Tigertronic.tv RSS Feed

Tigertronic - Friday May 21 - Red and the Black

rohit — Sat, 01 May 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Tigertronic rides again!

Come out to the Red and the Black on Friday, May 21st and listen to what we've been cooking up lately.

Click here for the Facebook Event listing

Tigertronic on April 24th, 2010

rohit — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Thanks to Erick for flipping on his iPhone viddy cam, and grabbing this excerpt from our debut show! Check it out if you missed it.

Also, we're playing with Dangerosa on Saturday night, April 24th, in downtown Silver Spring. Come out and join us.

-rohit

My Best Friend's Girl - Review

amanda — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:00:00 GMT

"The Ugly Truth" about "My Best Friend's Wedding" with BONUS! tips on how to lose a girl in ten ways.

The Ugly Truth - Review

amanda — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:00:00 GMT

"The Wedding Planner" meets "Someone Like You" in PG-rated "Superbad".

War Inc. - Review

amanda — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:00:00 GMT

War, Inc.
c/o Jason Bourne
1 Wal-Mart Place
"Grosse Point Blank", Anyjackistan
12345 United States Middle-East Territories

Download Tigertronic's Potomac Winter Sessions

rohit — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Duplicity - Review

amanda — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:00:00 GMT

Runaway Bride meets Mission: Impossible II
or
Oceans Eleven for two.

-amanda

Beer Wars - Review

amanda — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Every quirky documentary you've seen about someone's passion, but this one is about beer.

-amanda

Nothing is Perfect

rohit — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:00:00 GMT

"Nothing is perfect," said the sage.

"But master, you seem so content sitting under the tree, the way you do," replied the disciple.

"Being content is not an admission of perfection," replied the sage.

"Ah!" said the disciple. "Now I understand."

"Everything is perfect," said the sage.

"But master," said the disciple. "You just taught me that nothing is perfect, and that i should be content with that."

"Perfection lies in the acceptance of the imperfect," said the sage.

Announcing Tigertronic's first show!

rohit — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:00:00 GMT

Hi guys, Tigertronic is having our EP release party and debut live show on April 1, 2010.

We're opening for Andalusian Dog and Citay downtown at The Red and The Black. It's a nice little dive located on H street.

Doors open at 8:30pm and we go on first, so don't be late to this one. It's 21+ and there's an $8 cover.

Come have a beer and watch the show that's been 5 years in the making!

-rohit

Pandorum - Movie Review

amanda — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 02:00:00 GMT

Review in 10 words or less:

"Event Horizon" and "The Time Machine" in "The Abyss"

-amanda

Armond White doesn't get it

richard — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Read his review of Shutter Island here

My response to Armond:

Mr. White; I'm going to ask you a question. What yarns of narrative gold have you spun for the canon of contemporary film history and discourse (besides berating a brilliant filmmaker behind your safe artifice of failed wit and snobbery) to justify the right to call Scorsese a hack?

Have you gone bat shit?

You represent all the characteristics that I loathe about critics, which is a function in society that is occasionally useless (Exhibit A: this review. Exhibit B: you).

Does Mr. White seriously get paid to write this bovine shit? Marinade in that rhetoric for a bit, Mr. White, and get back to me ...

1. The Departed deserved its accolades. Every film you see today is relatively "unoriginal", you should get used to that, or you might get a seizure. 2. Gangs of New York: overambitious, overlong, exasperating, frustrating and absolutely brilliant (do you even remember Daniel Day Lewis' performance in that film?) It wasn't perfect, but its ambition superseded its flaws, by a wide chasm of personal certainty. 3. The Aviator was a great period spectacle ... a sprawling biopic, not purposeless by any means.

The Aviator is purposeless? Did you write that statement while having an aneurysm? DiCaprio is a versatile actor (it's hard to forgive him for Titanic, sure, but ... ). You clearly have an Anti-Leo Bias (which likely predisposed you to snipe at all the genre conventions you espied in Shutter Isle's preview before you even walked into the actual film itself). I haven't seen DiCaprio this emotive and haunted since Basketball Diaries ... stop persecuting him because he took a Titanic turn for the mainstream (years ago) and let the guy act ...

In fact, I should use your "negative" film reviews as a barometer to what is actually worth watching. "Oh, White didn't like it? Okay I'll watch it."

Do you want to make a film that corrects all the alleged/trite flaws that you disapprove of in Shutter Island? Perhaps even one as great as Goodfellas or Casino or Taxi Driver? OK ... stop wasting our time by berating Scorsese and start making films yourself. Oh ... you don't want to? That's not your job? Why? 'Cause you're a pussy?

Read More

-richard

Blindness - Review

amanda — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:01:00 GMT

Ditzy housewife becomes pragmatic caretaker in "Quarantine" meets "28 Days Later"

-amanda

Borat - Review

amanda — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:40:00 GMT

Borat in ten words or less.

Crocodile Dundee meets Moscow on the Hudson at WWF.

-amanda

Evelyn Glennie and the learned art of listening

rohit — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:53:00 GMT

Evelyn Glennie is a Scottish drummer/percussionist who is almost completely deaf. She is the subject of the documentary Touch the Sound. I've only watched excerpts of the doc, but the parts I saw were really great.

A few months back, I saw this Ted talk by Glennie. It doesn't matter if you're a musician or not, giving this talk an honest listen will open your mind.

The fact is that listening is a learned skill. Everyone is born with the sense of hearing, but we learn how to listen. Listening is a key component to playing music in a group, but it's also a key component to understanding the world we live in, and the people around us. Glennie is evidence that you don't need to hear to be able to listen.

You do, however, need to feel, and more specifically, feel sound.

There are times when we're jamming to a new song, or playing an existing one, and it just works. I feel like I'm in a sea of sound and am not separate from the sound, but rather, part of it somehow. It's those times that I feel most in sync with my mates. We are all listening to the each other, and more importantly, to the combined sound that we're creating as a group. That's when our individual musical atoms come together to form the molecule that is Tigertronic.

It's an amazing thing.

-rohit

Flaming Lips - Dark Side of the Moon - Review

richard — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:04:00 GMT

Bias alert: I am a Flaming Lips fan, and ironically, I’ve never been to one of their signature-spectacle live performances, aside from the live footage I’ve seen on the InterWeb and via Bradley Beesley’s 2005 Lips documentary, Fearless Freaks (one of the best rockumentaries I’ve seen before and since). And let’s face it, Wayne Coyne, artistically, can make some rather eccentric, genre-bending, odd decisions, circa the tepid launch of At War With the Mystics (2006) and, later, Christmas on Mars (2008, a psychotropic 86-minute sci-fi headtrip concerning a cadre of galactic colonists settling on Mars that Coyne first conceived a year after the debut of the aughts, featuring a sonically irreverent score by The Lips’ multifaceted, indispensable sound-innovator, Steven Drozd—and, yes, um, I recall an aborted fetus and a vulva-headed marching band on full display in this film). In short, I have to confess that I can’t find myself consistently agreeing with The Lips’ unpredictable instincts.

However, what can’t be denied of Coyne’s everyman, down-to-earthy, terrestrial existence on this planet of ours is the raw passion inherent to every decision he and his coterie of openly freakish misfits have made. Because of this, there is always an earnestness and honesty to the artistic leaps of faith they make, notwithstanding the reaction of the anonymous masses in cyberspace and amidst the viscous crème de la crème of the critical elite. At this juncture, you (that being either an impersonal you) will always find your svelte narrator, in a kneejerk reaction, defending The Lips against curmudgeonly textual-and/or-verbalized assaults and chucked stones.

As an intermission, this briefly brings your humble narrator to Embryonic (might they have a fixation on embryos, fetuses, and vulvas?), the Lips’ bombastic 2009 double album release, the most daredevil, ungoverned and brazen orgasm of anti-insouciant, disestablishmentarian, atomic, dark, furious, tender, vignette-slaphappy, fragmented collection of tracks since 1997’s Zaireeka. Perhaps it was an audacious reaction to the tepidity they experienced (or even endured) during their work on the thematically piecemeal Mystics, and that album’s equally lukewarm reception amidst fans and critics. Embryonic isn’t any less dismembered or compartmental, but with it we witness a renaissance of their heart and joy for either freaking you the fuck out, or uplifting you into a stratosphere of helium-headed hope coupled to a pinch of existential resignation and cyberpunk melancholy.

In PasteMagazine.com’s interview with the Lips’ grizzled frontman, Coyne elaborates on Embryonic and the atypical darkness of this album vis-à-vis its more saccharine predecessors:

I don’t know if it’s pessimism. I try to be realistic. As much as anybody would say that we’re optimistic, I always say we’re not even optimistic. I think we’re realistic. “Realistic” meaning that, yeah, we’re aware of the pain and suffering, in the end, will defeat us. We can’t just over come that because we have a good attitude […] A lot of things in life, you change it just by your perception of what it is. But we’re not ever going to pretend that it’s all that way (Source: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2010/01/flaming-lips-frontman-wayne-coyne-talks-dark-side.html)

This in turn ushers your bespectacled narrator to the raison d’être of this post: The Lips’ interpretation of Pink Floyd’s phenomenal album, Dark Side of the Moon, with their nephew’s band, Stardeath and White Dwarfs. Floyd-wise, you purists know what I’m talking about: you’ve smoked up to it, you’ve paired it with a synchronous viewing of The Wizard of Oz and wondered if “it” was actually working—you’ve even been tempted to buy a Pink Floyd T-shirt at Hot Topic, despite the fact that you’re in your 30s or 40s.

This is not a review, mind you, this is a brute opinion … a piece of commentary on some of the more cantankerous customer reviews I’ve seen trickling into iTunes, the App Store, online forums, etcetera. Some of this anonymous verbiage includes:

Public Enemies - Review

amanda — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:59:00 GMT

Movie review in 12 words or less:

Dick Tracey got Gilbert Grape in Places of the Heart.

-amanda

My homage to the original Donkey Kong

rohit — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:59:00 GMT

Oh man. I came across this site today that had a "Game Console Controller Family Tree". I know, what's it coming to, but still... I started looking at the controllers and saw this tiny little picture of this very familiar looking, burnt-orange, flip-view handheld game. I clicked on it, and a flood of memories came rushing back to me.

It was the early 80s and i was somewhere between six and eight years old. My most valuable possession was my Donkey Kong game. As soon as I saw the "Game & Watch" logo, I instantly remembered the mini-collection of hand-held games I had at the time. Donkey Kong wasn't the first. There were predecessors.

I remember, quite vividly, playing Greenhouse, Ball, Octopus and Fire, before my parents were kind enough to give me my first flip-view handheld, Donkey Kong. I remember how much those games meant me, and how in awe I was of them. When Donkey Kong came around, I remember neglecting the others for it. It was an amazing game.

Reading Sock Master's description of it made me realize how incredible this game really was. He calls it, "perhaps the single most influential innovation in controllers of the last 25 years." The Game & Watch Donkey Kong was the first game ever to feature "the invention of the cross-shaped control pad." Ho-ly Shit. We're talking ancestral here. I couldn't tell you if I was in love with the game because of its control pad, or it's flip-view, but I can tell you that there was a lot of love in my heart for this game.

A while later, I remember Donkey Kong 2 was released. I remember being insanely excited to get the long-awaited successor to my very precious video game. I played it, and loved it, but it wasn't the same. The magic of Donkey Kong wasn't there. It didn't compare. It couldn't.

It turns out Game & Watch games were made by Nintendo. Before I ever knew what Nintendo was, it was already a huge part of my life. I'm not a gamer, nor have I been one since those days way back then, but I have to say that in the console-wars, Nintendo will always win in my book.

-rohit

ps. the colors of the games were orange and brown... is there some deep-seated, subconscious color-scheme bias going on with tigertronic.tv?

Daybreakers

amanda — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:55:00 GMT

Movie reviews in 12 words or less?

"Daybreakers"

Blade in Gattaca.

-amanda

Dropbox - cloud computing is here to stay

rohit — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:47:00 GMT

I stumbled across this company called Dropbox earlier and set up an account. These guys have found a pretty solid way to share files/data across computers efficiently, and without headache.

I work on multiple machines, and often have the need to send a file from one computer to another, or even to my phone. Until now, I would have to either email it to myself (if the file was small enough), put it on a thumb drive, or upload it to the website and then download it from the other machine. All those methods are going to be obsolete for me from here on out.

Dropbox syncs a folder across multiple machines. Anything you have in your Dropbox folder on your Mac, is instantly available on your PC (or your iPhone or any other computer you might want it accessible on). It's cloud computing at it's simplest, which always ends up being the best way.

Another thing that's cool is that anything in your Dropbox folder is also accessible online. You can put a file in a folder, right-click and select "copy public link" and then give the link to anyone you want to download the file. Ingenious.

By the way, I'm not in any way affiliated with these guys, so this isn't a peddled piece of news. Let me know if anyone decides to try it out and what you think of it.

-rohit

Hello from Mario

mario — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:35:00 GMT

I started off the new decade just like it should: watching T2: Judgement Day, sleeping for 3-4 hours, having a solo dance party to the likes of "U Can't Touch This" and "Informer" and other great hits from the 90s, and having a magnificent brunch of homefries and a cup of hot chocolate.

I decided to also check out a lot of the music that's been with me for the past 20 years or so, and happened upon one of my favorite tracks by a good old Mexican band by the name of Maná (Listening to old songs--made easy at www.lala.com)

So then, I thought to share one of the plethora of songs that especially moved me back in my high school/college years. This song was originally released in 1995, which only seems like a very long time ago. This video is an MTV Unplugged version of that song which was released in 1999. Hope you enjoy.

-mario

Happy New Year

rohit — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Here's wishing you all a very happy new year. We hope your 2010 is filled with love.

I caught this Austin City Limits a couple of weeks ago and it was amazing. The picture quality on Google Video isn't that great, but it's still worth the watch, or even just the listen.

Things are slow here in Samsaville as people are scattered all over the place for the holidays... I spoke with Mario a couple of days ago and we're shooting for an early/mid February release for the Potomac Winter Sessions. I'll be posting the confirmed release date here in the next couple of days.

Until then, enjoy Explosions in the Sky!

-rohit

Potomac Winter Sessions EP

rohit — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Tigertronic is in the process of mixing our first attempt at a record. It's called the Potomac Winter Sessions EP.

We rented some schmancy equipment from the big city and spent our Thanksgiving building Samsaville Studios. Our resident Comptroller of the Ministry of Technology produced the record. We have about 25 minutes of music tracked in the form of five songs.

It was an exhausting process, to say the least, and we still have a ways to go... the light at the end of the tunnel is shining bright, though, and we're hoping to have it all done sometime in January.

Stay tuned... the record will be available for download soon.

-rohit

Happy Holidays

rohit — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This is how Richard cheers us up from Tigertronic on Vimeo.

Happy Holidays to all from Tigertronic. Wish you guys a safe holiday and a very happy 2010!

Live and let live, everyone!

-rohit

The Rebirth of Tigertronic

tigertronic — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

He used to be a good man.

He believed that people were inherently good.

His resolve had slowly chipped away, day by day, week by week, year by year, until one day he found himself filled with the spite that he was so desperately fighting.

Beware the thing that you fight, that you do not become what you are fighting.

With bitterness on one side, and naivete on the other, a tightrope emerged.

balance.

- tigertronic