Sean Daily is an English major from New Jersey now living in Las Vegas, the Other City of Lights. "I consider 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' to be comfort reading, I like the al pastor tacos at Tacos Mexico and I count among my literary influences the Chainsaw from 'Doom'. 'RRRRRR! You don't like that, do you, Mr. Undead Marine! RRRRRR!'"
Shanoah Alkire is our Discordian at large. "Born in Santa Cruz, I grew up in Grass Valley and the Bay Area, and now lurk in Las Vegas. My literary influences include Ray Bradbury,
Lewis Carroll, and Douglas Adams. I also program as a hobby,
and currently maintain the Gtk port of Angband. You can find
a rather old bio of me here."
Haven’t posted in a while. I’ll try to keep posting here every so often, but I doubt there’ll be any regularity to it any more. I’d rather keep posting erratically then stop posting all together, though.
So, theme today is stuff I’ve listened to recently. It usually is, actually. I’m just being a little more blatant about it right now.
First, I’ve played Who Knows Where the Time Goes being sung by Kate Wolf here before, and I tend to think of it as a Kate Wolf song, but this is Fairport Convention playing it. And, you know, the lead singer, Sandy Denny, wrote the song, so it’s actually their song.
Just a matter of where I heard it first, really. They both died way too young, and were great folk singers. Though, if you listen to Led Zeppelin’s Battle of Evermore carefully, it’s actually Sandy Denny singing with Robert Plant, which is cool.
I’ve also been listening to Steeleye Span playing The Lowlands of Holland for some reason. It’s a great folk song that’s been covered by everyone and their mother, really. Note that the singer here is not Maddy Prior, but Gay Woods. This was actually off of Steeleye Spans first album, and she left the band before the next album.
This is sort of tangentially related to the last song, in that Steeleye Span was founded by a former member of Fairport Convention.
And when I say this songs been played by everyone, I mean it. Here is Dún an Doras playing it.
And here’s Celia from Salmon’s Leap singing it.
And lets round things off with Fairport Convention and the song The Hiring Fair.
“My trembling fingers touched her arm, and she placed them on her breast.”
Part of me thinks it’s romantic. And part of me is thinking “Damn, he’s getting lucky tonight”. ^_^
You know, I don’t think I’ve played Bobby McFerrin on here before. And he’s innovative enough that I really have to correct that.
Check out this performance of the song Drive by him. It’s frankly amazing. This whole performance is a cappella, using his chest as a drum, and singing and making music with both his mouth and throat. I have no idea how he manages it.
This video of I’ve Got A Feeling, now, is just amusing to watch. I think the woman he gropes during the song is his wife. She’s certainly cracking up during the whole thing. And so was I, watching, of course.
All right, today I thought it was time to play some anime related videos, so I figured I’d start out with an annoying (but catchy) anime AMV.
Take the song Butterfly, which already fits the category of annoying and catchy. Mix sounds from Pokemon into it. Then add video clips of Pokemon to it, and you get this Pokemon Butterfly Remix video. It works well.
For comparison, here’s the really bizarre video to the original song Butterfly (which is by SMiLE.dk). This is very much a WTF type music video. I swear someone involved in it was on drugs.
And here we have more IOSYS. The song seems to have several translations of the title, but I’ll go with Erin’s Clinic (That People Queue Up For). It’s a very catchy song, and I was able to find a version with good video and sound that was untranslated, and a translated version that the audio and video wasn’t as good for. Here are both, untranslated first.
I was going to post another IOSYS song, but I found another song that intrigued me. I happened to stumble upon a song by the odd title of Peacebone being covered by JacobRuefer. The music video he posted set to scenes from Pokemon seems oddly appropriate, somehow. Very catchy cover.
Having heard that, I had to hear the original, by a band called Animal Collective. So I did. It’s a strange, oddly discordant song, set to a music video involving a girl dating a monster that looks like it’s off the set of Alien. I have to approve.
That said, I actually think Jacobs cover is cleaner, and catchier, and I actually found I enjoyed it more then the original. Still, here’s Animal Collective’s version, so you can judge for yourself.
Note: It’s growing on me on the second listen, but I still feel like I’m on the verge of a headache listening to the original because of what they did to the music in the background. I might just be somewhat sensitive to it…
They are evil, aren’t they? And there are so many of them, too; the group seems fairly prolific.
For today, first, I’ll play IOSYS’s Marisa Stole Something Very Important. Hurray for lesbian couples. And Guten Morgan is “Good Morning”, naturally, not the #3, so take the subtitles with a grain of salt.
And this other video I’m throwing in isn’t even by IOSYS. But the style and zanyness remind me of them.This is Kero ⑨ Destiny, by Silver Forest. Knowing that the sound frogs make in Japanese is “Kero”, much like cats going “Nya” helps on this video.
Translation may be iffy in spots, I suspect. Still, “There is n-o o-n-e inside this hat, OK?“. Win.
All right, I’ll admit it. I’m half posting this because of the combination of being addictive and annoyingly kawaii…
Well, think I’ll continue with IOSYS for the moment.
No subtitles on this, but it’s titled “You Should Drink Cucumber Flavored Beer!“, when translated to English. Somehow, I think this video is pretty self explanatory.
Sometimes I have no idea how I got to a video. Or even if I do, it’s from a strange enough route that I have to wonder anyways.
This is a case in point. However bizarre it was, earlier I was looking at a Japanese cast singing “Jesus Christ Superstar” (and that was very cool. Too bad it didn’t allow embedding.). And later, I was watching parts of Andrew Lloyd Webers “CATS” in Japanese.
None of that explains how I got to this odd fan made video, titled Overdrive, by IOSYS. After watching a purely Japanese version, I grabbed a version with subtitles. It didn’t help, though I’m assured this features Reisen Udongein Inaba, the Moon Rabbit.
Warning: this video may cause insanity in laboratory rabbits in clinical studies. And it’s not worksafe, besides that.
All right, since neither of us have posted, think I’ll post something that I know well enough that I could do it in my sleep. (though hopefully not particularly boring.)
I’ve expressed my interest, or perhaps obsession with the song Bedlam Boysbefore, which also goes by a few other titles. It’s a cool song with a million verses, and everyone plays it differently.
The song is about someone in Bedlam, the Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane. In some of its incarnations, it’s about someone from its sister institution, Maudlin, the Hospital of St Mary Madelene, who falls in love with Mad Tom O’ Bedlam.
As it’s supposed to be about someone who is insane, it encourages unusual takes on the song. Here is one such, Mad Toms Song by Bluehorses. They’ve set the song to some wonderfully discordant rock music. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of it was improvised.
And you’ll note that they’ve modified the verse structure, too. Cool performance.
And here’s Old Blind Dogs playing the song in a fairly traditional yet fairly modern arrangement. This video actually has both the studio version and a live version. Live version actually sounds somewhat better to my ears.
And here, of course, is Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span’s slightly cracked take on the song. Quite different from Steeleye Spans take on it, really, and a lot more lighthearted.
This isn’t related to the last post either, except, perhaps, in that it isn’t related.
Don’t really have much time for posting today, but here’s a song by XTC I found. This one is called Dear God, and basically consists of the ranting and raving people of a highly Christian background tend to do when they rub more then two brain cells together.
Of course, in my opinion, the fact that there is suffering in the world doesn’t mean god doesn’t exist. It just generally means that there is something wrong with the model of god given, or that there are constraints that you don’t know about.
Besides, if bad things didn’t happen, we’d still be in the stone age. And, frankly, good and evil are too sides of a coin; you can’t really have one without the other.
Still, I like songs like this. It shakes people out of complacency…
