Can't Stop Geeking

Indie band Arcade Fire recently put out a fantastic album called The Suburbs. If you haven’t heard it, go buy it now. It’s one of the the best I’ve heard in quite some time. To promote it they’ve done some TV appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, some summer festival appearances, and an awesome live concert on YouTube (directed by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python!) However, they’ve saved the coolest bit of promotion for last. They’ve made a music video for We Used To Wait, but it’s not conventional at all: it’s a dynamically created experience that ties in with real life. Go to thewildernessdowntown.com (using Chrome), type in an address, and it will create a unique music video based on what you enter. To get the best effect, it should be the address you grow up, but since it makes heavy use of Google Earth and Street View, that may not work best. If that’s the case, then enter your home address or somewhere you know very well. Once you do that, just sit back and enjoy the show! A word of caution though, this does make extensive use of HTML5 and was designed to work best in Chrome. During the video, it will ask you to write a postcard to your younger self. Why? The band will take that postcard out on their North American tour this fall and give them out. If you get one, you’re supposed to plant it and a tree will grow. This is possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet. I have the feeling more bands are going to do this in the future because having something spread viral on the internet is far more effective than trying to get on the radio these days, especially for a band like Arcade Fire. They have a devoted fanbase, but they just don’t get a ton of mainstream exposure. So yeah, definitely try it out. You won’t regret it.

Source: Pitchfork.

Uh, what? I guess the RIAA still thinks it’s 1985 and just like LL Cool J, we can’t live without our radio. That or it’s the latest in many misguided attempts to keep profits up. As the Consumer Electronics Association said “Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.” However, the RIAA maintains that this move is one to give consumers more choice. Pfft, the only reason they want this is to prevent piracy. But that won’t work because nobody listens to the radio anymore because they all play the same music, save for some public and college radio stations that are awesome.

Source and obvious joke:

This doesn’t fall within the normal realm of geekdom I usually write about, but since, I’m a music geek, it fits. I just watched a video of a high school boy ask his date to the prom.  No big deal, right? Well, he got three of his friends to dress in tuxedos like himself and serenade his date with a rendition of “In the Still of the Night.” He hada single rose, and these guys did a pretty decent job of singing the song. I geek about things like this because I always wanted to be that suave, cool guy who could pull something like this off.  My hat’s off to this kid.

This came from inhabitat.com. There’s an artist by the name of Luke Jerram who is working on a project which is best described as a walk-in wind chime. Tubes of various lengths surround a small chamber and each tube has strings in it that will resonate when the wind blows into it. So, change the wind, change the tune. you will literally never hear the same thing twice. Cool!

We all remember the treats of legal action from Metallica Drummer Lars Ulrich after he found out people were downloading his music for free on Napster? Well, apparently now that everyone has started to download legally Lars has decided to download his own Music for free! Yes, lars has admitted to downloading music for free…at that, it was his own music. Personally I think he did it just because he knew he would be the only person actually wanting to download that dribble.