The rock star cliché for a band headed to South by Southwest is a handful of gnarly dudes piling into a beater van and setting the GPS for Austin, Texas. But for New York singer/songwriter Laura Stevenson and the four guys in her indie-folk band, the reality is less fart jokes and drug-addled misadventure and more baked goods and early mornings.
We’ve been documenting their tour to SXSW this year - watch the first installment here! - and in the midst of all the shows and driving, Laura played us this acoustic version of her song, “The Move,” from the upcoming album, Wheel, due out on April 23rd.
(Source: Wired)
BEHIND THE SCENES OF SOLANGE’S FADER #84 COVER SHOOT :)
HAPPY WEDNESDAYYYYYYY
Beck’s astonishing 10-minute recreation of David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” racked up more than 300 thousand Youtube views in the last week, and now Beck and music video director Chris Milk (with the help of car maker Lincoln) are releasing an all-new way to experience the performance for all the fans who wish they could have been there. Call it the next best thing: an interactive 360-degree version of the performance that allows online viewers to navigate the concert similar to the way you navigate roads in Google Maps Street View, while surrounded by sound and movement.
“The perspective you have watching it in 360 and the way you move around is probably similar to how a player in a videogame moves around the space,” Beck told Wired. “But in this you’re obviously moving around a real space. It’s sort of imposing the way you navigate in a videogame into a real-life experience.”
Navigate Beck’s performance of ‘Sound and Vision’ as a 360-degree interactive video.
The art of beatboxing is unparalleled – intricate layers of booms and clicks produced by a single person’s mouth in ways that seem almost super-human. Watching a great beatboxer turn out a series of vocal tricks can give anyone watching a distinct sense of, “WTF? How did they do that?” Luckily, science is now trying to find the answer.
Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory have been using real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to examine exactly what “paralinguistic mechanisms” beatboxers are using. And, according to their most recent study on the matter, what they’ve found is that a beatboxer can use mechanisms found in many diverse languages — even ones they don’t speak. Their research also shows beatboxers can create an illusion of singing while making a beat, a skill that provides insight into the relationship between speech production and perception.
“We were very surprised to discover how closely the vocal percussion sounds resembled sounds attested in languages unknown to the beatboxer,” the study’s lead author Michael Proctor said in an email to Wired. “Even though his goals were musical, the beatboxer converged on methods of sound production which have been harnessed in the phonology of other human languages.”
Read more, and watch a video of the MRI, over @ Underwire!
(Source: Wired)
![Fans of indie musician Jonathan Coulton were incensed last week when an alleged Glee version of “Baby Got Back” surfaced on the internet that seemed to shamelessly rip off Coulton’s distinctive arrangement of the 1992 Sir Mix-A-Lot song. Last night, that cover version was confirmed as an official Glee track when it appeared on the mid-season premiere of the Fox show, and is currently for sale on iTunes.
Fox’s hard-nosed, corporate disregard for the work of an independent musician seems ironic particularly in the context of Glee, a television show whose core themes have so often revolved around the plight — and triumph — of the underdog. “If this were an episode of Glee I would win. The way they’re behaving is so antithetical to the message of their show,” Coulton told Wired.
“It’s a little frustrating. Whether or not they’re in the right legally, it doesn’t seem like the best way to handle it. If you’re going to claim that you’re giving an artist exposure and they should be grateful — there’s a right way to do that. Contact them ahead of time. Say this is great, we’re going to talk about it on our blog and tell all our fans that they should be fans of yours. We’re going to put a credit in the show. That doesn’t cost them anything. It’s a show with something like a $3.5 million budget for each episode, but there are still so many free things they could have done to engender goodwill.”
[via Underwire]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8e6be259f0585642ad48b748d0f6e00d/tumblr_mhaxpkSjYa1r69k7do1_500.jpg)
Fans of indie musician Jonathan Coulton were incensed last week when an alleged Glee version of “Baby Got Back” surfaced on the internet that seemed to shamelessly rip off Coulton’s distinctive arrangement of the 1992 Sir Mix-A-Lot song. Last night, that cover version was confirmed as an official Glee track when it appeared on the mid-season premiere of the Fox show, and is currently for sale on iTunes.
“It’s a little frustrating. Whether or not they’re in the right legally, it doesn’t seem like the best way to handle it. If you’re going to claim that you’re giving an artist exposure and they should be grateful — there’s a right way to do that. Contact them ahead of time. Say this is great, we’re going to talk about it on our blog and tell all our fans that they should be fans of yours. We’re going to put a credit in the show. That doesn’t cost them anything. It’s a show with something like a $3.5 million budget for each episode, but there are still so many free things they could have done to engender goodwill.”
[via Underwire]
Over the last several weeks, we’ve posted our year-end roundups of the best television, top albums, and most underrated movies of 2012. We thought we made some pretty good choices, but since no list is ever going to be comprehensive in the eyes of the fan whose favorite didn’t make the cut, Wired readers had some suggestions of their own. With the help of your generous and in no way angry comments, we’ve compiled a new list of 10 TV shows, movies and albums that deserved props in 2012 — as dictated by you.
…also DUHHHH, ADVENTURE TIME = BEST EVERRRR
Breaking Bad is as addictive as Walter White’s blue meth, even to people who work on the show.
Before the pilot aired, composer Dave Porter saw it at a colleague’s house and knew he was going to need more than one fix of AMC’s nervy drama that stars Bryan Cranston as a chemistry teacher who makes a fascinating descent into the drug trade.
“I was absolutely hooked,” Porter told Wired in an e-mail. “After that, I was as persistent as I could be until I was hired.”
(Source: Wired)
Greg Gage of the DIY neuroscience company Backyard Brains stimulated the axons of a squid with the electrical signals coming out of a headphone jack plugged into an iPhone playing a Cypress Hill song. He videotaped the Squid’s pigmented cells called chromatophores, which changed with the music.
[via BoingBoing]
(Source: Boing Boing)
We got to hang out with RZA and talk kung fu, movies, directing, and all the other awesome stuffs.
You jelly?
(Source: Wired)
