Posts matching tags 'video'
2008/7/2
An artist in Portland, Oregon bought an old Pullman rail sleeper car and converted it into a living/working space. The interesting thing here is that it's not sitting in a yard somewhere, sans wheels, but is on the North American railway network. It's stabled at a private siding, for which the owner pays $150 per month; electricity, cable TV and DSL are available. Should the occupant get bored of their locale, they can move anywhere on the railway network by getting a freight rail company to attach their wagon to a train and move it, for $1.50 a mile.
Now that it's known that one can rent private sidings with facilities, and contract freight train companies to move your home around the railroads, perhaps a new subculture of bohemian railcar dwellers (let's call them "boho hoboes") will arise, comprised of similar sorts of people that live in houseboats in Europe. And perhaps the railway revival that some are saying expensive oil will lead to will include new private, full-service sidings catering to the new hipster-hobo class.
I wonder whether something like this is possible outside of America. Could Europeans take advantage of the European railways' open-access rules to do something similar? If so, could an European rail dweller bounce around the entire EU at will for euros per kilometre? What about in Britain? (Though there, the problem arises that British rail cars, and the spaces between platforms, are quite narrow, which could make living arrangements somewhat cramped.) Could one make a railcar home compliant with British and continental standards and the Channel Tunnel's safety standards and cross the Channel with it? I'm guessing that in Australia, where the railway networks are more fragmentary and limited (and old sleeper cars are somewhat scarcer), such a thing could be more difficult.
(via Boing Boing Gadgets) ¶ [no comments]
2008/5/24
Tonight will be Eurovision 2008, that annual spectacle of kitsch, histrionics, cultural misunderstandings and political skulduggery. There are 25 entrants this year, the videos of whose entries the BBC has kindly hosted on its web site.
As a public service to those following the competition, The Null Device has provided a handy table of the salient qualities of these entrants:
2008/2/20
How To Behave On An Internet Forum, presented in the form of a retrostyled pixel-art video:
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2008/2/8
Norwich-based comedian and reviewer of dubious far-eastern video game machines Dr. Ashen (he's the "sarcastic British guy") reviews the Vii, a cheap video-game console of Chinese manufacture which attempts to imitate the Nintendo Wii without having much of the technical innovation. If you ever wondered what one of those could possibly be like, here's all you need to know. (Capsule summary: don't bother importing one.)
(via Engadget) ¶ [no comments]
2008/1/19
YouTube video of the day: Jeffrey Lewis - "Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror", a nice exemplar of New York hipster antifolk:
(via Tegan) ¶ [4 comments]
2007/8/11
Last night, I saw Rose Melberg (from The Softies) and Harvey Williams (once known as Another Sunny Day) play. It was an amazing gig; probably one of the gigs of the year.
First up were The Dreamers; I had heard nothing about them before, but they were quite good; melodious indiepop, not a world away from Blueboy. They're definitely one to keep an eye out for.
Harvey Williams was great; he first part of his set he played on an electric piano, doing mostly newer songs (i.e., from his 1990s album on Shinkansen; there wasn't a raft of new material), though he then picked up an acoustic guitar and played a bunch of older songs, including You Should All Be Murdered and I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist. It was great to see him performing these songs.
Then there was Rose Melberg's set, which was sublimely lovely. She played acoustic guitar and sang, with a friend from Vancouver (where she lives now) accompanying her on vocal harmonies (much in the way that Jen Sbragia did in the Softies).
They played for about an hour, doing recent songs, a few older songs (including The Softies' It's Love, which many in the audience sang along with), and some covers. The highlight of the set by far would have to be the cover of The Field Mice's The Last Letter; Rose started it almost apologetically, concerned that she may be committing sacrilege of a sort, proceeded to play a beautiful version (imagine said song as a Softies song and you've got it) and finished to rousing applause. Anyway, there's a video here:
2007/7/2
A few videos from this weekend's Momus gig at La Flèche d'Or in Paris:
Pierrot Lunaire:
Nervous Heartbeat:
2007/6/11
Things I didn't know until today: there is a video to
And here is some rather distorted footage from a performance at a Sarah Records backyard party. No idea who the band are, I'm afraid.
(via 
class_worrier) ¶ [no comments]
2007/5/20
YouTube video of the day: "Amateur", by a Scandinavian fellow named Lasse Gjertsen, who, despite not knowing how to play the drums or piano, recorded video of himself hitting drums and piano keys and assembled it into a song through the sheer power of video editing:
(via trayce) ¶ [no comments]
2007/5/3
This blog has been quiet recently because your humble correspondent has been in bed with a cold for the past two days (a state of affairs which may or may not have had something to do with watching indie bands on chilly railway station platforms in Derbyshire on the weekend). Anyway, in lieu of new content, here are a few old links and random things:
- Here is a photo gallery of eerily empty former advertising billboards and hoardings in São Paulo, Brazil, where all outdoor advertising is now banned. Not surprisingly, the advertising industry is concerned about the human rights of those who might want to be advertised at:
"I think this city is going to become a sadder, duller place," said Dalton Silvano, who cast the sole dissenting vote and is in the advertising business. "Advertising is both an art form and, when you're in your car or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom."
