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Hear Cassiopeia at Gorilla Vs. Bear due to restrictions with embedding.

elite athlete – dreams about “we’re loosing him!” by Elite Athlete

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This past weekend I spent in New York hanging out with Ian Perlman. One of the highlights of my trip was visiting MoMA and brainstorming ideas for the new Beach Fossils video with him, we spent most of our time in their music video and modern photography by women exhibits, and both of those exhibits stimulated an ample amount of ideas.

Dustin had sent this video to Ian by an artist from Spain called Bedroom, which serves as some of the inspiration for the new video. This music video is stunning, I was lost for words when I was watching it at Ian’s place. The shots are very interesting and creative, a masterpiece to watch, and quite honestly is the best music video I’ve ever seen. Bedroom is Albert Aromir. He sings and plays acoustic guitar over found sounds, mixing in melodic undertones and creating a dreamy, natural sound of sorts. He dropped an LP on Foehn Records a couple of months ago, grab it here.

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Speculator Nick needs some help paying his April rent so he recorded some live tracks at his home and uploaded them to his new bandcamp to try and raise some money. You know you love Speculator, who are you trying to fool, really? According to his Bandcamp he’s going to post some more tracks tomorrow. Just in case you didn’t know, pretty sure Underwater Peoples will be releasing his first wax sometime in the future.

Edit: This was a limited time offer, but grip a couple mp3′s from Rose Quartz

So basically The Weeknd is being called the “future of R&B”, and I can see why someone would believe this, however I don’t agree that any genre can progress on it’s own. Instead, I believe music progresses collectively. Music in part is a derivative of an artist’s influences, among other things. Listening to The Weeknd clearly sampling Beach House on their track The Party & The After Party exemplifies my thought process on the conclusion that pop music will become more and more of a sample-based world. I realize The Weeknd is R&B, but all genres converge to pop music at some point in time. Pop music is the music of “pop culture”, a summary of general influences on pop culture.

Not sure if you remember but a while back Altered Zones profiled James Ferraro and had asked him about his sample-based music where he responded:

“I use samplers, but I make everything from scratch. I’ll sample my voice– anything– to create a certain texture. I love sample-based music, but I think that in the post-sample world, people automatically register certain sounds as samples. Because they’ve never worked with a sampler, they don’t realize that using sampling doesn’t mean that you’re sampling someone else’s work. Achieving that effect is about spending a lot of time on the details, wanting to have a specific texture. If you were to look at my studio, I’d have my 8-track and keyboards and guitars [on one side], and the other side would be an effects portion where I have this thing… It’s like a bucket that you carry dishes in, with water in it, or microphones, or different things like hair gel– different things to create certain textures.”

Sampling first and foremost is known in signal processing as the number of samples per unit time taken from a continuous signal (such as a sinusoid) to create a discrete signal. When sampling, a general rule is to sample at least twice the frequency to obtain a relevant discrete time signal. Sample less than twice the frequency, and you get aliasing. Sample too much, and your new discrete time sequence will not be accurate. While oversampling and undersampling in signal processing do have some practical uses, for this argument I’m using the two to show how a nice ‘balance’ of sampling will result in solid pop songs. I realize my reasoning may seem a bit convoluted, however it seems to make sense when relating my thoughts to science. Essentially, sample too much and you’re a rip off, sample too little and the pop mob may find your track boring (assuming you are aiming for some sort of electronic sounds with your music).

There is of course nothing wrong with sampling a large portion of a song and merely speeding it up to achieve a certain aesthetic for your track, and that’s what’s great about music, there really are no bounds. I believe that in the future music will progress more into a world where song samples are more noticable. It’s been done, DJ Shadow’s 1996 LP “Endtroducing…” was a record completely composed of samples from other records. When listening to The Weeknd, this music has so much potential for mainstream media, remixing, a bro grinding on a girl while she texts her friend to get her another drink in the club.

Ian Paul Roger Celtics Nelson noted that he disliked The Weeknd’s Wicked Games because it was boring, and I can definitely see where he’s coming from. This is the type of track that would become popular in the mainstream media, because it’s so straightforward it’s easy to relate to. For those looking for meaning throughout this track, no need to search far, it’s pretty clear and obvious. It’s the straightforwardness is what will appeal to the masses, hence why The Weeknd has infiltrated MTV, and the creatively done tracks that surround it make me want to listen.

After listening through The Weeknd’s free nine track mix “House of Ballons”, it is surely a very solid release. The Morning, What You Need, and House Of Ballons – Glass Table Girls stick out as obvious stunners. It’s no doubt that this release is interesting enough, in general, to keep your “repeat all” turned on.

