Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Monday, August 25, 2008

Summermuxtape !

Since the excellent muxtape.com was taken down by the RIAA yesterday, I thought it was a good time to post some of my favorite summer tunes:

  • Tricky - Veronika
    Probably the best track on his newest album, which is worth listening too. It's a return to his trip-hop roots, and I can't help but wondering what Massive Attack would sound like if he was still in it.

  • Cat Power - Hate
    It took a while before I could sit through the latest Cat Power album (The Greatest). The cover art belongs in the deepest bowels of hell, and at a first listen, all the songs sound pretty much the same. How wrong I was, and I stand corrected.

  • Gnarls Barkley - Blind Mary
    It's okay, Cee-Lo. I love Blind Mary too. God forbid you should release this as a single, instead of the mediocre Run.

  • Portishead - Threads
    Although not really a kick-back, hats-off summer song by definition, it surely is a powerful end track. I think. I'm always so unsure.

  • Wilco - Impossible Germany
    You think the melody is nice, wait until the guitar solo at the end.

  • Beirut - Napoleon on the Bellerophon
    Lights out.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

The Sandvich

He was a good lunch who played by the rules, until the rules robbed him of everything he ever loved. Now he's lettuce, tomato, cheese, bread, and a mysterious slice of meat, marching down your throat and straight to hell. He'll satisfy your hunger. FOR REVENGE!

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Flox

A project I saw scrolling by on #thepiratebay.org on Efnet caught my attention a couple of weeks ago. Flox is an enhancement on several existing traditional P2P techniques.

"Flox is a technique in development which will identify the same parts from similar files and download those when needed. This will certainly increase speed, for slightly different files. This will also make the technique to strip off metadata from media files obsolete, since Flox will do it universally for ALL sorts of files, whether they have ID3 tags, ApeTags, or something completely new."

The current development draft contains some very interesting stuff about palindrome pattern file splitting and hashing. I'll surely get my hands on this when I have the time.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Unfinished Robbery

Hoping to see them this wednesday at the Lokerse Feesten (update: I missed them, bummer !), I thought this was the right time to release a remix I've been wrestling with during the last months. Danny The Dog (international title: Unleashed) was a mediocre thriller by Luc Besson (Taxi, The Fifth Element, ...), but the soundtrack was composed by Massive Attack. For me, the title track really stood out.

I tried to add a subtle dubby feel to it, by overlooping the beats two or three times (it's random), much like Portishead did in its recent single, Machine Gun. I also played around a lot with the echo/cutoff on the parts without drums.

I overlooped the piano synths by accident, but never corrected my mistake because I thought it sounded quite nice. There's clipping and misplaced frames all over the place, including the odd vinyl crack here and there.

Download

I'll probably never finish this, so I'd better get it out the door. Most of the reverb/pitch effects and rough cutting were done using Audacity, with some additional drumkit programming in Hydrogen and strings generation by the ZynAddSubFX Synthesizer. Those are all free, open source applications.