- Stylus Magazine has an interesting guided tour of the first 50 Sarah Records singles, going beyond the usual "twee/jangly indie pop" cliché that the label is often dismissed as. As for actually hearing the records, Clare Wadd said a while ago that there were plans to release the entire Sarah back-catalogue as downloads, though nothing seems to have come of that so far.
- And a few videos from The Blow's recent gig in London: Hey Boy, a spoken-word interlude, and an acapella version of The Long List Of Girls.
2007/1/22
During my visit to Melbourne, I videotaped a few gigs. Now (time and computer facilities permitting), I'm going through the tapes and will be putting a few choice fragments on YouTube (with permission of the performers, of course).
The first fragment: Light Music Club, "Music for the Tiny Hours", live at Spoon, Brunswick:
Apologies for the shaky camerawork/less than ideal video quality.
2006/12/6
Scary Mary: Disney's Mary Poppins re-edited into a trailer for a hypothetical horror movie.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/11/6
A few items from Music Thing: this account of one hip-hop head's attempt to recreate the talkbox sound à la Roger Troutman, with instructions on how to build your own talbox from an amp, a speaker, a plastic bowl and some plastic tubing.
And here is a disco-dancing lesson from a Finnish TV programme, with the instructor showing the moves and then demonstrating them to the sound of Dschingiz Khan's Moskau. Eurovision's in good hands.
(via Music Thing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/10/24
And a few video fragments from the weekend's Ninetynine gig in Reykjavík:
Polar Angle:
and Wöekenender:
(They look a lot less blurry in real life. Or, indeed, in the video before it went through the YouTube process.)
Anyway, they're playing Spain this week, and in London on the 31st. More details on their web site.
2006/9/18
And a YouTube treat for you: Swedish indiepop ensemble I'm From Barcelona performing "Treehouse" at their recent gig in Hoxton:
The rest of the gig, incidentally, was just as brilliant; it was more like a travelling party than a concert.
2006/9/7
And here is what looks like Banksy's making-of video for his Paris Hilton project.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/8/9
More YouTube videos: this time Stump's "Buffalo", which you may remember from the C86 compilation (it was the most dadaistic track on that one). The video, in this case, is the visual equivalent of the song. Enjoy.
Meanwhile, more Swedish indiepop: Jens Lekman's "You Are The Light"; pretty polished, involving Jens riding through a tunnel in a van surrounded by riot police, with brass sections passing in open-topped cars at key sections of the song.
And here's one for the goths: Propaganda's "Dr. Mabuse", with Anton Corbijn doing his best Fritz Lang homage.
(via Bowlie) ¶ [no comments]
2006/7/15
This week, I went to see Spearmint at the Luminaire. They were excellent; incredibly tight and energetic, with lots of handclaps, harmonies and dancing around the stage. And their new material is quite impressive (particularly Psycho Magnet, which sounds like what Funny Little Frog would have been had it been recorded by early-1990s Pulp rather than Belle & Sebastian).
Anyway, a few choice video fragments from the gig:
2006/6/12
Tonight, I went to Cargo to see Camera Obscura, the Scottish indie-pop combo. They were pretty good; slightly retroish pop music, not a world away from Belle & Sebastian, though with a black-haired girl in Stuart's place. (I.e., if you like B&S, you'll probably like them.) They played some older songs ("Teenager", "Suspended From Class" and so on), and a few from their new album, which I'll have to get a copy of.
The support band, Frànçois and the Atlas Mountains, really impressed me. They're an indieish outfit from Bristol, fronted by a French chap who moved to Bristol for the music scene, and played both well and energetically, with a lot of instrument swapping, handclaps and general jumping around; not to mention some rather leftfield choices of instruments; in addition to the usual indie kit (guitars, Casios, tambourines, melodicas), they had a huge wooden recorder and a harp; all of which worked quite well. Not to mention that one of the band members had the k3wlest T-shirt: it read "I Really Like Electric Rock Music".
I happened to have a digital video camera on hand, and hence I filmed parts of the gig. I've uploaded one of François & co.'s songs, "Tracey Emin" (perhaps the standout piece of the set) to YouTube (with the appropriate permission, of course):
2006/6/8
YouTube video of the day: a kitten climbs onto a MacBook, inadvertently triggers FrontRow (the media-player application), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdXTDovB9K8 starts pouncing on the flying icons, and eventually starts iTunes.
