Deutscher Blogeintrag des Tages Es war einmal... in København: Das nun folgende war wirklich eine Frage, die in einer Physikprüfung, an der Universität von Kopenhagen, gestellt wurde: Beschreiben Sie, wie man die Höhe eines Wolkenkratzers mit einem Barometer feststellt. Ein Kursteilnehmer antwortete: "Sie binden ein langes Stück Schnur an den Ansatz des Barometers, senken dann das Barometer vom Dach des Wolkenkratzers zum Boden. Die Länge der Schnur plus die Länge des Barometers entspricht der Höhe des Gebäudes." (wie es weiterging und wer der Prüfling war bei da-tom)

Coming back

• Josh blog is back: Ideas for an unwritten review of the new Tom Waits CDs
• Two years after their last album Yo La Tengo released the underwater movie soundtrack The Sounds of the Sounds of Science recently. You can only order it via their website for $10 plus shipping. It consists of eight instrumental tracks to eight short films on underwater life by Jean Painlevé. The evolution of Yo La Tengo from Post Paisley Underground to noisy drone rock and then to the warm and mellow songs on And then Nothing... seems to have come to a logical end here. Yesterday morning I tried to listen to the new CD in the car but realised that it is definitely evening or night music. Too slow, too impressionistic, too soft (except the noisy "Liquid Crystals") in the morning. Some tracks are close to ambient but the drums always play an important role though Hubley's drumming is refrained and unobtrusive. When you think about it it seems quite a challenge to make music for a film on a world of silence. I think Yo La Tengo have succeeded here. The album is still growing on me. Yo La Tengo played the score live on tour last year while the films were screened. A live review is here. The album is reviewed in the Dusted Magazine. A long interview with the band about the project in the Independent Weekly.

Meta

• People who read my blog using a weblog monitor like blo.gs or weblogs.com should update their weblog list in case they want to continue reading me. From now on I ping the weblog name "sax and sunshine" to weblogs.com instead of "sx and sunshine" with the "" standing for the most common letter in the alphabet.
• Google has finished its' monthly crawl. Unfortunately my page rank went down from six to five and I am now no. 4 (not counting websites twice) for the infamous "s*x"-query. I can't believe it. I suppose the number of visitors per day will exceed the one thousand mark soon. The measures I took to repel people looking for smudgy stuff will probably only take effect after the next crawl.

Miscellaneous

• Marjorie Kelly's critic of capitalism and especially the shareholder value becomes more and more relevant in view of the falsified balances of Enron, Worldcom, Xerox etc.: The Divine Right of Capital
• The European knowledge test (via prolific). Not very difficult as I got 19/20.
• The new Flaming Lips album is streamed on their site (Mefi discussion).
• Everett True on Ed Kuepper, the great rather unknown Australian songwriter: The Cornish Arms - Artists' Biographies (via monkey puzzle)
• Tom Ewing on the Talking Heads Fear of Music and Remain in Light and the Byrne/Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (I have to relisten to that album. In my memory a brilliant experimental record): It's nearly Africa (ILM discussion)
• I Love Music: did we ever have a Keith Jarrett thread?
• 'Deep in a Dream': A Life of Chet Baker, the Popularizer of Cool. Extract 'Deep in a Dream' (free NYT registration required)
• 'Anything Goes' (free registration required), the new novel by Madison Smartt Bell is about a 20-year-old traveling with his band across the South. Excerpt: "Kurt Cobain was teaching me how to play "Lithium." One of two songs off that record I ever liked well enough to care to learn it. How the changes were just so brutally stupid, like they went out of their way to pick the exact wrong chords. The funny thing was I was playing guitar. Kurt was explaining to me–you got to keep it rough. Which it seems like rough was built into the chord progression anyway but maybe it wasn't quite so simple as I thought. So he was reaching for the guitar to show me what he meant but somehow the guitar sort of went tilting away from both of us and that's how I woke up." (via wood s lot)

German - deutsch - allemand

• Kollektive gemischtgeschlechtliche Besäufnisse: "Drei befreundete /bekannte Paare meinereins haben sich beim gemeinsamen Kotzen nach zuviel Alkohol kennengelernt.":
• Interessante Diskussion über die Ablehnung des internationalen Strafgerichtshofs in Den Haag von den USA bei hirn&verbrannt.
• Glückwunsch an Brasilien. Es ist selten, dass die Schönheit über die Effizienz siegt. Ausgerechnet ihr bestes Spiel bei der WM verlieren die Deutschen, soviel Ironie hätte ich der Mannschaft gar nicht zugetraut. Zudem wissen wir nun, dass Kahn auch nur ein menschlicher Torwart ist.

Deutsche Links

• Zum einen das komplette in realiter fast zentnerschwere Grimmsche Wörterbuch im Internet, dessen Javascript aber nicht überall funktioniert. Zuhause unter Windows 98 ging es, wenn auch sehr langsam, unter Windows 2000 im Büro klappte es leider überhaupt nicht. Habe die Artikel zu dem Begriff "Gott" nach Word kopiert: Unglaubliche 139 Seiten!
• Etwas verspätet, aber eigentlich immer aktuell: Die Abmahn-FAQ V. 1.2. Das Betreiben eines Weblogs ist vom Juristischen her immer ein Risiko. Da die Server von Blogspot an der kalifornischen Westküste sind und ich meist sowieso auf englisch schreibe, hoffe ich, dass ich von derartigen Nuisancen verschont bleibe.

