It's Not Me, It's You: Breaking Up With Your Favorite Band~NPR

I thought this was a great list and I had to repost it from All Songs Considered...

On this week's All Songs Considered, we head to Splitsville with a look at some of the bands we've broken up with or grown apart from over the years, along with some of the artists we'll stand by no matter what.
While going through my music library to prepare for the show, I found that a lot of my relationships with bands are more complicated than a simple breakup or reconciliation. So I came up with a short list of sub-categories. Take a look and tell us your own picks for each one:
 
1. Band You Really Thought You Had Something With — They Said They'd Call But You Never Heard From Them Again
This is a relationship that never quite gets off the ground. It's over before it's begun. For me, this is Neutral Milk Hotel or My Bloody Valentine. They put out an amazing record, you get excited about the great life you're going to have together, but then you never hear from them again. What happened? Was it something I said?

2. Your Best Friend's Girlfriend Or Boyfriend You Secretly Want To Hook Up With
I see all my friends with My Morning Jacket, and I think, "I so want to hook up with My Morning Jacket!" They make loving My Morning Jacket look so awesome. Then we finally get together and it's a total disappointment. Basically, it's bands you want to love because everyone else you respect loves them, but it's never what you thought it'd be.
3. The Rebound: Bands You Start To Date After Everyone Else Is Through With Them
When early Weezer fans broke up with the band (around the time Make Believe came out, or possibly sooner), you know there was a whole new group of fans that discovered them for the first time. Early Radiohead fans broke up with the band when OK Computer or Kid A came out, but that's when I started to love them.

4. Band You Broke Up With, Then Got Back Together
I broke up with R.E.M. about 10 years ago when the band released Reveal. I never thought we'd get back together. But then R.E.M. released this year's Collapse Into Now and I found myself falling back in love. I broke up with Bright Eyes for a few years, but then the band returned this year with one of the most amazing albums I've ever heard (The People's Key), and I was head-over-heels in love again.

5. Band That Broke Up With You
This is a band that says it's done with you before you're ready to end it. I really thought The White Stripes and I would spend the rest of our lives together. Then, a couple of months ago, the band told me it was ready to move on. I'm still heartbroken over the breakup.

The original post.

Yann Tiersen on Valentine's Day

Tonight we're heading to the best local music venue Cat's Cradle so musician Yann Tiersen can serenade us into a lovey-dovey stupor. I adore the French film Amelie and wouldn't you know that this fine garçon composed the soundtrack. I can't wait! I'll post photos later.

Oh how I do love Valentine's Day...

Steampunk NC

Has anyone ever heard of the term "Steampunk" before? Because I haven't, and certainly not before coming to NC.
According to Wikipedia, Steampunk is a branch of science fiction that centers around steam-powered Victorian England and where technological innovation as the Victorians would have envisioned is at it's core. We're talking alternative universes where machine and man were both decked out in 18th English garb and could time travel or venture to the center of the earth, a la Jules Verne. I think "imaginary flying machines, goggles, and corsets" sums it up just fine.

Steampunk Gallery:
City Of Lost Children kick-ass French film
The Clockwork Cabaret weekly podcast

The Affinity Bridge novel

Vegetable Orchestra

A group of Vienna based musicians created an alternative orchestra in 1998, composed of musical instruments made out of fresh vegetables; they call themselves the Vegetable Orchestra.  That's pretty cool in my book.

Hope For Agoldensummer

When I was in college several years ago I saw this band in a very small rec center on campus.  The Athens, Georgia band, Hope For Agoldensummer, rocked my world and I bought their cd that night.  I'm sure they've produced many more albums in the six years since, but I Bought A Heart Made Of Art In The Deep, Deep South has still got to be one of my all-time favorites.

My favorite song on the album:
Download 12 Laying Down The Gun.m4a from FileFactory.com

Ramona Falls

Ramona Falls "I Say Fever" from Barsuk Records on Vimeo.

Ramona Falls "I Say Fever"

Brent Knof's solo project away from Menomena. Directed by Stefan Nadelman.