(via Gizmodo) ¶ [no comments]
2006/5/7
Man memorises Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven backwards, videotapes himself singing it backwards outside St. Paul's Cathedral, London (complete with righteous air-guitar and exaggerated facial expressions), reverses the video, adds music and puts it online. The overall effect is eerie, not least of all because of the steady stream of people walking backwards behind the strange man in front of the camera.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/3/24
This is fairly nifty; a piece of software that divides a library of music videos into segments, listens for incoming sound, and plays the segments matching the sound the most closely. It's implemented using C++, Python and Pd, and will be released soon. Until then, you can watch the video, which explains it and demonstrates, playing back beatboxing as disjointed fragments from a MC Hammer video.
(via Music Thing) ¶ [no comments]
2006/3/3
Melbourne/Brisbane twee-krautpop outfit Minimum Chips have released a video to their song Goodbye, from their most recent album, Kitchen Tea Thankyou. Filmed in oversaturated Super 8, it involves the band members packing into an old turquoise Toyota and going for a picnic in the park, and goes quite well with their music. There's a streaming Flash version on YouTube here, and Spiked Candy has put up a downloadable version here.
Apparently Minimum Chips are going on indefinite hiatus, as frontwoman Nicole is having a baby; which could mean no more Minimum Chips, or just a longer than usual wait for the next EP. However, they're not leaving fans empty-handed; they have posted (128kbps) MP3s of their entire back-catalogue, including their recent album Kitchen Tea Thankyou, on their discography page.
(via spikedcandy, andy_yayus) ¶ [1 comment]
2004/11/30
2004/10/23
This is pretty cool; NASA video of an aeroplane full of crash-test dummies crashing and burning, edited and set to what sounds like a laptop-glitch remix of Interpol's Untitled. (Of course, Sigur Rós, Merzbow or some Austrian glitchmeister would have been more l33t, but still...) (via bOING bOING)
2004/5/7
Staplerfahrer Klaus, a German factory safety video that seems to have been inspired by Peter Jackson's early works, or possibly a comic splatter-horror film masquerading as a factory safety film. Includes forklifts, chainsaws and the sort of daggy/groovy incidental music that they seem to make only in Germany. If your browser doesn't play Windows Media inline, you can grab the WMV file here.
2004/3/22
I should really read Largehearted Boy more often; he has recently posted a number of links to MP3s online, including a trove of tracks from Slowdive EPs (at 128kbps, though). These are really good; if you haven't heard them, go and download.
Also via LHB, Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, in a MPEG file. If you were wondering what exactly The Pixies' Debaser was about, that's it.
2004/3/7
Video Feedback Fractals; fractal-looking shapes (resembling IFSes, for the most part) generated using purely analogue means, i.e., a video camera, two monitors and a pane of glass. Which is rather clever. (via Gimbo)
2004/2/9
Video Toaster, the classic Amiga video-editing system, has been released to the open-source community. Mind you, since what made it so useful is dependent on the Amiga's video chipset, it's more a historical curio than anything else.
2003/9/17
Looking at the temporary page on the Ninetynine web site; apparently there is a video for The Process, but it's in streaming Windows Media only. (The XML-like file linked to also says it's copyrighted by Festival Mushroom Records, which sounds a bit odd, given how the band like to own all their own masters, unless News Corp. commissioned the video themselves or something.) Anyway, whuffie to the first person to send me a HTTP, FTP or BitTorrent link to a file of the video. (Preferably in MPEG4 or some good-quality format. Windows Media 9 and below is OK as long as there's no DRM involved; i.e., as long as mplayer on Linux will play it.)
And here are their Australian tour dates:
SYDNEY LEG
Fri 19th Sept - Annandale Hotel w/ The Devoted Few + Disaster Plan. - 8:30 Start $8
Sat 20th Sept - Pop Frenzy Presents.. @ The Taxi Club, 40 South Dowling St, Darlinghurst w/ Disaster Plan - 9pm Start
Sun 21st Sept - All Ages Show @ The Club House, Jubilee Park (under land bridge) Glebe w/ Pure Evil. 2pm - Donation
MELBOURNE LEG
Fri 26th September - Rob Roy Hotel w/ Pink Stainless Tail (CD Launch) + Jihad Against America
Sat 27th September - Rob Roy Hotel w/ Love of Diagrams + Because of Ghosts
And apparently there's vinyl of The Process coming out too. (Which stands to reason, as labelmates Architecture In Helsinki have been doing the vinyl thing too.)