WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Burroughs narrates Poe (video, MP3)

This post arrives slightly late for Halloween, but I'll take both William S. Burroughs and Edgar Allen Poe any time of the year. After some Poe readings by James Mason, we have this gem from the 1995 videogame "The Dark Eye", featuring William Burroughs reading "The Masque of the Red Death", accompanied by some creepy slides.

YouTube: Part 1 | Part 2
Just the audio, in slightly higher quality: The Masque of the Red Death (MP3) from RealityStudio

8 Bit Beefheart

Charlie, Help

From StSandersMisc via Andee Connors.

WFMU: Now With More Video

Hello, please enjoy WFMU's first VIDEO PODCAST, VIDEO QUEST.

Subscribe to the feed here, watch it up there, or download it and put it in your pod.

Watch this space for more info, next episode coming mid-April.

Top 10 Party Jams of 2008

I don't think any of these came out in 2008 but they certainly made my 2008 sparkle more than any other songs that came out this year.  There are some RealAudio and mp3 links in here so watch out.

Beyonce - Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)

Khan Edison vs Pearl Jam - Jeremy (2008 Dub)
Solange Knowles - Could've Been the One
Fleetwood Mac - The Chain and Bone Thugs n' Harmony - Wind Blow [essentially the same song]

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion [this is a whole album but whatever it's one big tripadelic party jam]

Sunscreem - Love U More (Slam Mix)
Taken by Trees - Sweet Child O' Mine

Bruce Springsteen - I'm On Fire (Cousin Cole's Bad Desire Mix)
Plastique Du Reve f/ Radical Resistance Cheerleaders  - RESIST
Annie - What Do You Want (The Breakfast Song)

10 Other Things That Made 2008 Gr8

ATP

Live Broadcasts from the Miracle Garden

40z and 45s with Marty McSorley
Rave Pinata
Drinking Beer On Top of a Winnebago Camper at Ms B's in Austin

Boredoms @ Terminal 5

Meat Beat Manifesto @ Highline Ballroom

Portal

Mirror's Edge

Pixeljunk: Eden

Get Ready to ROCK... Again!!!

The sequel to the play-along-with-the-music video game Rock Band, Rock Band 2, is coming out this Sunday! To celebrate, Trent will be hosting another live video game playing session on his show Monday 9/15, from 8 - 11pm EST.

Rock Band 2 is like the wildly popular Rock Band, but with more songs. Tune in live Monday evening to hear your favorite WFMU DJs (and others) slaughter the classics (virtually) via the brand new hyper-karaoke game. If you'd like to play live in the studio or remotely on Xbox Live, email Trent ASAP!

You can hear the last Rock Band session Trent aired (featuring Bryce on Tom Sawyer, Nick the Bard on Black Hole Sun, Maria on My Sharona) by checking out the archive here.

The full list of songs can be found after the jump, and you can see all of WFMU's upcoming special programs here.

Freezepop of the Current Gaming Music Future Future Future Perfect

Freezepop are not just a band. They're the first band in the world to become popular almost entirely because of their appearances not in newspapers, radio, magazines, or the blogosphere, but in video games. As a result, they're a convincing picture of the near future of music, gaming, and the worlds of art and commerce that surround both.

Just a few years ago, Freezepop's songs were sharing the stage with karaoke-style covers of "Smoke on the Water," "Ziggy Stardust," and "Spanish Castle Magic." Now, through a combination of good timing and great songwriting, they're sitting right up there with Bowie, Radiohead, and Blue Öyster Cult. Not karaoke-style Blue Öyster Cult, but the REAL Blue Öyster Cult...in a way. *

The Boston 3-piece has at its core The Duke of Pannekoeken, a programmer of infectious synth-pop and also of music for highly infectious video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Liz Enthusiasm is Freezepop's bouncing, purple-haired frontwoman whose deadpan delivery is every bit as plasticky and cutting as their synth lines. The two were kind enough to answer a bunch of my stupidly detailed questions about music, licensing, the Cardigans, and the concepts of "fun" and "songwriting" in rhythm gaming. If you haven't experienced rhythm gaming or Freezepop, you might want to watch these videos to get an idea of what you're dealing with. The first is Freezepop's official video for "Less Talk More Rokk," and the second is the same song being played to perfection in Guitar Hero II.

Trent Wolbe: How have your audiences and concerts changed and/or grown over the years?

Liz Enthusiasm: Well, when we were in the smaller games (Frequency and Amplitude) it was more hardcore gamers who came to our shows, but Guitar Hero has really opened it up to a lot of people. One thing I really like is that there are all kinds of people there, all ages groups and different scenes. It's pretty cool.

TW: Duke - you work at Harmonix, the company that makes the best Rhythm games in the world. What is Freezepop's relationship to Harmonix, exactly?

The Duke of Pannekeoken: why thank you kindly for the praise... i hope to think that harmonix has worked really hard to try and bring fun, interactive music experiences to people! the relationship is pretty straight-forward... just after freezepop was started back in '99, i joined harmonix as a sound designer and composer and was tasked with writing music for our first game FreQuency, as well as authoring a number of other tracks in the game. after a couple of years doing that, i moved up and became the audio director for the Karaoke Revolution series of games, AntiGrav, and Guitar Hero 1 & 2. Since then, i've transitioned over to being a producer and lead the team that made Phase for the iPod which was released last fall. All of this has opened up a great opportunity for freezepop to include tracks in almost all of those games and reach whole new groups of fans. it's been amazing the reaction we've gotten to our songs in the games and has brought out lots of gamers to our shows.

TW: Do you write Freezepop songs and hope they'll end up in Rock Band, or see a hole in Rock Band, for example, and write to fill it?

LE: We generally use pre-existing songs of ours. There are certain ones that are just more obvious choices as to what would work well in the video game context.

DoP: For the most part, it's just a song we've written, and have gotten an opportunity to include it in a game, and then we've made some changes to the track that will make it play more fun. the only exception to this really was Less Talk More Rokk which was pretty much explicitly written knowing it was going to go into Guitar Hero 2. But it sounds pretty much like our other songs so it wasnt much of a stretch. We have added guitars and beefed up some of the instrumental parts in Brainpower to make sure it's super fun to play in Rock Band.

Massive Subculture Reveal: Bemani

Sometimes you like to pat yourself on the back for having a fun idea like "Guitar Hero?  What about Techno Hero!!!!  That would be so much fun, like haha stupid what would you do, sit there and push play.....haha stupid idea."

Then someone from Japan blows your fucking brain away.

That person (female, I think, because of the spotty nail polish) is playing beatmania IIDX 15 DJ:Troopers.  As you might be able to tell from all the postfixes, it's the latest in a very long run of titles Konami's Bemani series.  It's included games like Guitar Freaks, that featured a guitar controller way before Guitar Hero came out, portable (!) rhythm games called Bemani Pocket, and most famously, Dance Dance Revolution.  The IIDX iteration, which has been around since 1999, features two one-octave keyboard pads and a turntable controller (yes, she's using it in the video - check the pinky).  Instead of a meager 50-someodd songs like Guitar Hero and Rock Band come with, they have...500 songs.  Blam!

In December, there was a gigantic "Bemani 10th anniversary Memorial Event" concert in Tokyo called Gitado Live:

How in the goddamn fucking hell had I not heard of this entire world before this morning?  It got me thinking.  Right now, video gaming - in the United States, at least - is a world of extremes.