Karate Party dot com

Check out www.thekarateparty.com — a Craig ‘n’ Cat Joint.

Three Bob Dylan Records for a Dollar

I was browsing the iTunes music store last night when I noticed they were selling this box set of three Bob Dylan albums (Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind, and Love and Theft) for $0.99, which is even cheaper than the equivalent on allofmp3.com. If you’re interested in Bob Dylan, you might as well grab a copy while the going’s good.

Sydney

I just realised that I haven’t written anything about my recent trip up to Sydney.

For the uninitiated, I was invited up to Sydney last weekend to do a DJ set at the launch party for Chaos Is An Order Edition #2, which features an interview with Look Who’s Toxic. I’d always wanted to DJ, so I jumped at the chance to do it — my theory was that if I stuffed it up badly, at least I wouldn’t know anyone in the audience

Despite a serious lack of sleep and the beginnings of a cold, I had an awesome time.

After getting home from Buck 65 the previous night around 1:30am, I was up again at 5:00am and in Sydney by 8:30am. I spent most of the morning wandering the streets of the city, drinking coffee and trying to find some clothes to buy. I didn’t find anything.

My hotel room became available at 2:00pm. I’d never DJed before and was feeling pretty nervous, so I spent most of the afternoon listening to tunes on my iPod, making little notes that would help me along the way and drawing a big, convoluted chart of what songs I felt would run into with other songs well.

Around 7:00pm I found the venue, had a few drinks and met up with the organisers of the party. I wasn’t supposed to be starting until 10:00, but I figured I’d need a few drinks to calm my nerves. Thankfully I got to have a play with the CD players and the mixer, so I was kind of familiar with what I was doing.

The turnout for the launch was pretty disappointing, but that was fine by me — the combination of the whiskey and lower than expected numbers meant I went into my set with my confidence sky-high.

The first song I played (Dang by Buck 65, taken from Strong Arm) was recieved very, very well — pretty girls and record nerds (two of my favourite kinds of people) were coming up to the desk, asking about the song and letting me know they thought it was awesome, which was really cool. Unfortunately some of the record nerds bum rushed my set and started playing an obscure 7″ record from the 80s which was a bit of a bummer, but I got to play out the rest of my set, so that was cool.

After that, the story follows the usual downhill path you’ve probably come to expect from me. I ran into Spod and got talking with the pretty girls from the party, but the ol’ memory starts getting a little shaky after that point. The next thing I remember is waking up in my hotel room alone and fully clothed at 4:00am.

Anyway, in summary, if anyone needs a DJ to play Rock, Pop, Electro, Hip Hop and Country music, give me a call. I’d definitely be up for it again.

Good Idea or Dumb Idea? #5 - iMixtape

Like any good upwardly mobile young man, you’ve got your record collection in iTunes (probably on an external hard drive, because you’ve got way too many tunes to fit on that piddly 60GB drive that Apple shipped the computer with). You also like the idea of making a mixtape for your sweetie (a-la DJ Rob Gordon), but iTunes gives you no option for doing mixing tracks, which is essential to the carefully crafted emotional message you’re trying to convey.

Your options are to shell out hundereds of dollars for something like ProTools (you’re not that upwardly mobile), or hand-crafting your mix in a wave editing program and losing the ability to mark tracks on your CD. This just isn’t good enough.

Enter iMixtape.

This simple application will allow you to grab tracks from iTunes, place them on a grid, fade them in and out of each other and place track markers. iMixtape will then burn it to a CD for you. It’d look something like this:

Those ‘volume envelopes’ indicate the volume of the track. The top of the track indicates 100% volume, the bottom indicates 0% volume. The ‘envelope points’ are the parts that are dragable. There’s always an envelope point at the start and end of each volume envelope. Additional envelope points can be created by clicking on any point of the volume envelope. You can drag these envelope points around inside the track, and the volume envelope will move to create straight lines between them.

Does this make sense? I think I’d buy this application for $20. It would be fun. Would anyone else?Is this a dumb idea or a good idea?

Buck 65

Buck 65 on Friday night was the best show I’ve seen in a long, long time.

I was pretty skeptical when I saw that his “band” was a CD player and a single turntable, but within five minutes the entire audience was hanging from his every word. It was inspirational.

The show basically comprises of the character Buck 65 standing at the microphone, delivering his poetic ramblings to backing tracks built from sampled guitars, pianos, synths and long-forgotten country records, punctuated with some extremely sensual appearances from Mrs. Buck 65 (Claire Berest) and some of the most bizarre, poignant stories you’ll ever hear at a hip hop show.

I really don’t know how to describe it properly, but if you’re a fan of Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Hip Hop music or storytelling, check out sides one and two of Strong Arm, the downloadable mixtape he’s made available on his web site.