New year everyone. I wonder what 2006 will bring?

Check back soon for a new podcast, some new desktops, some new reviews and my personal favorite music from 2005. I know that most top whatever lists have come and gone but I still want to get one out there. There was a lot of good music that im not sure got as much attention as it deserved so look out for that as well. Until then, have a nice break from the world celebrating and I will see you here again soon!

-john

(thats silly putty by the way!) link

...in the friends area of the desktop sections. check it out!

hey there everyone! due to the giving nature of the holiday's ive decided to give something away today! the 3rd email that i get today with the subject line, "happy day!" will get a ten dollar gift certificate to the itunes music store! so hop onto the contact page to your left and send me a mail! you could also use john (at) twistedsun.net if you would prefer.

also if you were so inclined and have the ability to do so send me a photo that you have taken to post here later today. i will post any photo that i get in the mail today! im not sure why really, just seems like it would be nice to have some readers photos here.

so to recap, send me a mail! the third person to email gets ten dollars of tunes! (hopefully international certificates will work as well so dont hesitate if you are not in the u.s!

i will be waiting for emails until the morning and if for whatever reason i get no emails then i will re-work the contest and do something different.

good luck!

-john

p.s- i hope to start having little contests for music more often so look out for that!

UPDATE: ah well, not a single email i guess people aren't here for music then! thats ok though. ill come up with something else sometime soon. have a nice day after and ill talk to you next update!

for those of you who have been following this weblog for a while now you may remember seeing a post about a great little flash puzzle called grow cube. well the maker of that game has made one for the holidays and created grow tree! its not as involved but fun all the same so check it out here.



oooohhhh! and i wanted to post about another cool flash thing that i came across the other day. its a brilliant flash movie that is a what if kind of a scenario. its a street fighter vs. mortal combat animation and its very cool to see the two different styles collide, not only in the animations but the combo styles as well. very cool. check that out here.

(playing at the lucky cat in brooklyn as a drop in silence)

(he dances with his head and ears and has a lot of various colors that play along to music! i talked about this little guy in my new podcast)

here.

I know that this is not really much of anything to review seeing as its just a seven inch single but I just thought it was worth writing about here in the reviews section because it's just so good. For those of you who are not familiar with Cat Power and you are a fan of powerful female singer songwriters then do yourself a favor and check out some of her music. I would suggest checking out her last full length on matador called You Are Free. I personally really dont like a few of the songs on that album that try to be more electric and rocking because I really don't think that she does that well at all. The majority of the music on that album is simply amazing and the best tracks are those which she takes a more simple approach to the production side of things and lets her powerful song writing really stand out and that is exactly what she does here on The Greatest / Hate.

The title track is a gorgeous new song that seems to be showing her progression as a musician. Although similar to her last full length you can really feel her music maturing. It has this haunting, slow swing to the song which causes her voice to tread oh so lightly over the rest of the instruments leaving you listening a little harder to catch what she is saying in the song. Maybe I'm being to specific here but in a way, it kind of takes away from the lyrics but gets leveled out by the the way it graces the rest of the instruments in the song.

The b-side here called Hate is a tighter song and that is simply due to the fact that it's just her and her guitar. Well, that and a dusting of reverb for mood. I love this song! It is the kind of track that all the indie kids that follow her music would call her best work because any self respecting singer songwriter needs to stick with his or her roots right? Kidding here. I really do enjoy the song though, it's always nice to hear a musician be able to hold up well with a full band but still be able to sit down with a guitar and stop everyone in the room with her mind controlling confidant singing that leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside.

