year’s shows [...]

For your viewing/listening pleasure:
Trailer Club 70 - is a site collecting trailers from 70’s grindhouse films.
Copy, Right? - is a blog with an impressive list of odd cover versions of songs. (Including a post dedicated entirely to Pascal Comelade’s fairground re-interpretations of 1970’s songs.)

Blender.com’s “50 Craziest Pop Stars Ever!”
Note: Contains an unsurprisingly high level of crossover with their “50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars”

I started writing short book reviews as a way for me to keep track of what I’d read over the years. I was too lazy to do the same for music and I was hoping that making judicious use of Lastfm would remind me of the things I actually listened to a lot.
Well, it turns [...]

This Morissey quote may be apocryphal, since it’s gone round every website in the world with no trace of the original source, but it’s a fine sentiment nonetheless:
Interviewer: Did you hear t.A.T.u.’s version of “How Soon Is Now?”
Morissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don’t know much about them.
Interviewer: They are teenage Russian lesbians.
Morissey: [...]

As fun as being in the nosebleed galleries at the top of the Albert Hall during a Flaming Lips show was, it turns out it can’t really compare to seeing them whilst jammed into the second row at the Hammersmith Apollo. Having a crazy-haired man in a 70’s suit crawling above your head in [...]

Oh Internet, I love you so. Without you I would never have realised that Winger - yes, that Winger. ‘Beavis and Butthead’ Winger - are still around and releasing albums with gloriously, life-affirmingly terrible artwork.
How did I ever survive without you, Internet?

For a band whose albums I love so much, Animal Collective are a surprisingly dreech live proposition.
Picture a man alternately yodeling and screaming through a flanger and reverb unit, backed up by another man making baby-noises through a differently timed reverb unit, accompanied by drums and by someone manipulating keyboards/synths/mixers in accordance with the instructions [...]

The fantastically named Jim Bumgardner made this neat page that takes animation ideas from some of John Whiney’s films on harmonic relationships and uses them to create music. More details about the techniques can be found here.

Last night I went off to see the Dresden Dolls again (for the 3rd - or technically 4th - time.) The quick summary is that they were fantastic. Again. They always put on such a incredibly extravagant show; for two people who spend most of their show behind entirely immobile instruments - drums and piano [...]

Hooray for last minute tickets to the sold out Flaming Lips show! Even in the nose-bleed-inducing top gallery in the Royal Albert Hall it was still like getting a bucket full of pure joy right in the face. Yay!

Also on the ticketing annoyances front:
Tickets for Radiohead’s tour went on sale at 9am this Saturday. I woke up too late and the tour was completely sold out.
Mr eBay says: 651 items found for radiohead in Tickets & Travel
People who buy tickets just to immediately sell them on eBay for triple the face price should [...]