BTC: Panda Dance
Some weeks, thumb you just gotta throw your hands up in the air, cry “Tempus FUGGIT”, and do the Panda Dance.
Song by Jonathan Mann.
Friday Afternoon Apathy
No Friday Afternoon Movie today. Instead, we present Jon Lajoie’s hip hop tribute to not giving a fuck. It is absolutely vital that you watch this right now (with headphones if you’re at work as it’s full of dirty, work-inappropriate language). The FAM will return next week. Promise.
Dial-up Modem Sound Slowed Down 700% Using Paulstretch
Dial-up modem sound slowed 700% by Darkfalky, ampoule using PaulStretch. Eerie, sinister, incredibly beautiful.
via Ariana Osborne
Also see:
“Russian Unicorn”
One Canadian crooner’s Top 40 banality yields another Bad Lip-Reader’s jejune BRILLIANCY:
via Sarah Blue
Bad Lip-Reader’s Black Eyed Peas, Ludacris/BeeGees and Taylor Swift piss-takes are sidesplitting as well.
“Russian Unicorn” lyric sheet after the jump.
Better Than Coffee (Encore): Trolling Saruman
First, there was Eduard Kihl. Then, there was Trololo Cat. Now, there’s this:
(Via Ariana Osborne. All due love and respect to the incredible Christopher Lee, but I trololol’d.)
BTC: Hans Reichel’s Daxophone
One of the more unique looking, and easily one of the most unique sounding musical instruments ever invented, Hans Reichel’s daxophone is sure to put some spring in your step and some giggles in your face this fine morning:
A bowed musical instrument that falls into the category of “friction idiophones“, the daxophone consists of a long, thin wooden blade notched into a wooden block containing one or more contact (piezo) mics, often attached to a tripod. In addition to being bowed, daxophones can be plucked or struck, conducting sounds the same way “a struck ruler halfway off a table does”, with each vibration moving through a “tongue” of wood into the instrument’s wood block base, which acts as a resonator for the contact mics contained inside.
Depending on the shape and grain of each wooden tongue, and how they are manipulated, all manner of uncanny (and often hilarious) warbling, moaning, grumbling, yodeling, spluttering, rasping, growling, yowling sounds can be coaxed from these oddly human-sounding pieces of wood. (The daxophone’s name comes from the use of a stopper block of wood called the “dax”, which is fretted on one side to produce fixed pitches, while the other side is curved and smooth, allowing a performer to shift more fluidly from one note into the next.)
A variety of daxophone tongues. (Via oddmusic.com.)
Generously, Reichel offers extensive downloadable plans for his invention on his website so that other woodworkers can create daxophones of their very own.
Visit oddmusic.com to find out more about this, and countless other experimental instruments and musicians. Also worth checking out:
Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters (Feed the Beasties!)
Another beautiful day, another amazing Kickstarter project by a beloved curator of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
Musician, composer, artist and storyteller Carla Kihlstedt‘s Necessary Monsters is a staged song cycle after Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. Carla wrote it with poet Rafael Osés for seven musicians and an actress. The narrative “follows a young writer as she tries in vain to corral the imaginary beings that parade out of her mind in the course of a sleepless night. In this journey, she encounters many beasts – some meddlesome, some winsome, some loathsome – and discovers that she is indeed the sum of their parts.”
Previous stagings of this work have provided stunning, intimate portraits of Carla and her colleagues’ creative processes– their intelligence, their playfulness, their sweetness. Since that time, the piece “has gone through a kind of distillation process, the way a good friendship does, that only happens with time. In this next chapter, we’ve recast, retooled, and redirected. The cast, the crew and the design team include some of my very favorite musicians and artists, all of whom have brought incredible ideas and energy to the piece. It is finally becoming the beast it was meant to be. We’re performing it in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on July 29th and 30th of this year. ”
As of this minute, hundreds of people have contributed approximately $23K toward Carla’s Kickstarter campaign. She just sent out an email saying “We’re right at the edge and the pressure’s on. We’ve got three days to raise another $2,043. So, If you’ve been waiting in the wings for these last giddy moments… NOW is your time!”
