Aperte.org » Music

nixon master blaster headphones

Jeremy Handcock — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:46:42 +0000

Before I left Seattle last week, my Rob surprised me with an early graduation gift and got me a pair of the new Nixon Master Blaster headphones. Thanks, Rob! I've had my eye on them since Nixon released them last December. I love their retro styling with the shiny metal frame against the real leather ear pads and headband. Putting them on is like resting your head on a nice vintage leather sofa. They're by far the fanciest set of cans I've ever owned. There's a ball and socket rotation mechanism on the ear cups so they adjust to your head really nicely. Other fancy features include a volume control on the right ear cup and a detachable cable that is insulated with woven fabric instead of the traditional plastic. I could tell that my fellow passengers were a little jealous when I whipped these beauties out on my flight to Toronto. Although they don't have electronic noise cancellation, I've found that the leather provides enough insulation to block out ambient noise. They were great on the plane even with the roaring jet engines and chatty passengers. Now that I think of it, they somewhat resemble vintage pilot headsets! As you might guess by the name, the Master Blaster headphones produce big sound. They're not overbearing though and they're incredibly responsive. I've listened to a lot of music on them already, and although they can be a bit bass-heavy depending on the type of music, it's a lush and full sound without muddiness. These headphones are my new favorite thing. Share:

the rural alberta advantage

Jeremy Handcock — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:17:09 +0000

"The Alberta Advantage" is a phrase the Alberta government made up to describe the benefits of living in Canada's most prosperous province. You know, it has something to do with the 179 billion barrels of oil locked up in the tar sands. There are the more glamourous parts, too: big prairie skies and top-of-the-world views in the Rocky Mountains. Born and raised Southern Ontarians might find this hard to believe, but Alberta is actually a lovely place to grow up. The Rural Alberta Advantage is an awesome indie folk-rock band from Alberta and now based in Toronto. They play "... songs about hometowns and heartbreak, born out of images from growing up in Central and Northern Alberta." The tracks I've heard from the new album Hometowns are super. I love the percussive sounds of "Sleep All Day" and "Don't Haunt this Place". A few MP3s are available on the band website and you can order the CD from there, too. Mine is in the mail! Share:

hawskley at danforth

Jeremy Handcock — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:15:13 +0000

Thanks to Ryan, my brother Nicholas and I scored some tickets to see Hawksley Workman at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto a few weeks ago. I had only listened to his new album, Between the Beautifuls, a few times before his show and I was kinda ho-hum about it. I'm not crazy about the slide guitar alt-country smells. And no, it's not because I don't like alt-country. Quite the contrary. I think I know the sound that he's going for, but Hawksley's soaring operatic voice and the rest of the production doesn't really fit. To me this album is kind of an unfocused cut. So far I think Hawksley's albums have been variable but cohesive: lyrically strong alt-pop/rock (For Him and the Girls) to high-sheen pop productions (Lover/Fighter). I actually really liked his last album, Treeful of Starling. To his credit, I liked his tracks from Between the Beautifuls much more in-concert. I felt the instrumentation was much more appropriate: he played mostly on electric guitar with a whammy bar, his band mate was on the fiddle, and his horn player spent most of his time on bass clarinet. The alt-country touches were well-placed and lovely. The track "Oh You Delicate Heart" was excellent. He had an awesome rocked-out rendition of "Striptease" from Delicious Wolves that moved into a sweet double-time version of "Jealous of Your Cigarette" (and all the things you do with it). The concert was a bit self-indulgent in a way that only a personality like Hawksley could get away with. He had this little mini synthesizer and drum kit (seriously mini: about 2 feet tall) that he played on for the first couple songs. It was funny at first, but they sounded awful so I don't know why he kept playing on them. Also, half way through the concert, his entire band came up to the front of the stage and went unmic'd for a song. It was a nice touch to get closer to the audience, but of course I couldn't hear anything and when they decided to do a second song sans-amplification I was just annoyed. All that considered, it was still a nice show. It was 2.5 hours of nothing but Hawksley so I got my fix in. I only saw him once before ... it was a number of years ago up at Yonge and Eglinton for one of those Toronto summer street festivals. If you're a die-hard Hawksley fan, buy the new album to complete your collection. Otherwise, his older stuff is still unquestionably his best. Share:

music is my boyfriend

Jeremy Handcock — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:46:32 +0000

