yesterday, we were in winterthur, watching cyclope, a wonderful show combining tinguely-like apparatuses with acrobatics and music. it was really amazing! the show, inspired by jean tinguely’s le cyclop, is performed in an old industrial hall, which creates a wonderful atmosphere. the stage, which begins directly in front of the persons sitting in the first row, is a broken up amusement park, which seems to be only inhabited by a (involuntary?) clown. when he’s eventually fed up by his surroundings and wants to leave, suddenly hell breaks loose. it was just amazing! a wide range of acrobatics, acting and music blending perfectly in the huge metal colossus, which turns more and more into a face with, well, only one eye. a pretty heavy piece of metal, so to say.

we were lucky, and our friends, who arrived very early, were offered an upgrade to sit more in the front, and so we ended up in row 9 (instead of something much higher). it looks like it wasn’t exactly sold out, and they tried to at least fill the first rows so that it doesn’t look too sad. which is really, really shameful, since such a great show deserves a much larger audience! so in case you’re somewhat close to winterthur, be sure to watch cyclope while it is still shown! (until end of may, apparently.) after that, it apparently will be shown in july in basel as well (though outdoors there). it is really something which should be seen live, and not on video or tv or anything similar.

lately i’ve been listening a lot to some finnish bands and artists, mainly tenhi (väre, maaäet, airut:aamujen), timo rautiainen ja trio niskalaukaus (kylmä tilä, rajaportti) and eicca toppinen (black ice soundtrack). below you can listen to the fabulous soing suoti from tenhi, a beautiful progressive folk/neofolk piece.

this is the end of my project, the my favorite music video series. this series contained 35 videos from various bands in various genres. i hope you enjoyed it! and maybe even found something you like which you didn’t knew before!
anyway. feel free to post a short list of videos / tunes you liked most of these, and which surprised you most :)

while watching a video on youtube, i got an idea for a new project. from now on, every day until (at least) december 24th, i will put a music video in my blog at 18:00. i went through the list of bands of whose i own music, and tried to choose one video per band which i really like, which has good quality (if possible) and which is available on youtube. not for every band i could find something, and for very, very few bands, i choose two videos.
sadly, most bands don’t have good videos of the songs i like most, so sometimes having no video for a band just means that i didn’t found anything i both like and which is an acceptable video :-)
well, i hope you enjoy it, or at least parts of it. i’ll add links to lyrics as well as a few comments, which in particular indicate what kind of song this is (i.e. if you want to listen to this if you don’t like strange music as i do).

after some silence, bad religion released another album this year, called the dissent of man. the fifteenth in their thirtyone years long career. and a good one, i think.
here’s one rather catchy track:

i just learned about the complaints choirs project: choirs from all over the world create a song complaining about annoying things in their life. here’s the recording from helsinki, which i like best from the few i saw. its sung in finnish, but there are english subtitles:

i upgraded to a new ubuntu a week ago, after buying a new harddisk. this resulted in getting amarok2 instead of amarok1, which i was used to. and it was a complete failure. it ignored my music, didn’t show anything in the collection, and some tries to change this didn’t do anything. well. so i decided to try out exaile. this worked well, until i noticed that changing to the desktop exaile was running on took up to five seconds. i don’t know why. but this is clearly inacceptable, this should take way less than one second. so i started looking around. i tried rhythmbox, the standard gnome player, but it didn’t really managed to read my music collection. then, i tried xmms2 and various frontends. so far, i didn’t really found a frontend which convinced me. but at least the backend is working fine. maybe i should start hacking my own frontend together, to do exactly what i want it to do.
it is not exactly satisfactory, but for the moment, i think i’ll stay with xmms2. at least it works fine so far, accepts my music collection, and has no strange hickups.

while listening to a mike oldfield collection, i came across his cover of the william tell overture, a well-known classical piece by gioachino rossini. since i really like this song, you can watch it here, featuring many copies of mike:

if you want, you can listen to rossini’s piece on youtube.

today, i saw dracula (imdb). the one from 1931. well, you might now think, “so what?” well, i did not just saw the movie on a big screen, but the more important reason – the one which made me pay CAD 52 for this show – was the score. the original movie did only had music played during the intro and the outro. until 1998, when minimalist philipp glass was given the task to write a score. he composed a string / piano piece, performed by him and the kronos quartet, under the direction of michael reisman. well, a philipp glass score together with the movie is still no reason to spend that much money – but a live performance of the score by philipp glass and the kronos quartett themselves, together with the movie, definitely is. the whole thing happend in the context of the high performance rodeo 2009 in calgary; an advertisement can be found here.
this was actually the first time i saw the movie. and probably the first time i saw béla lugosi in a movie not made by ed wood. well, it was quite funny, even though some of the dialogs were hard to follow because of the score.
anyway. this event was definitely worth its money.

i just read an article on torturing of inmates of, say, guantánamo bay and american prisons in iraq by exposing them to too loud, repeatingly played music, for example songs by metallica, nine inch nails, eminem, etc. this is really shocking, but what made it way worse was the last paragraph, which states that while bands like rage against the machine and massive attack are opposing the misuse of their music, metallica apparently likes it.
first i hoped that the article was somehow wrong, that they meant it in an ironic or sarcastic way. then, i started searching the web, and found a video interview on blabbermouth by 3sat with james hetfield from metallica and an article in the guardian. some quotes:

“if the iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then i’m glad to be part of their exposure”

“we’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. why should the iraqis be any different?”

“part of me is proud is because they chose metallica because he [mohammed al-qahtani] thought he was hearing the sound of satan”

“it is just a thing — it’s not good or bad.”

this already sounds pretty bad, but then i read this and watched the video, from 4:45 starting. sorry, but i really had to think, “what kind of idiot is this guy?!” if you compare listening to phil collins on the car’s radio for a few hours to constantly listening to the same piece of music with a very high volume for a whole day, you’re either a complete idiot or you talk without really thinking.
in any case, shame on him.