Blog Updates, 28 December 2007

I use this blog to write about matters of personal significance - which means that I don't typically drop a topic after I've written about it, but tend to continue keeping tabs on it for some time.  Occasionally, I get some really juicy material with which to follow up previous posts.  Although the rule is to keep my entries as discrete as possible, you can expect me to drop a bricolage of updates on you every once in a while - collected links and videos that explore previous entries in greater depth.  Here is the first round...more or less just a clumping of cool stuff that ties in to my blogs of yore.  Enjoy!

Update - Geniuses of Percussive Guitar
First off, add to my gallery of awesome percussive guitarists one Erik Mongrain, one of only two or three dudes in the whole damn world who play tap guitar with his instrument flat on his lap (kind of like a lap steel, but a fundamentally different technique, being as there's no slide involved).  In my opinion, it doesn't open up much creative territory - "lap tap," if you'll forgive me, is an incredibly limiting technique that looks cool but doesn't accomplish much that can't be done by holding the guitar like a normal human being.  Even Erik only has a handful of songs in this style.  But he takes the gimmick as far as it will carry him - which is pretty far!  His song, "AirTap!," is featured in this video, recorded from Canadian television.  What a badass.


Update - Visionary Instruments:  Tenori-on and Monome
In this article, I compared the Monome, an open-source electronic musical composition device, to the Speak & Spell, an artifact of retrokitsch from the 1980s.  Kind of an unfair comparison, considering one is a key to limitless musical freedom and the other is a pre-programmed child's toy, but apparently I wasn't the only person who thought of the two in the same breath.  Right after writing that post, I found these videos, in which someone is using a Monome to control a circuit-bent Speak & Spell.  As adorably weird as it is questionably musical.



Update - A Joyful Noise:  Phil Kline's Unsilent Night
I wrote this article on Phil Kline's winter noise parade the day before it actually happened in Boulder.  Thanks to the Daily Camera, Boulder's local newspaper, there is now a video news segment online that features footage from the event and does a good job of capturing the strange buzz of participating in it.  It's not on YouTube, unfortunately, but you can find the video here, on the Daily Camera's homepage.  Makes me wish I hadn't been working, that night...