So heres hoping that her upcoming full length featuring this single will hold up to my, and every other cat power fan's expectations. "We would all be free"

iTunes Link:

i will be in NY, New York this weekend (friday night to be exact) performing with my friend matt as 'a drop in silence' (the electronic music duo i am part of) we had toured the east a few months back but missed ny some how so we are heading back up to finnish what we started.we will be playing in a club in brooklyn called the lucky cat. there will also be a couple of other local musicians playing, Ezekiel Honig and Grant. It should be a fun show in a cozy little venue in brooklyn and i am looking forward to the trip up there. im sure i will stumble across some internet and ill be sure to throw something up online, photos? desktops? a video? who knows. just thought i would stop by and mention the trip here before i forgot to post it. well, i think thats all for now so if your into fun electronic music and your in the brooklyn area stop on by for the show. till next time...

i have been using this site for a while now that makes it quick and easy to see where recent visitors to twistedsun.net have been visiting from. its a site called gvisit.com and its a free service that uses google maps to map out where a websites recent visits originated. not as detailed as my standard statistics but more fun to check from time to time!

link to my map page

some of you may have gathered over time that i also like to do a bit of live sound engineering. i love being that close and trusted by the musicians that i have the opportunity to mix for. its so much fun to give bands the opportunity to sound the best that they can possibly sound. although i am relatively new to the technical side of things and im still getting my head around grabbing that frequency that is feeding back i think im getting the mix as a whole part down pretty good. i have been around the sound industry my entire live and ive been picking up things throughout that time. its been fun to learn about the field as ive been going along and i look forward to learning more in the future. i love the challenge behind mixing live audio, its great that i have had the opportunity to mix all sorts of different types of acts and learn the specifics of how to make a band really stand out live because every band can be so different. for instance, i rock band is totally different than mixing a jazz band or even a bluegrass band. they all have their own specific sound that they are used to and its my job to carry that out in the mix.

this area of work does have its ups and down but even the dark side of audio has its interesting bits. over the past few years ive had a chance to learn so much about the industry and how cut throat it is. its such an interesting field because there are so many misconceptions surrounding it and even from tech to tech you will find that there is a vast amount of urban legends and standards that have been set and are followed so militantly by some. sometimes it surprises me to find how stubborn people can be in this field. for instance, i have come to respect a simplified approach to live audio, within a mix and within the pa's set up. if you gather up a few really nice pieces of gear into a system then you can simplify the whole process and in most cases actually end up with a much tighter, warmer mix because your focus moves away from the typical overly complicated approach to live mixing and focuses on letting the band sound the way they really do. maybe im not making any sense with this and i would have to get in a lot more detail to make the point i am trying to make but i somehow got started with this little rant here and i thought i would follow through.

so anyways, i was posting here today to mention that i recently acquired a couple of amazing new mics that were engineered by blue and have been released by electro-voice. the mics i am referring to are the amazing new cardinal and raven mics. the cardinal i have a photo of above and as you can see it has an amazing and unique wooden enclose and yes, it sounds as good as it looks. as soon as i have the opportunity to record another podcast or two i am really looking forward to using it for that. i have used them at a couple of shows now and they have really stood out from the typical mics you see and hear. the cardinal is a wonderful condenser mic that would appear to be primarily a vocal mic but works wonders with other instruments as well. the raven is a dynamic mic that i have not used for vocals yet but would make for a great live vocal mic because of its tolerance to feedback. it has a really slick black metal body that is of a similar shape to the cardinal and from what i hear it is also a great all around mic and also has the benefit of not needing phantom power to use.

right, so this may seem a bit out of the blue here but i would like to start posting more about this side of my personal interests on the site. till next time then!

i have posted a nice new desktop up in the friends section of the desktops area. its a slick image brought to you courtesy of davejansen.com

what is the world coming to? i love being able to remember some old song and type in a fragment of the lyrics to the song to remind me who it was but it looks like the sites that make this possible are getting shut down... sad sad sad.

link

...a bunch of 6 ft wide 450lb jellyfish start to mess with your countries food supply? well, make like the people of japan and eat em'. there are some pretty interesting facts at the bottom of the article as well so check it out!

link

Here is another bittersweet acoustic album for everyone. This is a great record through and through. It has this amazing, gentle reverb that blankets each song which is due to the fact that this was recorded in a church that was set up as a temporary studio to record the album. It's a wonderful album for a cold winter night which I am starting to see plenty of around here. It's a sit around the fireplace and relax album that would make a nice addition to anyones music collection.

