Presenting: the Geocities-izer

This site claims to "Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996"... so... me, essentially. Of course back then you could have found me hanging out in "Area 51" writing about Star Trek and replying all to mailing lists and flooding my Dad's email account with bullcrap flame wars... Ahh, the 90s.

The Geocities-izer

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99% invisible

Going through a bunch of podcasts I have to catch up on (I hate deleting), and I thought I'd share this really cool story from Radiolab... it's a feature from another radio show the producers like.

This particular show interviews a guy who does acoustic product sound design... worth a listen.

Edit: Only took me three days to figure out I forgot to put the link... Bah.

Bowie on 20/20 in 1980

Pretty astonishing to see a piece like this from such a high profile news program. A great watch:

TV Eye: '20/20' Profiles David Bowie In 1980...

He-Man: Sexy and he knows it

Aww yeah! You know how much I love mashups!

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Player's "Baby Come Back"

One of my favourite baseball podcasts recently used the smooth rock classic "Baby Come Back" by Player. I immediately noticed that the song I was hearing was different than the version that I'm used to hearing.

The version I'm used to hearing is the 7" single cut, which checks in at 3:40. The version on the podcast was the album version, which is 3:56 in length and features a guitar solo. The single cut reached #1 on the Billboard chart back in November 1977, according to Joel Whitburn.

Sixteen seconds seems somewhat insignificant, but every second counted on radio, and anything longer than that would be on the bubble of played/not played. Unless you were a huge artist, the chances of your "long" record getting played were slim.

Here's a rendition of the longer version:

Reckoner '85

My friend Adam sends me this link to a Radiohead remix of "Reckoner", done to make it sound like it was from 1985.

The track gets the New Order circa Low-life treatment, and it most likely makes use of a Yamaha DX7 or at least samples/patches designed to emulate voices from the iconic sounding synth. Here's a demo that gives you an idea of what the keyboard can sound like... I'm sure you can think of dozens of songs that use this instrument, mostly from the David Foster category.

Here's a recent use of the same instrument, from the album that was at the top of many critics' year end lists, Bon Iver's "Beth/Rest".

Obligatory New Year's post

It's about time I got that Christmas post off the top of the page. Happy New Year, and all that. It's been a relaxing, and then busy again couple of weeks. Last week I worked on some pretty cool stuff for work that I can post when it airs/goes online, so stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, to get the blog juices flowing again, here's a list of the most visited posts on the blog from the past year:

• Captain America trailer features Tool song
• Great songs in the Zookeeper trailer can't convince me to part with my money
• NIN track in the Avengers trailer
• Concert review - The Weeknd - I like the fact that all I did was post a link to the Star website and I got mad hits.
• Soundgarden concert review - July 2, Molson Amphitheatre, Toronto
• My favourite podcasts
• Cut Copy concert review & setlist
• TV on the Radio concert review - April 18, Sound Academy
• 30 Harshest Musician on Musician Disses
• Caribou shills for Lexus in new commercial

Bonus: This Resident Evil post from June 2010 was the third most visited post this past year. Go figure. I need to either post more, post more quality stuff, or post more about songs in trailers. And also more concert reviews. Who's up for a show soon?