David Emery OnlineDithering: Jonny Greenwood
SASHA FRERE-JONES: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?
JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me. They can even put a helpful crunchiness onto some recordings. We listened to a lot of nineties hip-hop during our last album, all as MP3s, all via AirTunes. They sounded great, even with all that technology in the way. MP3s might not compare that well to a CD recording of, say, string quartets, but then, that’s not really their point.
Exactly.
This is probably the moment I gleefully point out I’ve never used a record player…
Visit ➔Reading '09 Times
As part of my normal pre-Reading preparations I’ve hunted out the schedule for this year’s Reading (as compiled by someone helpful on the internet), which I thought some of you might appreciate.
The most interesting thing though, is the mysterious gap at 16:45 on Saturday on the NME/Radio 1 stage. Odds are good that it’s a performance by Them Crooked Vultures the ‘super group’ featuring Josh Homme, John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) and Dave Grohl (especially considering the rest of the gang – Spinnerette & Eagles of Death Metal – are all there as well) which would be pretty awesome, quite frankly…
Visit ➔MySpace Disables Auto-Play
MySpace has made a big change to it’s product – songs no longer auto-play when you visit a MySpace user profile. Autoplays accounted for a billion or more song streams per month, and were costing MySpace a significant amount of money. Turning off that hose is a cost saving maneuver. This also has the benefit, sources say, of improving the user experience and providing labels with better listening data.
Hallelujah.
Visit ➔Kurt Vile - Overnite Religion
Unexpectedly loving this – really something quite special, and it isn’t even the best track on the album.
Visit ➔New Jack White - Fly Farm Blues
As reported, this Tuesday was a busy release day for Jack White and his Third Man Records: the label put out singles by Dan Sartain (“Bohemian Groove”) and Transit (“C’mon And Ride”) — both produced by the Third Man main man — as well as the track that made the three-pack singles release day a press event in the first place, “Fly Farm Blues.” It’s Jack unaccompanied in fuzzbucket slide-guitar mode
Quite frankly, this is the best thing Jack has done in years, even if it does sound rather a lot like ‘Ball and a Biscuit’. Jack, could you stop dicking around with side projects and make a whole album that sounds like this? It’s why we liked you in the first place…
It’s on iTunes if you want to listen to it a bit more (interesting to note Stereogum’s use of YouTube as an audio player, while we’re on the topic of listening…).
Visit ➔thehorrors.co.uk
We’ve just launched the new site for The Horrors – we’d been quite happy with the way that the previous video-focused site had gone but it was (finally) time to get something with a bit more content up there.
All textpattern based, as ever, it runs with the ‘activity stream’ format so everything gets fed into the same feed on the home page, whether it’s blog posts, photos from the flickr group, polaroids posted by the band, videos or whatever else. Also watch out for the natural extension of the fading colour trick featured on version 5 of this site, but instead changing the whole background image…
Visit ➔Harry Patch (In Memory Of)
Recently the last remaining UK veteran of the 1st world war Harry Patch died at the age of 111.
I had heard a very emotional interview with him a few years ago on the Today program on Radio4.
The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me.
It became the inspiration for a song that we happened to record a few weeks before his death.
It was done live in an abbey. The strings were arranged by Jonny.
I very much hope the song does justice to his memory as the last survivor.
A stunning beautiful song, which falls in the Radiohead canon alongside album closers like ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ and ‘Videotape’. Haunting but with an important message – go and buy it and see for yourself.
Visit ➔iLike launches iPhone apps for Jeff Buckley, The Cribs, Sonic Youth…
Back in May, music service iLike announced plans for a new B2B service that would create and launch iPhone applications for artists. More than 250 of them have gone live on the App Store in the last few days.
And they’re all rubbish. I really don’t see the point in such generic, assembly line production of mediocre apps – is anyone going to care? Wow, you can download an app to listen to 30s clips of an album (err, like you can in the iTunes app), see twitter updates from the band and see upcoming tour dates (insert ticket affiliate link here).
Doubly stupid considering the only way to get decent volume on the iTunes store is to get some promotion backing it up, either on the store/top 10 charts os somewhere else – how exactly are you going to promote an app when there are 249 near identical other versions?
I’m wondering whether it’s already too late to bother with music related iPhone app development – there’s just too much noise and rubbish to get lost in.
Visit ➔