iTunes link:

i came across this amazing little utility for safari called inquisitor. It essentially is an extension of the google search field and it adds some great functionality to that feature. when you type in the thing you want to search the fun begins, a menu pops down showing you the top search results for that subject and you simply click or use the arrow keys to scroll down to one of the links to jump to the page quickly. you can customize how many results are shown there. thats not all though. it will also list other possible spellings of the subject you are searching automaticly and allow you to quickly jump down and search on other sites aside from google. after a few days of using this im not sure if i could go back! its a really helpful little utility that i would defiantly check out!

it is also the first shareware app that i have seen sold like it is. there is an online demo that you can preview the way the application works which is pretty cool on its own but has limited functionality. here is the link to that page. to get the utility you must donate whatever you think its worth to the developer then he will send you a link to download the app. pretty cool approach in my opinion.

here is a link to the main site for the app where you can buy it.

ricky gervais has a podcast! for those of you who for some odd reason do not know who this is then please run out and buy the original bbc comedy, "the office" on dvd. he wrote and stared in this simple yet amazing bit of tv history. some of the best tv in years and easily one of my favorite shows ever. you can also see him in his new show called "extras" which i believe is airing on hbo as well as bbc. hes good at getting a laugh out of me, i know that much. ill let the podcast speak for itself. for more info you can go to the ricky gervais website, the guardian which hosted the podcast, or the iTunes page where you can subscribe. (all of those are links)

Recently Schematic Records came out with some pretty big news kind of out of the blue and that was that they were going to release a bunch of records as download only releases via the mp3 download site bleep.com. Some of the records have been in the pipeline for quite some time and I was pretty excited to find that they would finally see the light of day. The first one that I purchased from the lot was a release that I have been waiting for a long long time to get my hands on and that is the Glen Velez remix album.

Scematic re-released an album by the well respected hand drummer Glen Velez called Internal Combustion a couple years back and I fell in love with it. It was an amazing release that held multiple parallels to the world of IDM and experimental music in general and it seemed like a logical step to take this and curate a remix album based on the release. It was well worth the wait!

Right off the bat I knew that I was in for a slew of good tracks with a wonderful remix by Atom (TM) which I have not really heard to much. It was a little on the short side but made for a great opener for the rest of the album. The second track which is a remix by Richard Devine seems like an extension of the first track and moves the album right along with his trademark tempo and rambling glitches that fill out the track. From what I heard he played a lot of the drums on the song and tried to keep the programming to a minimum on this one which was a pretty cool approach seeing as he is known for being such a good sound designer/ tweakaholic and it was a nice change of pace for him in my eyes.

Many of the remixes on this record seem to fit right into the aesthetic that Glen Velez laid down with the release that inspired these remixes which I think is pretty cool to see in a remix album. For the most part I think that the remixes tried to build onto what was originally achieved in the source material rather than just loop some samples from the original and create a new track. It really feels as though most of the tracks on here were really well thought out and I can really appreciate what the artists did with the songs.

The album really works well as a whole which is also nice to see in a remix album like this. You will find all sorts of totally different approaches to remixing the music on here. Chris clark offers a great remix that carries his trademark grittiness and makes for a really solid danceable track. Otto Von Schirach takes the sounds well away from the original and is one of the only tracks on here that really depart from the sound of the original. I do however feel that it fits right in with the other remixes. Its some of the tightest programming I have heard from him in a while.

So for any fans of any of the remixers, hand drumming, or music that takes you well away from the norm as Scematic releases always do so very well then head over to bleep.com and check out this great release.

Unlike iTunes, bleep lets you preview whole tracks which is very cool in my opinion and they offer web tools so blogs like this one can have little preview players right on the page soooooo here it is! (you can even alter the colors to match your color scheme!

holy _ this is craaazy. you must look at this video. im sure that some of you may have seen it already but its still pretty crazy. i read somewhere that in japan if people see a line or hear that there is some sort of big event that they will just kind of come down just to be part of whats happening? its just amazing. oh, i dont think i mentioned, the video is a quicktime video of the line to get into the apple store in tokyo the day it opened!

have a look!