It's not so far from the truth. This song is so ridiculous and awesome: "music is my boyfriend ... music is my beach house ... music is my king-sized bed." It's almost as if the band (CSS, from Brazil) wrote it as a commission for the great new iPod Touch commercial, but they're such unassuming looking hipsters that I doubt it. I impulsively went and bought the album from Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store after my buddy told me the name of the band. Patrick Wolf's The Magic Position is lovely, I kinda like Beats for Beginners' Don't Fly into the Sun, and Kids on TV's Mixing Business With Pleasure is a little bit of explicit fun. Some of Gus Gus' Mixed Live album is pretty hot and chunky and I've been listening to it a lot. My beloved Hawksley has a new album coming out in the new year and the tour dates are being announced soon. Sarah Slean is playing a show with some new material at the harbourfront Dec. 20/21 too! Share:

ipod doctor

Jeremy Handcock — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 03:46:55 +0000

I dropped my iPod a few weeks ago It's not the first time, but sadly, this time I broke it a little bit. The poor thing had a good, long 2.5 years and it has served me well on many travels across the globe. The display would light up when I turned the click wheel and it would still click and select things, but there was no visible text on the display. I knew the hard drive was probably still good though because it would sync properly with iTunes when I plugged it in. At this point I was ready to drop $300 on a new iPod classic, so I really had nothing to lose by popping off the cover and having a look. I was thinking of maybe trying to swap out the working display from Nicholas' old iPod. I had to struggle a little to get the cover off but the effort was all worth it: somehow the impact had knocked the display connector loose from the main board and all I had to do was put it back in! I put it all back together and now I have a perfectly functioning iPod again. I just have a few scratches on the casing where I pried it open with a screwdriver. After a little wifi trickery and successfully dissecting my iPod, I'm feeling pretty good about my household geek skills. And yes, I even had the necessary torx screwdrivers in my toolbox. How dorky is that? Share:

Some new music

Jeremy Handcock — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:15:05 +0000

I bought some new music from Zunior a few days ago (thanks to my brother for the recommendation). You can buy DRM-free MP3s and even FLAC-encoded indie Canadian music from them for cheap cheap cheap. Nicholas told me to pick up Jill Barber's debut album from them. It's a lovely album for a fall day like today when it feels like snow. Stephen also gave me a (huge) sampling of Placebo music to figure out what I like. It'll take me a while to go through it all, but I can say that the Placebo show in Seattle last week was awesome. Those pretty looking boys put on a good show. I'm feeling a bit nostalgic tonight for some reason... I'm really looking forward to Toronto next week and seeing the cool cats there. Share:

Scissor Sisters: live tomorrow night

Jeremy Handcock — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:10:12 +0000

I'm going. You're jealous, right? I haven't been blogging much because I'm working on a longer thing about Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal party renewal. Good vibes to my little bro on his date with Corporate Canada tomorrow. Share:

Insomniac entertainment

Jeremy Handcock — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 08:42:01 +0000

