Staticfree Blog

For the longest time, I've had a very silly song of unknown origin called "Moscau" on my hard drive. I wasn't sure what language it was in, or what the lyrics were other than that they were singing about Moscow in a rather discoy, mock-Russian way. Well, thanks to a commenter on my Disco Moscow post I have more info (thanks Greg!).

The artist is a German band called Dschinghis Khan. The song is Moskau, track number 1 on their 1979, self-titled album. The lyrics (local mirror, poor Babelfish German-to-English translation) seem to praise Moscow. I'm still a bit unsure if it's sarcastic or not, particularly as there are lyrics like:

Come we dance on the table
Until the table breaks down

Whatever the case, there are traces of the group on the web:

• Greg pointed out one of the most amazing music videos I've seen in a long time.
• thebronsteins.com has a copy of a video of one of their live performances
• As pointed out in the above site, you can buy their "best of" CD on Amazon
• my pugglechump entry which has most of these links.
• An excellent German fan site devoted to Dschinghis Khan. Make sure to check out the photo galleries. Some of those photos there are astounding.
• 2005-03-21: Boingboing discovered this video today. There's another link to a copy of the Moskau video there.

For those who regularly read my blog, but wish there were more bloggy/journaly things, now's your chance to get your wish! I have read a few of these and found them to be interesting, so here is mine. I upped the number to 30, 'cause.

step one: load up all your music on your mp3 player and shuffle it

step two: write the first 20 songs here, no matter how embarrassing or misrepresentative

steve@mu:~% playsong -l /music/ > /dev/null
steve@mu:~% for ((a=0;a<30;a++)); do cursong -r $a; done

1. Banco de Gaia:Last Train to Lhasa - Amber
2. Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Friends:Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project - interlude 9
3. Underworld:beaucoup fish - winjer
4. Mediaeval Baebes:Undrentide - Quan Vey La Lauzeta
5. Air:The Virgin Suicides (Score) - Ghost Song
6. Aphex Twin:Selected Ambient Works 85-92 - Xtal
7. pOW: - Project X 2
8. Aphex Twin:Selected Ambient Works Volume - Eleventh
9. Metallica:2-12.84 London - The Four Horsemen
10. R.E.M.:Document - Strange
11. The Cranberries:No Need to Argue - Ridiculous Thoughts
12. Aphex Twin:Selected Ambient Works 85-92 - Pulsewidth
13. AIR:moon safari - remember
14. Underworld:Live at the Riviera Theatre - Born Slippy.NUXX
15. R.E.M:Fables of the Reconstruction - Good Advices
16. Propellerheads: - on Her Majesty's Secret Servic
17. Delerium:Chimera [Bonus CD] - After All [Andrew Sega Remix]
18. R.E.M:Up - Airportman
19. Seanette Blaylock:Spammer's Paradise - Sounds of Spammage
20. Cranes:Loved - Lilies (flood mix)
21. The Cranberries:No Need to Argue - Disappointment
22. Anabolic Frolic:Happy 2b Hardcore Chapter One - Go Insane - Dj DNA
23. Kriston J. Rehberg:Spammer's Paradise - Write in C
24. Portishead:Portishead - Western Eyes
25. R.E.M:Dead Letter Office - White Tornado
26. Two Nice Girls:Lesbian Favorites- Women Like Us - I Spent My Last $10 (On Birth Control And Beer)
27. Simon & Garfunkel:Greatest Hits - Scarborough Fair
28. LioZ / Sv.index: - Enigmatic Soul
29. Infected Mushroom:The Gathering - The Gathering
30. R.E.M.:Reckoning - Time After Time (annElise)

Note: This is the exact output except for a few of the mod files which didn't show up properly in Xmms.

I'm a bit sad that none of my favorite female vocalists like Tori Amos, Poe and Ari made it to the list. Mmm, so good.

Some of your friends are already this fucked. An interesting look on the music industry from a financial point of view. How much money does an average band make? I don't quite know the accuracy of the numbers, but looking them over they seem to make sense.

In reading the Creative Commons RSS feed, I came across another feed for archive.org, which is very keen. There's a ton of free (free as in beer, free as in legal, free as in speech) music there and some of it's even good.

A particularly nifty compilation there called One Minute Massacre Volume 1 was put together by a bunch of electronic music artists, each contributing a 1-2 minute segment that is supposed to blend with the previous segment. Some of the artists succeed remarkably well. Check it out, the only cost is a 141MB download.

I just received my first Christmas gift in the mail the other day, straight from CD Baby. In the package came a keen sampler of other CD Baby artists (an mp3 CD with a good 90-something songs). One of the songs caught my ear so far, Come to Me by Bethany Yarrow.

Good female vocalists always catch my fancy, especially when accompanied by intriguing backup instruments. There were some particularly amazing samples of a live set where Ari did accompaniment vocals to some ambient electronica by Antarktika; I wish I had been there. On that note, Ari will be performing around Boston. She's having a regular show every Monday of December, so I think I'm going to try and make those. See her site for more details.