Musical links

• The documentary film A Skin Too Few - The Days of Nick Drake according to Pitchfork does not reveal anything new about the most gifted suicidal songwriter of all times. The memories of his sister Gabrielle seem to be the most interesting part.
• Article in the LA Weekly on a big fan of The Doors who happens to be one of the foremost rock critics: Richard Meltzer (via freezing to death)
• Pitchfork on Sonic Youth: Murray Street. Rating wise from zero for their last album NYC Ghosts and Flowers to 9. Only the Flaming Lips going from 0 for Zaireeka to 10 for The Soft Bulletin have received the two opposite extreme ratings from one album to the next at Pitchfork. Though I ask myself if those two numbers were not confused.
• Another positive review of Murray Street by Marvin on the Aussie site Delusions of Adequacy. My review on this phantastic album is in the makes, promised.
• There is also a positive review of Pere Ubu's latest St.Arkansas by Patrick at DoA. I loved the last album Surf's Up of David Thomas and Two Pale Boys. Truly great haunting and weird atmospheric stuff.
• Jim O'Rourke who seems to be the bête noir behind most great albums this year (Wilco and Sonic Youth) has been releasing loads of albums himself recently. The five releases I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1,2,3,4, Insignificance, Halfway to a Threeway EP, Eureka, Bad Timing and Happy Days have been reviewed very positively at Tiny Mixtapes Gone to Heaven
• I even started a thread on ILM: Jim O'Rourke S/D. Forget what I wrote on Tortoise's Djed there.

Unmusical links

• Interesting LSD discussion at kuro5hin: My Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Life. From the introduction text: "Acid has the strange ability to make all of the parts of your mind that make you who you are, dissolve away, and you can see your pure sort of essence. ... Acid made me happy. ... I never thought that the human mind could think as fast as I have experienced on acid. Imagine that you catch a glimpse of your finger, the tiny ridges on it, and while pondering the implications of fingerprinting technology, and the injustice that is the FBI and federal government, you see the blood vessels in your finger, which, in your imagination, you can sort of travel down, and seeing that blood indeed permeates every part of you, you become aware that everything you intake, air, food, water, does indeed permeate every part of you also. These thoughts, spiraling faster, take you back, when you blink, realizing that you have been thinking for about a faction of a second."
• Four page Haruki Murakami story: Airplane in The New Yorker. Murakami is like a mix of Kundera and Carver to me. The obsession with the physical and psychological relations between men and women from Kundera, the austerity, simplicity and open-endness from Carver. Only less striking and dense than those two.
• Big Brother is watching the US: FBI checking out Americans' reading habits / Bookstores, libraries can't do much to fend off search warrants (via wortlog)
• The hardcore version of this blog: sax and sunshine. mainly a farting music blog. (via s*xblog)

Beautiful losers and/or good public relations? The German Samsung headquarters are in Schwalbach about 500 meters from our house. Coming back from work in Frankfurt today by car I saw a German flag and a big banner in front of the Samsung building. It said: WM 2002. Glückwunsch Deutschland., in English: World Cup 2002. Congratulations Germany. If there is a football god on Sunday I will write Felicidad Brasil here.

American Analog Set live The concert took place last Thursday night in the small Dreikönigskeller in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen. We had been waiting for almost 1 1/2 hours before the support act Don Lennon, a young singer/songwriter from Boston started around ten o'clock. He sang with a pleasant baritone and articulated the words of his often rather trivial lyrics centering on himself, on parties and girls very well. I thought the song in which he repeated his name in three languages was ingenious as it prevented me from forgetting it as it happens so often to me with support acts. His last song Dance Music was outstanding. He finished it without guitar just humming and making other strange noises with his mouth. That reminded me a little of Bobby McFerrin. Around 11 o'clock the five guys of the American Analog Set from Austin, Texas arrived on stage and started tuning their instruments while Murray Street, Sonic Youth's excellent last album was still playing on the stereo. AAS music is almost purely instrumental, the singing is subordinate, soft and rather high, more like a background effect, the lyrics are quite difficult to understand. Though AAS have existed for more than seven years the guitarist/singer seemed to be very young. He was extremely sympathetic and laid-back. Somehow this guy was so sweet that he radiated sunshine. He even apologized for playing a song they had performed six months ago when they had already been at the same venue. His guitar playing technique is rather economical and careful. At the end when his band already had left the stage he asked if there was a drummer in the audience to continue jamming a little. Of course there wasn't. The drummer was the motor of the music. He provided the frame to fit in for the others. His drumming was very focussed, mostly rather energetic, sometimes more restrained. The peculiar thing about him was that he sticked out his tongue while drumming. I can think of the following adjectives concerning the music: hypnotic, addictive, psychedelic, warm, mellow, serene, tender and tuneful. Many songs are rather minimal and repetitive. Some explose in a small crescendo. Besides drums and guitars there was a bass, keyboards and percussion (often xylophone). I had the impression that the keyboards sometimes played the same notes as the xylophone but with a small delay. The effect was like a kind of echo. During the second half of the concert I often closed my eyes to concentrate and enjoy the music better. The musicians did the same. For one song the guitarist used a black box which he stroke over the strings. The resulting sound was very low and full. Almost symphonic. In another song there was only drums and xylophone. I had difficulties to hear the bass. The bass player always turned his back on us. Overall I loved the concert and bought their singles compilation Through the 90s: Singles and Unreleased after. It seems that they have changed their style slightly on the last record. The keyboards which have been dominating on many older singles have been pushed more into the background whereas the drumming has become more prominent. To me this is like a shift from psychedelic (keyboards) to hypnotic (rhythms). On the other hand it could be that this impression is mainly due to the concert where the drums have been louder than on the records.

• Genre: Drone-pop (due to AMG)
• Similar bands: Yo La Tengo, early Stereolab, Luna (for the singing and mood)
• Mp3s: "The Kindness of Strangers"(3.2 MB) and "The Only One" (2.1 MB) from their latest album Know By Heart and "Weather Report" (2.7 MB) from the album The Golden Band.