No video to show of this as yet, but I wanted to write about it straight away. Tuesday night at the Cube, the talents behind last year’s awesome Monkey Jazz beatboxing video got together to film a series of videos for YouTube. It seems that more prepared stuff was done in the daytime, then the evening was spent improvising with an invitation-only audience.
When we arrived, Beardyman had already filmed seven hours of material. Despite that, he gave an incredible performance, making up song ideas by combining shouted audience suggestions. Beats, chords and lyrics all came to him on the spot, creating pounding (and often hilarious) tracks out of phrases such as “I made Wagon Wheels out of Play-Doh (and fed them to your children),” “I took Jesus’ balls in my mouth” and “Australian Fetus Detective”. We asked for, and got, “Kraftwerk play Country,” “Ambient Morrissey” and many more ideas that I forget.
Beardyman has a seemingly limitless array of voices, sounds and musical hooks. He can combine genres on the fly: the audience asked for “Hip-Hop Calypso” and “Indie Electro Emo”, and lo, these bastard styles were born from his mouth. He used the same modest set of electronic equipment as in Monkey Jazz, and did some sections of the gig in a more traditional way with just his voice and a microphone.
In short, a phenomenal musical talent was on display. As one YouTube commenter put it, Beardyman is to most other beatboxers what the first electric guitar was to all the acoustic guitars that came before it.
Mr Hopkinson now has ten hours of footage from each of six different cameras to edit, so we await the the results of the evening with patience… lots of patience. Keep an eye on Beardyman’s Youtube channel and of course mr_hopkinson’s.
Bold of The Onion to do a comedy sketch which so closely echoes media coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, but it pays off. This is dark, dark humour. “Yesterday’s shooting may simply have been a cry for help…”
What if you had the power of levitation, but only the left side of your body? What if you nearly had the power of invisibility but were still mostly opaque? Superuseless Superpowers considers, and quite charmingly depicts, these questions.
Here’s a nice (and vaguely obscene) tribute to those ancient techno Übermensch Kraftwerk – sadly no more now that Ralf and Florian have finally fallen out over who gets the bike clips:
This video has been making the rounds at TASI. The bit at the end is particularly astonishing: bear in mind that what these people are doing is “falling with style,” as Buzz Lightyear put it. Eight feet above the ground at around 100mph? And if you’re looking for something even crazier, you could do worse than try this.
Gid and I have been pretty much speechless on discovering this video, and the resulting blog post has been difficult to write.
This visual diarrhea emerges from the cloaca of Microsoft Research. It features a little girl WHO MUST DIE, her charming family WHO MUST DIE, and her Daddy’s colleagues WHO ALSO MUST DIE, portrayed by actors the creators of the software WHO MUST BE BURNED WITH HOT IRONS, THEN DIE (it’s morally okay because they CLEARLY ARE NOT LOVED). They all want more music in their lives, and Microsoft helps them by hurling them into a meat grinder. No, it’s less tuneful than that: by slapping donkey dicks against their faces. No, it’s less dignified than that: by herding them into camps to learn that “Arbeit Macht Frei”. No, it inspires more despair at human cruelty than that.
No, the solution they offer is a program called Songsmith, which auto-accompanies them while they sing into their laptops. Not just in one painfully generic, ear-rapingly putrid style: no, in a variety of user-selectable styles ranging from “Rock shit” to “Salsa shit” taking in “Techno fucking shit” and “Bluegrass just fucking kill me now” on the way. Think of it as homeopathic music: muzak without a single molecule of talent or creativity left in it, purified at last of any pleasure or emotional expression.
If Microsoft really want to cause this much pain to us all – and let there be no more doubt that they do – then why don’t they just cut out the middle-man and force a pineapple into the rectum of any thinking, feeling human being alive enough to experience the joy of music, art, beauty or anything else which inspires love? Pointy end first?