The Weeknd – The Morning by The_Weeknd

I’ve always had a certain fascination with the west, and more specifically I envision what I believe the great american explorers Lewis & Clark had seen in their expedition. I have a general idea about their adventures into the west, for when I was young I was infatuated with American History and thought it was very cool to be reading the Lewis & Clark journals at an age where my friends and classmates thought was a strange way to be spending my free time. The Lewis & Clark journals were even drier than Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea, coming in at a whole one hundred and twenty-seven pages. That book took me almost and entire summer to complete, I remember falling asleep at around every ten pages or so.

I have never been out west, the furthest I’ve ever traveled west is the city of Chicago with their breezy politics and deep dish pizza. For now, it’s a mere dream to travel out there and see what it has to offer for me.

Below are two videos from Balmorhea and Lord Huron, the two bands I use to idealize the unmodernized west. The Lord Huron video is a music video for their track The Stranger, and the Balmorhea video is a documentary about how Rob Lowe and his crew approach their songwriting. of their recent performance at FW Modern, featuring some of their music.

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Lord Huron: The Stranger

Balmorhea: Clamor

Balmorhea: Clamor (Prefuse 73 Remix)

Definitely vibing on some Tangerine Dream influences with Deep Earth’s synthesized soundscapes, generating some cinematic electronica which create the feeling of some sort of “intense galactic moment”. It’s available physically in an edition of 150 at Moon Glyph. The final scene from A.I. pretty much sums up the feeling I get when I listen to this space-out jam in every possible way.

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Deep Earth: Speak My Language

It’s been a while since I last heard from Green Gerry, and he hit me up recently with a super beautiful mellowed-out psych jam called Pupil Patterns Are Crazy. Gerry lays out his smooth vocals over some intense ambient haze as his guitar chords progress into psychedelia. He also sent me a demo for a track titled Cynicalities a while back which I put on a tumblr mix, also included below.

Green Gerry: Pupil Patterns Are Crazy (Demo)

Green Gerry: Cynicalitiess (Demo)

Ian recently shot a bunch of live footage of the Beach Fossils and hit me up with videos for their tracks Daydream and The Horse, two of my favorites from their s/t LP that dropped on Captured Tracks back in 2010. He also shot a few of their newer songs from their “What A Pleasure” EP which will most likely appear on Pitchfork’s Tunnelvision soon. In other Perlman news, Ian is working on a database for quality live music videos. It’s called Monkey Water, and  it’s a tumblr for now, but he plans to progress the project into a full-out site . Watch these videos Salad Fork TV-style after the jump.

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The recent 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan not only caused a massive Tsunami to hit and dessimate the country, but it also moved some of Japan’s coastline thirteen feet closer to the United States and shifted the axis of the earth as well as shortening the day by a few milliseconds. Holy shit, right? If the shorter day is bothering you, the 2010 earthquake in Chile also shortened the day by a few milliseconds. I’m starting to think, maybe this is what the Native Americans meant by the world ending soon.

Putting myself in the shoes of someone living in Japan, I’m scared, I feel lost, and I know that once I get all my shit together I’m still pretty fucked because there’s a possibility I might get cancer. Essentially, this is Hiroshima all over again. An atom bomb was dropped on the nation in the form of a massive water wave, one of mother natures’ weapons of mass destruction, but with no one to blame for this destruction. You can’t even be pissed at someone due to the randomness of this event.

Here I sit, in a nice chair in the comfort of my own home in the northeastern United States. Quite frankly I have no way of associating with what the people living in Japan could be going through right now. I guess, everything just seems wrong. I think that’s the answer to a lot of problems in the world right now, everything is wrong. Nothing is purely ideal. There isn’t an answer for every question.

It is culture that separates us from other animals, and artists take culture and interpret it to make something real out of it. Art is culture you can see or hear, maybe even both. Maybe not right now, but somewhere down the line this earthquake will have affected some artists vibes in some way, possibly create the inspiration needed for a new song, or a new painting. On the other side of the spectrum, a listener may be listening to something that creates a certain mood or feeling that causes them to associate the song with the earthquake, even if it was not the artists’ own interpretation when creating the music. Don’t misinterpret this is something bad, it is actually quite the opposite.

Below is a video by Peter’s House Music for his track The Mirror Has 2 Faces shot by Brett Milspaw. This track is off of his EP titled “Jump” which dropped on All Hands Electric. I have nothing more to say.

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Peter’s House Music: The Mirror Has 2 Faces