Every now and then I go through a phase of insomnia. I haven't been able to determine the cause. It's not coffee -- I'm actually doing a pretty good job at kicking that addiction. I don't know. I could sure use a tranquilizer right now though. Insomnia sure can be boring, so I've figured out a few things to entertain myself with. I've been playing around a lot lately with Pandora, an application of The Music Genome Project that I read about in the New York Times last weekend. The Music Genome Project develops a metadata vocabulary for classifying and relating music that the "music analysts" at Pandora have applied to their analysis of an insane number of tracks and artists. The result is that you can type in an artist and Pandora will pull up the defining characteristics of that artist while relating it to artists of similar characteristics. The relationships are relatively transparent too. For example, I clicked on "Why is this song playing?" when Massive Attack's "Special Cases" was playing and Pandora related it back to my Portishead search with the characteristics, "electronica roots, downtempo influences, and tripped-out production." Developing relationships between artifacts using a pre-defined metadata vocabulary isn't really a new thing (online retailers have been doing this for years), but it's cool to see this applied to "subjective intangibles" like music artists and tracks. The difference is that developing relationships between subjective intangibles in the past has been done via consumer behaviour data mining (ie. 25% of consumers that purchased A also purchased B, so one might infer that A is related to B. Moreover, those consumers that rated A highly also rated B highly). The Music Genome Project is instead building a music classification database from the ground-up, without the help of consumer behaviour data. There are merits to both approaches: mining consumer behaviour data is probably a lot cheaper than analyzing immense numbers of artists and tracks for their defining characteristics, for example. But one might criticize relationships derived using this method as being predominantly related to economic behaviour rather than defining musical characteristics. Consumer behaviour and preferences for certain musical characteristics must be related to eachother in and of themselves, but still, the data mining approach seems a bit flawed in that it doesn't account for these relationships based on musical characteristics. Maybe the silver bullet would be to combine data from the two different approaches? One could overlay relationship data derived from consumer behaviour data mining with the relationship data from Pandora, reconcile it, and come up with "meta-relationships" based on the two sources of data. It's an idea. An insomniac idea. Share:

Sasquatch: Flaming Lips, Beck, Hail, Cow Crap

Jeremy Handcock — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 10:35:47 +0000

(no idea who those people are) The music was great. There was hail and cow crap too. A couple of friends and I went out to George, WA last weekend for Sasquatch. The concert was seriously cool. I saw so many bands I've been wanting to see forever. In order of awesomeness:

Flaming Lips: Wayne Coyne got inside a big inflated sphere and crowd-surfed. It ruled. They played lots of stuff from the amazing Yoshimi and Transmissions, a few from the new album.
Beck: the stage had a miniature stage inside of it with puppets of all the band members (the "Puppetron"). Some puppeteer dudes moved them in sync with the band. Even their mouths. Cool. There was even a puppet sitcom where the Beck puppet asked the Death Cab dude, "Can I have a ride in your death jet?" I laughed my ass off at that. I've revived some Beck stuff that has been laying dormant on my iPod since the show.
Shins: everything was rocked out and tempoed up from the album recordings. Crazy cool!
Tragically Hip: I've seen these guys way too many times, but they played an *awesome* set. So much energy. I suppose they don't play "New Orleans Is Sinking" anymore though (ya know, because it really did sink), which is a shame. It was a good song.
Decemberists: I don't know this music that well, but their set rocked.
Arctic Monkies: These little guys act much too pretentious for their age, but they're cool. The lead singer has that irrestable blue collar roots charm.

Sadly, just as Neko Case was starting her set, the skies opened up and it hailed like crazy for about 20 minutes. I was soaked, cold, and pretty much a bitch by the end of that. I stuck around though. Neko did not. No worries, however. I have a ticket to her show in Seattle on Canada Day. I must warn you, my bloggies: the next few paragraphs are rather grotesque. Not for the faint of heart, most definitely. We bought a camping pass in the event 'camping ground', not realizing that the 'camping ground' was really just a field full of cow shit. I'm pretty sure the owner of the field herded the cattle out the day before we arrived because some of those cow pies were pretty fresh smelling. Such a lovely place to lay down a sleeping bag. Oh yeah, and I think the event planners drastically under-planned the amount of human excrement that would be deposited in the porta-potties. To see a porta-potty piled high up to the seat with shit is a horrible, life-changing thing. I had to take a moment. As a side note, the septic company that came around with trucks to suck up the crap was called "Honey Bucket". I take that as a cruel, horrible joke directed toward porta-potty users everywhere. The other thing I had to take a moment about was the freaky 'trough urinal style' porta-potty. The line-ups for the real porta-potties were much too long, so I decided to check it out. So I shuffled into the trough area and saw the most urine I've ever seen standing in one place ever. Seriously, these troughs could have filled a VW Golf. I even had to shuffle down the trough mid-stream while people left and those waiting tried to shove in for a spot. Anyway, from a music perspective, it was great. It was worth it. But I'm so glad I don't have to go through that again for another year. Share: