christophe thinks out loud

Electric Cowbells

It's entirely possible that the Rad Monkey Electronic Cowbells are not, in fact, real, and that this is a parody.

It's possible.

Why didn't I think of that?

This is an exceptionally cool idea: The Virus line of synthesizers comes with plug-ins for your favorite composing program. Rather than doing the synthesis in software, bogging down your computer, it communicates via USB with the synth, and the synth does the synth thing and returns the results.

And you can play it as a keyboard. I hope it sounds wonderful, because this is a very nifty idea.

Dave Smith Instruments

Years ago, when I worked at Oberheim Electronics (working on the DPX1, gobble, gobble), Dave Smith's first Sequential Circuits was still around. Like Tom Oberheim and Roger Linn, he was a brilliant analog engineer. Like Roger Linn but unlike Tom Oberheim, he got out while the getting was good, just ahead of the Yamaha DX-7 destroying the US synthesizer industry.

Smith was, in fact, largely responsible for the invention of MIDI, since he didn't want to have to build yet another damned sequencer. He also held a patent on the scanning keyboard, resulting in what must have been a nice little royalty stream.

But Smith's back, and he's making utterly drool-worthy equipment. I'm not 100% sure, but this seem to have an architectur similar to the Oberheim Xpander and Matrix-12 (although it probably doesn't use dual 6800s as the processors). It also seems to have the wonderful advantage that you can feed external audio through the filter array, not just the output of the generators.

Yum.

RazorBladeKisses

Songs available from Mperia.com. Not only are they a stylish and delightful dark-rock-guitar-goth band, but when I ordered their CD, I received a keyring with it. Mperia.com is a single-song download site I can actually live with.

World on Fire

When was the last time a music video made you cry? This one did for me. (Requires iTunes. Via ongoing.)

RIP, Sydney Carter

I feel terrible I didn't even know of his passing until now, but better late than never. Sydney Carter, one of the greatest Christian songwriters, and folk songwriters of any religion, passed away in March of this year.

His best known song, without a doubt, is “Lord of the Dance,” a song that is sung and resung by many people who assume it is traditional . . . pagan, even. Carter’s genius was writing songs that, while undoubtedly Christian (in a gentle, Noncomformist way), could speak about the essence of faith to anyone, of any religion.

If you needed any more proof that Enoch Powell was a moron, the fact that he wanted to ban “Friday Morning” for being blasphemous should be sufficient: a more intensely devoted Christian song has probably never been written.

Don’t let me scare you off his work; it’s not “Christian Music” any more than J. S. Bach’s is. If you have never heard much of his work, you are in for a treat. Find a copy of Lovely in the Dances, the tribute album that Maddy Prior and other luminaries put together in the early 1980s.

The Twilight Singers / . . . Plays Blackberry Belle

I barely remember the Afghan Whigs, except in a sort of "yeah, that name produces a feeling in me of kind of liking their music. I wonder what it was like" kind of way.

The Twilight Singers are, I suppose, very much like the Afghan Whigs, given that they have the same frontsman. They are wonderful, or at least . . . Plays Blackberry Belle is. They have jangly guitars. They have horns. They have noise and melody together, a combination that always works for me. They have a track that is nearly an anthem, "Papillon," that I sing along to in the car without a shred of embarrassment. It really does all come together nicely.