Puck

DJ Funken Wagnalls and Cottonmouth, MC have reunited and created a raw mixtape for the people. Featuring four brand new tracks and four previously rarely heard tracks from the mythical 2003 sessions, this updates the saga of our dynamic duo for 2010. Listen to the mixtape and download individual tracks in the sidebar player over at funkmouth.com.

Here’s how Bad Translator translated the first line of the text above:

“Funk and Wagnalls deer boots, DJ, Mitsubishi create a mixtape of public funds. There are 4 new songs and 4 meetings in 2003, very few songs, heard the strange, and changes in the dynamic combination of epic 2010th”

NPR’s “Project Song” got Stephin Merritt in the studio for 48 hours. Merritt wrote a cool song called “Man of a Million Faces.”

From a group of six photos and six words, The Magnetic Fields guru Stephin Merritt picked “1974″ — and an image of a man wearing a kind of suit covered with baby dolls. Two days later, the song they inspired was finished.

Another fantastic video from the Playing for Change folks.

A one-take music video par excellence by OK Go, directed by Brian L. Perkins. Booooooom asks,

Can we crown them kings of the one-take music video yet?

Hell yes.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Leonard Bernstein, early mass media star, gave millions of people a long string of sophisticated lessons in music. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Bernstein appeared on all three major television networks many times as brilliant educator and glorious composer, all the while and just off screen he was also a glamorous bon vivant. Bernstein was a man who lived large and looms large still in the musical consciousness of the United States, and the world as well.

From 1958 to 1973, Bernstein delivered four TV music performance/lectures per year, illustrated lavishly with the likes of the New York Philharmonic: the Young People’s Concerts series is still one of the longest-running programs on classical music. Earlier in the 1950s, he delivered for Omnibus a handful of performances that are considered among the finest of the so-called “golden age of television.” Omnibus was a dignified, mid-century monumental series hosted by Alastair Cooke that explored art, science and the humanities. Read the rest of this entry »

Booker T. and the MGs were the house band for Stax Records and provided the backbone for many a hit record. Here they in a performance in Oslo, Norway, in 1967.

Holy smokes, never seen a geetar fingered like this before. Go, Ronnie, go!

Music sales topped a record 1.5 billion units in 2009, and overall music purchases were up 2.1 percent. Then why shouldn’t the music industry be celebrating?

In 2009 sales figures released this week by Nielsen SoundScan, a decade-long trend continued: digital sales were up while sales of physical product, including compact discs, were down significantly. Though overall sales increased, most of these increases were in digital singles, which cost a fraction of an album. The biggest sales losses were in albums (both CD and digital), down 12.7 percent overall to 374 million.

via Turn It Up: Music sales for 2009 are up — but numbers are deceiving.

You can get the track from Portishead here.

Portishead – Chase The Tear from Mintonfilm on Vimeo.

When guitar player Dave Carroll travelled to Nebraska for a tour with his band Sons of Maxwell, he witnessed his Taylor guitar being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago.

The guitar was severely damaged and after a lot of communication he was told that United wouldn’t compensate him for his loss.

He promised the last United person he spoke with to make 3 songs and videos about the way United Airlines handles luggage.

via The Jazz Guitar Blog: United Airlines Breaks Guitars.

Here’s the first of three videos: