Sxip, you rock socks all over the world!

Sxip (pronounced 'skip') is a multi-instrumentalist genius who makes his own instruments out of stuff. He appeared in the goddarn weird but funny Insane Yeti Squirrel comic strip a while back.

At first it seemed like another crazy guy who does experimental stuff, but he's one of the few to do so compellingly, methinks.

Beatboxing, guitar playing, and weird sound effects, heck, I wonder, he does them all live yet I wonder how he gets all those sounds. Watching some of his stuff I initially thought he was playing along a backing track of sorts or using special effects!

So, without further ado, I present the one and only Sxip Shirey:

Moon In Her Belly (featuring the amazizing Adam Matta)



Pandora


In a song with Jason Webley (must check him out one day) - Days With You



Few people are able to do all these wildly different things with all kinds of people, have a blast and make awesome stuff... you heard me, Britney Spears- take note.

Now, you might not remember him by his music in that case (maybe by his mad scientist hairdo), but it's kickass music. I loved his new CD, Sonic New York. It sounds as if all the different grooves and melodies of the city that never sleeps had slept together and had a million babies. Truly some kind of thing that's not heard often. A bit Bowie-ish, Zappa-ish with everything in between! Will buy sometime :D

Dj Shackles . Crazy Dubmetalstep thingy

Dubstep is a new kind of thing to me, even though it's been around for like a decade now (as if I'd listen to music through the web when I was nine...), and I've been growing to like it a lot. I dunno, it can be harsh, heavy, it can make you wanna get up and shake your goddamn booty or get you into a trance. And still I don't really know how to describe the music since it all sounds so different... isn't that great? Not like other kinds of music (gangsta rap, reggaeton, metalcore and trance, you all heard me).

So! Dj Shackles (what a name) makes some grindingly heavy dubstep that occasionally sounds more like heavy metal, really, really dancy heavy metal. Anyway listen for yourself this oddity:

SHACKLES - WOLVES AMONG SHEEP by SHACKLES

The mixture is cool, the drums alternate between realistic heavy metal drumwork and more dubstep-ish sounds. The guitars sound a little glitchy for my taste.

Here it almost feels like it could lead nicely into a DnB track but he artfully brings all the weird crap that makes dubstep dubstep. Interesting indeed:

SHACKLES - DARK HARMONIX by SHACKLES

GE: Home Appliance Energy Use

I find this little flash application in the General Electric of great use to all those who ever wondered how much each appliance used. Not only it tells you in watts the usage, but also it can show you in dollars and the equivalent in petrol, or how much does a kilowatt hour yield for each appliance, in addition to ranking them from the biggest users to the least..

Apparently electric furnaces use the most with a big-sounding 17,211 watts, while things like laptops barely use 30 (printers use around the same). However, I'm curious about how much things use when they are off but they remain plugged. Would it be relative to how much they use when in work?

Also, I see plenty of people who would be interested in seeing all this in the equivalent carbon footprint and all that stuff.

Barnbrock studios

I ran into this creative studio based in the UK a while back. Works for book covers, fonts, posters, CD covers (including David Bowie's ''Heathen'') and all sorts of stuff. Some heavy political messages, succinctly and subtly expressed?

http://www.barnbrook.net/

http://www.barnbrook.net/archive/

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Trance? Techno? House? Jungle? Hardcore? What's the difference between them anyway? They all sound like un-tss un-tss because all electronic dance music does so. I found this neat little (massive) guide to electronic music made by some mysterious person by the alias 'Ishkur'. Pretty cool, years are like the rings inside a tree trunk and different music styles that split and form nodes and crazy lumps and things and you can hear examples of each style of music and learn how sounds change through the ages and travel different cultures. Although in the last 10 years there has been an explosion of new styles of music (dubstep, reggaeton that has actually been around for a while, this new trancey DnB sound and a resurgence of electro), the guide still kicks ass an is not that out of date. How much work was put into it!

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Noah's Ark

I was gonna go through some crazy silly theory someone used to explain Pangaea according to the Bible and all... but I couldn't bother.

Instead, I'm gonna put these 3 videos making funny stuff out of the story of Noah's Ark. Amen.

My current obsession with flamenco guitar

As my next album nears completion, there's a track that was a bit like flamenco that I decided to re-record. It wasn't that bad, but I lost the original files and couldn't polish the mix, so I opted for doing the whole thing again. And me being me, I dived into the world of flamenco guitar and listened to Paco de Lucía for hours. I'm really getting into this; it's so much fun playing this kind of music, but it's also as hard as feck.




So, in my quest to unlock gypsy and middle-eastern roots in my Spanish guitar, I've found tons and tons of flamenco techniques that I had no idea about. It's amazing how many awesome ways of making the guitar sing exist!

So here are the ones that really really got me:

Golpe technique:


Rumba flamenca:


Rasgueado (the most known one):


Different Rasgueado:


Bulerías (this is the hardest one I've found, aghh!!)


Crazy-ass mofo comes up with a flamenco-ish technique when trying a Victor Wooten slap bass thing:


Using ''picado'' (fingerpicking) to play arpeggios:




So yeah... I've had my hands doin' these crazy gitano things lately, and also, this has sparked my interesting in Gypsy music. Last Friday was listening to things ranging from Django Reinhardt's gypsy jazz music to Bulgarian wedding music, seriously some of the craziest and most awesome music in the world!