Dear God this is painful! (or "Keyboard screwups even happen to mega-bands like Van Halen")

Holy living crap is this painful for me to listen to. PAINful. As described in this post, Van Halen (with David Lee) took to the stage for their final number - Jump - and unfortunately the prerecorded synth parts were played back at a different sample rate (48 khz) than they were recorded (44.1 khz), making them waaay out of tune with the rest of the band.



Now, Caffeine Sunday and the previous bands Ryan and I have been in have had their share of technical glitches (which to be quite honest would have been very, very easy to eliminate if we had mountains of cash to spend like VH), but this is soooooo bad....... worse than anything we've had blow up on stage, and people certainly paid a lot more money in this instance to have their spinal columns decalcified.

Bad bad bad. Happy Friday!

cn

New Caffeine Sunday album progress - of kings and men

The new stuff is getting closer and closer to being ready to release. While any actual release is still probably a few months away, Ryan and I were taking stock of things last weekend, and we have 12 tracks that are finished or well on their way to being finished, plus a bunch of stuff that could theoretically go on an accompanying "remixes and bonus material" disc, like Pet Shop Boys did with Fundamental/Fundamentalism, and Very/Relentless.

So 12 new tracks, plus bonus stuff. It's going to be fun when we finally get to release all of it and you can hear it!

Of the tracks that are still being worked on, the one I'm finishing some music tracks on while riding the bus here is called The King is Dead. It's something a little different that Caffeine Sunday tracks in the past - it's a bit of a political statement. Well, maybe not a political statement in the conventional sense, but a commentary nonetheless. I wrote the initial demo of the song a few years ago, when two American pilots dropped a bomb in Afghanistan and killed four Canadian soldiers. "Friendly fire", it's called. Anyway, one of the four casualties was Marc Leger, who was nicknamed King Marco when he was stationed in Bosnia and became the unofficial mayor of a village that was in tatters following the war there. He became a hero to those villagers by scraping together anything he could to help rebuild their community and their lives. But that suddenly didn't matter anymore, because an American dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb on his head. No more hero.

Anyway, I had a mix of emotions stewing inside me. Sadness, anger and frustration, for sure, but cynicism and helplessness too. I could see a time when there would be investigations into what happened, resulting in nothing changed. I also saw a time when the average Canadian on the street wouldn't remember the names of the four fallen (although I didn't predict at that time it would be, in part, because of all the other soldiers who would also die in Afghanistan - 71 and counting). Given that life would move on, the men would be more or less forgotten, and nothing would be done to prevent a similar incident from happening again (see: U.S. kills Brits in Iraq event just a year later...), was Marc Leger's death, and the deaths of the other three (Ainsworth Dyer, Richard Green and Nathan Smith) going to be in vain? The automatic response is "No, they will always be remembered and they did not die in vain", but I wasn't sure that was going to be the truth.

So years later, when most of those predictions have come true, I'm wrapping up my song about Leger. I didn't want it to be corny or sappy, and I didn't want it to be some sort of over-the-top angry Neil Young Impeach the President thing, I just wanted it to be my reaction to it all. Set to a stomping BT-style beat, of course!

And on that note, I'm closing this up to go dice up some samples before I get to work...

cn

Technorati Tags: Caffeine Sunday, Songwriting, Synthpop, Marc Leger, Afghanistan, Friendly fire, Canadian soldiers

An album on, yes, a floppy disk

A UK band Batch Totem has released its new album on a 3.5" floppy disk.

I mean --- it is cool in a retro technology sort of way, but music lovers who buy records still have their turntables. They keep them specifically so they can buy vinyl. Does anyone have a computer with a floppy drive in it anymore? I wonder if the novelty can overcome the crippling effect of "lack of media players in 2007"?

Unless there's a huge demand for this ;-) I doubt Caffeine Sunday will be issuing new material on floppy disk...

Story here

cn

Super cool new video from the Pet Shop Boys

New version of Integral features a stop-motion video that I sure wish we could do in Caffeine Sunday. In fact we may do something like it someday but on a much smaller (much cheaper) scale.

This video is an anti-British-national-ID-card-system statement, and features a bunch of bar codes that you can scan with cellphone cameras to see web pages of info regarding civil liberties.

cn
(PS If you go to the PSB website you can download a PDF file of the stop motion frames, insert your own, and upload your version of the video to YouTube).

Gee, to think all this time I've been stealing music

With this kind of thinking obviously still pervasive at big labels including Sony BMG, at least among their legal depts, is it any wonder they are being shellacked by the whole digital distribution thing?

Sony BMG top lawyer tells court ripping your own CDs is stealing

I rarely if ever use P2P to download free music. But even though the above court case is taking place in the States and copyright rules are a little different up here in Canada, it's a little surprising to me that even as someone who doesn't file share, I would be considered to be a thieving pirate in the eyes of major labels because I've put my CD collection into iTunes and into my iPod.

Now, the opinions of music label legal depts don't necessarily speak for the overall corporations. But isn't it interesting, in the music industry world, that in one week you can have a record label exec giving testimony like this during an RIAA lawsuit against a single mom, and have Radiohead announcing that people can download their upcoming album digitally for a price that's "up to you"?

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Radiohead takes a stab at "How the hell do you release an album in 2007?"

Radiohead's new album is coming out Oct. 10. It may or may not be a synth pop album (most likely not).

But the interesting thing is they're taking a stab at the whole How the Hell do you Release an Album in 2007 thing.

You can order a "discbox", which has all kinds of stuff in it including vinyl records, CDs and various booklets, plus digital downloads; or there's the "download only" version, which the price is apparently "up to you".

• Radiohead's site: Link
• Read more from Boing Boing and CBC.ca.

Interesting stuff...

cn