Mammy Rock

Ruth Flowers is not your average DJ. Coming up to her 70th birthday, when many are well settled into retirement, the grandmother from Bristol has become an international sensation, in demand in clubs throughout Europe.

With spiky silver hair and scarlet lipstick, gold bomber jacket, baggy tracksuit bottoms, bling jewellery, and trademark giant black sunglasses, Flowers plays down the new-found fame of her twilight years.

"I'm not a superstar DJ," she said, before donning her diamante-encrusted headphones and starting her set. "I'm just a DJ."

Mamy Rock, as she is known on the circuit, came to the wheels of steel later than most. She fell in love with dance music after accompanying her grandson to a London nightclub.

"The bouncers didn't want to let me in at first, I was quite a lot older than the usual clientele, but once I got inside I hugely enjoyed it. I thought 'I can do this.' My husband had died, I was retired, I had the time, so why not?"

Entire article can be read at Guardian UK

How wonderful is this?!  She reminds me of the rapping grandma from The Wedding Singer.

I just found some more styled photos of Mammy Rock on Advanced Style.

Les Triplettes De Belleville

Several years ago I got into the habit of requesting friends and acquaintances to make me a mixed tape of their favorite songs.  I had the idea that this excersize would be the musical equilvalent to looking through their trash--a very telling way to get to know someone in a flash with a bi-product of enhancing my musical library 10-fold.

This is how I discovered M.  A French musican who is hugely popular among coissants and brie but who is virtually unknown in our land of milkshakes and hamburgers.  He even worked on the soundtrack for The Triplettes of Belleville which leans heavily on the gypsy swing music of Django Rheinhardt with a super cute music video.


In fact, I quite like French music.  I like world music in general because when the words are in a language I can't understand, I focus on the music as a whole while the voice becomes simply another instrument and less a vehicle for some deeper message.  However, of all world music, French is my favorite.

Jacques Dutronc-Les Cactus (1967)

This American Life

  

I love This American Life.  Words cannot express how much I adore the idiosyncratic stories that make up the hour-long radio show.  It often comes up in dinner conversation by saying, "I was listening to This American Life the other day and I heard that..."  There's one episode in particular that I just love called Numbers.

"Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want. It turned out to be a landscape, with a mountain and a lake, and deer, and a family, and George Washington. Then they applied these techniques to music, with composer David Soldier. They surveyed audiences about what kind of instruments and topics they liked most in their songs. Then they produced one song based on what people most want to hear—and one song based on what they hate the most. The one people hate includes bagpipes, children singing, lyrics about holidays and religion, wild volume and tempo changes."

The thing about both experiments is that the artwork resulting from what people want is completely weak and uninteresting; like a Thomas Kinkaid painting.  However, the painting and song that were created out of everything that annoys people ended up being different and amazing.  You can go to Melamid and Komar's website and buy the songs or you can listen to the streaming episode for free.

The experiment reminds me of an ancient Greek sculptor that allowed fellow Grecians to critique his sculpture of an ideal feminine beauty and he would make changes as requested.  The resulting sculpture was considered grotesque.

It also reminds me of a contemporary French performance artist named Orlan who has been undergoing multiple plastic surgeries to combine the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, nose of Jean-Leon Gerome's Psyche, lips of Francois Boucher's Europa, eyes of French School of Fountainbleau's Diana, and the forehead of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.  Entitled The Reincarnation Of Saint Orlan, the project began in 1990 to morph herself into an ideal beauty as suggested by men who paint woman.  She even makes the act of plastic surgery into performance art by staying awake and reciting poetry while filming the procedure. A few stills of the operations can be seen on her website.  I love her.  She's extreme but fascinating.  By combining all of these various elements of feminine beauty she's making herself look rather disturbing, but in a very feminist way...there's lots of articles about the whole thing.

Darwin As An Opera

Swedish rock group The Knife, who's Heartbeats was repopularized by Jose Gonzalez, has recently gone is a wholly new direction.  They've been commissioned by Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma to write the music for their opera based on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species.  In collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, they will release the studio version of the opera entitled Tomorrow, In A Year, on March 1, 2010.  A streaming version of "Colouring Of Pigeons" can be heard here.