Mike Linksvayer

Following the Magnatune & Creative Commons party last Thursday I saw a few more bands play at the Blender Balcony at the Ritz and Room 710 SXSW showcases.

I miscalculated and caught a bit of Supagroup. I can’t stand their brand of rock, not since I first heard something similar when a down-the-street playmate put on a Sammy Hagar record. Supagroup seemed to do what they do very well though. If you have atrocious taste, do yourself a favor and check them out.

Joanna Newsom shtick is singing in a little girl voice while playing a harp in such a way that it sounds mysteriously guitar-like. Great for radio, not bad for a short set, would require a very funny mood to want to listen to an entire album.

Faun Fables is Dawn McCarthy, often accompanied by Nils Frykdahl of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, as she was Thursday evening. I could swear I heard McCarthy sing at the Paradise in San Francisco in the mid-90s, but I can’t find any record of it. At that mythical show (my bad memory has Jad Fair and the Ruins also playing) I was so impressed by the probable-McCarthy’s folk-singing and yodelling that I tried to remember her “name”, but got it wrong, thinking it was Crow-something. Anyway, I was delighted to discover the definite-McCarthy sometime in the more recent past. Her teaming up with Frykdahl is mostly a good thing — Fear March is a nearly perfect song in my book. Sometimes it is almost too much of a good thing, particularly when they sing at the same time. Both have such compelling voices that it is really hard to listen to both at once and hear the beauty of each. Frykdahl ought to do some solo work, even a capella.

Seeing Alice Donut was a real treat. They were on my short list of bands I really wished I had seen, and I’m very happy that they got back together. Singer Tomas Antona is a beautiful person. For star struckers, Jello Biafra was in the audience, the only semi-famous person I noted at SXSW.

Simulacrum playlist for the evening (sans Supagroup) at WebJay.

Also following the Magnatune & CC party, CC’er Glenn Otis Brown attended an MSN party. His account of Microsoft’s tremendous goodwill is a must-read.

Notes on last night’s SXSW showcase at Emo’s Annex:

Electric cello sololist Erik Friedlander at his best (to my ears) sounded like a Tony Conrad-Kronos Quartet hybrid, i.e., amazing. A couple of plucked pieces were relatively boring, in particular a Carlos Santana piece, and to a lesser extent one by John Zorn. The amazing pieces, which should’ve inspired a miniature mosh pit (as opposed to total destruction of the venue, which is what should’ve happened at the one Conrad show I’ve had the pleasure of attending — I’ll have to write about that sometime), more than made up for the uninteresting interludes. Friedlander’s set was the best of the evening, and I plan on checking out more of his music.

Dengue Fever, billed as a “six-piece Cambodian Psychedelic rock band” was decent. Lyrics were all in Cambodian, mostly sung by a Camobdian woman. One sax player worked well with the sound, which is pretty hard to do in my listening experience. Asides: I note that the Dengue Fever site lists among related projects Brazzaville, a band I’m familiar with via their use of Joe Frank, my spiritual guru, on a track called Ocean. Check out L.A.’s Brazzaville found its audience in Russia via downloads and pirated CDs from the December 1, 2003 Los Angeles Times.

Estradasphere played jammy exotica, heavy metal and banjo-led bluegrass, none of it all that effectively to my ears (actually the banjo sounded OK). Each musician played at least two instruments. They’re obviously talented, but the implementation just didn’t work for me.

I’ve seen Sleepytime Gorilla Museum a bunch of times in San Francisco. They played mostly new material I hadn’t heard before, some of it more explicitly political than their previous work, including a song about Rome introduced with a dedication to “the American Empire at its greatest extent” and another intro’d with (to the best of my memory) “a man who saw many things wrong with the world and attempted to fix them by sending little wooden boxes to strong people” about the Unabomber. They closed with the track they used to always open with, Sleep is Wrong, which made everyone very sad there was no time for an encore.

Secret Chiefs 3 consisted of all of the members of Estradasphere less the drummer, plus four other musicians, including two different drummers. They got into some OK multi-ethnic mish-mash grooves. Just OK.

(Apart from Dengue Fever, all of the bands last night employed at least one amplified bowed string instrument.)

For a hint at what the show was like, listen to my 2004-03-17 Emo’s Annex Simulacrum playlist at WebJay. Most of the songs on the playlist are just recent tracks from the artists involved and probably weren’t the ones played last night. I also didn’t make any attempt to choose representative or superior tracks — this post has already taken far too much time, apologies.

Tonight following the Magnatune & Creative Commons party I’m hoping to catch two acts to die for — experimental yodeller Faun Fables and out-of-retirement sardonic-hard-punk-rock band Alice Donut.

I’m in Austin, Texas now for SXSW, where Creative Commons has two panels, two parties, and an exhibitor booth. Check the Creative Commons weblog for info and updates.

This is my first time in Austin (and Texas, and “the South”). I probably won’t have much time to explore, but I’m curious — I very nearly moved to Austin after finishing school eleven years ago. As far as I could tell San Francisco has a better live music scene for the types of music I’m interested in (at that time Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and frequent visits from Japanoise bands in particular), among other things. I should’ve moved to New York or Tokyo instead, but I didn’t even consider them, which I now find inexplicable. No, I don’t. Lack of knowledge.

So far: I’m grateful for the non-stop SJC-AUS nerd bird, and that I found out about a four hour delay before leaving home for SJC. AUS was shiny, clean and empty (excepting the sound of some fiddling country music) at 2:15AM. My cheap hotel has WiFi and ethernet ($9.95/day or $39.95/week).

Lucas Gonze’s analysis of client-side remixing is spot on. Summary: client-side remixing is to precise syncrhonization as HTML is to precise layout. If you don’t need precision, enjoy.

I see three limits to client-side remixing. All can be raised:

• Bad client software. It either doesn’t work or barely works and you need a very keen eye to find a gratis download amongst enticements to buy a super-premium subscription version (cf RealPlayer).
• Lack of expressivity. Remixers don’t just overlay source segments, they also apply various effects to the same.
• Streaming-like experience. In order to obtain a smooth client-side remix playback you (actually your client, this is a subset of “bad client software”) will have to download most of the needed source content first. I often have a bad experience with playing-while-downloading of individual songs and videos over the net, nevermind many coordinated sources.

I suspect that with excellent client software the client-side remix experience could be very good. Lack of expressivity seems like the toughest hurdle to me. However, if said excellent client software can download and run code safely … effectlets?

Video games seem like a highly constrained example of what client-side remixing could do. They pull off co-ordinating lots of different source media (sometimes all local, but that’s beside the point) with code quite well, versus hardcoding different sources into a single stream at the point of production.

However, anytime in the near future using client-side remixing to evade those who would prevent distribution of The Grey Album and the like is pointless. Client-side remixing isn’t up to the task, and you can still download the album from the web after weeks of brouhaha, nevermind P2P networks.

Memory augmentation: cc-metadata client-side remixing [1] [2]