Tuesday’s radio show was a Ladies’ night special featuring Sharon Jones, Wanda Jackson, and my new favourite singer Betty Davis.

There’s a dedicated feed for the shows now too, so I won’t post them all on this feed as well unless there’s a particular reason to do so.

The page: http://bsidebeats.com/podcast/

The feed: http://bsidebeats.com/category/podcast/feed/

Righto.

Found the first two shows and posted them as well. Now all that’s missing is last week’s show when I recorded two hours of silence.

Live streaming coming soon.

Couldn’t quite say Raglan is starved for live music but it’s not exactly Mecca for touring bands either. There’s a fairly steady diet of competent-but-very-ordinary reggae and somewhat-less-than-ordinary house, so last night was a rare treat.

The Shrugs are humans, made from flesh and The Trons are robots, made from Meccano. They’re both (mostly) from Hamiltron and they’re both excellent and that’s about all I have to say about that.

(Except to add that I bought perhaps the coolest bit of merch I’ve ever seen at a gig ever, pictured above. It’s a lathe-cut record made by Greg Locke (The Trons) and if it looks a little strange that’s because he cuts them on aluminium pie dishes. He claims that they sound awful. I haven’t played mine yet and I’m not sure if I will. Playing it would require punching a hole in the cardboard backing which would diminish the collectibility, for me anyway.)

I host a regular Tuesday night radio show here in Raglan (more about that later). I’m going to post recordings of the show here. You can download them or listen online.

It’ll also be streaming live over the interwebs every Tuesday night (NZ time) in a week or two, I’ll let you know when, where, and how.

The shows are about two hours long and just over 100MB wide. Last night’s show was a special on The Residents. Previous shows have focused on the music of Fela Kuti, and on the origins of punk rock.

I intend to do something different every week and I’m open to suggestions. If you have ideas for future shows, tell me in the comments section.

This one is the third of seven, the eighth is Kutiman talking about the project.

If you click through to the youtube pages, in the sidebar (under more info) there are links to all of the original clips of each instrument part so you can see exactly what materials he’s used.

The idea seems glaringly obvious in a “why didn’t I think of that” kind of way when you consider the massive number of videos on youtube of people showing off their skills or demonstrating their new toys etc.

Related: in Bb 2.0

The voting is by the entrants which makes it doubly nice, and also I get some sweet prizes in the mail! Bonus.

If you like this kind of mashing up and remixing – and particularly if you’re into the Beasties – do have a bit of a dig around at BeastieMixes.com.

To find out more and hear the album go to moldover.com

BeastieMixes.com is a cool site for people who like to remix and mash up Beastie Boys songs (hey that’s me!) and people who like listening to mashups and remixes of Beastie Boys songs (hey that’s me too!) and right now there’s a “Beastie Boys vs Chemical Brothers” contest on, into which anyone can enter two mixes.

The rules are: Remix / Mash any Chemical Brothers song with any Beastie Boys song. That’s it.

Download audio file (SuperDiscoDust.mp3)

BeastieMixes.com holds these kind of contests a couple of times a year at least, and they’re always fun. Good people. There might even be prizes but it’s not about the prizes. So if you’re into this kind of tomfoolery, get mixing. All the details are here. If you need Beasties acapellas or instrumentals you can find them there too (or ask me, I’ve got a stash).

AND…

I’d noticed it made some quite nice noises when I found it the other day and I was wondering if it might be any use as a reverb plate. I’d always figured aluminium would be too soft for reverb but it rang out nicely when struck so I gave it a go.

 

Turns out I was right – it was a terrible reverb plate. But now that I had it on a stand in the studio with a piezo attached I figured I may as well do something with it, and seeing as I couldn’t eat it, I hit it with a stick.

I was reading the other day about my friend Sean’s new pots-and-pans drum kit – which also uses piezos to pick up the sound. I also happened to have another one of these lids lying around, slightly bigger, so I wired that up too.

Sean’s using his for the sound of the pan itself and also as a switch which triggers an oscillator when struck. I think I’ll keep these ones just as amplified acoustic instruments as part of the percussion rack I’m putting together.

I haven’t done any audio processing, the recording is straight from the piezos to the desk to the pc. I think I’m going to have some fun with these.

Read more here.