This is beautiful example of art rebelling against technology.

(via: A Welsh View)

This is an amazing video of a showdown between DJ Kentaro and the superstar shamisen player Kinoshita Shinichi from a 2003 episode of the Japanese television show Live Jam.

(via Digg)

Recently I’ve taken a break from peaceful Classical and Minimalist music to geek out with some terrible, noisy, intentionally bad, electronic music. Three bands that I’ve really been digging lately are Captain Ahab, Quintron, and TTC. Christine and I heard all these groups first on KALX.

Captain Ahab is a humorous, obscene, electro-pop band from Los Angeles. Throughout the years a few select pieces of music have captured the essence of their eras. Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos” in the 1700s, Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” in the 1930s, but no song captures the cultural spirit of the modern day quite like Captain Ahab’s song “Girls Gone Wild”. It lays down some awesomely cheesy, high energy techno under an ultra processed vocal track of the singer describing what might be going on in the head of a young lady who is appearing in a Girls Gone Wild video. This song made a brief appearance on the TV show “The Office” and Captain Ahab also gained some popularity by winning a contest to get on the soundtrack for the recent cinematic masterpiece: “Snakes on a Plane” with a song called “Snakes on the Brain” done in the style of the grand, gothic, industrial music that I used to seriously boogie to back in the 1990s. You can hear some of their songs on the Captain Ahab MySpace page or watch videos and look at pictures on the official Captain Ahab web site, but keep in mind these guys like to get nude on stage and spit milk on each other, so some of the stuff may not be “work-safe”, unless (of course) your coworkers are into that kind of thing.

Mr. Quintron is a German born, New Orleans based, organ player and music equipment inventor who plays songs with a mix of funky organs, Casio rhythms, bizarre sound effects, and lots of screaming. I picked up his recent “Jamskate” EP with its title track that sounds like John Spencer and Ric Ocasek got liquored up and took over the organ booth at a hockey game. It’s incredibly awesome. The album also has a strange skit with what sounds like a CB conversation about a plot steal a Madri Gras float in Mobile, Alabama and drive it down to New Orleans, leaving all of the donkies unconscious and unharmed. Quintron often does concerts with his wife a puppeteer and musician who goes by the name Miss Pussycat. They have a series of powerfully strange, puppet videos called Trixie and the Treetrunks. You can read more on the Mr. Quintron Wikipedia page or on the official Mr. Quintron & Miss Pussycat site.

TTC is a humorous hip-hop and synthesizer group from Paris, France. Their vocals are (of course) in French and oscillate between smooth, faux-romantic rapping and shrill yelling, while the music is full of solid, funky, 1980s drum machine beats and squawky synthesizers. I was able to find a copy of the latest album “3615″ at Amoeba in Berkeley. It’s a great batch of songs, ranging in style from the catchy quirky rap of Digital Underground, cheesy rave sounds of the Smart E’s, the smoothness of Big Daddy Kane, and the euro-pop of Flock of Seagulls. Check out the In Bed with TTC MySpace page to experience their awesomeness. I haven’t read much on them since most of the stuff written on them isn’t in English, but if you watch the video for “Téléphone”, you’ll get the idea pretty quickly.

I’ve been playing with Last.fm for a few months now. It’s an online service that tracks the music that you listen to and then suggests new music that you might like. When I first signed up it was constantly suggesting alternative rock that usually made me cringe, but I feel like I’ve now been feeding it information long enough that it’s actually starting to understand what I like. You can see what I’ve been listening to on my profile page at last.fm/user/markcelsor. You can also listen to a streaming radio station of music that I like (or that I mathematically should like) with this cool little widget on the right.

I came across the full video for “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes. I loved this song and the video when I was a younger but I don’t remember ever seeing the first two minutes of the video. MTV probably trimmed it down to keep people’s attention. The first two minutes are definitely an important part of the narrative. Without them it makes… uhm… no sense at all.

(via Boing Boing)

If you have some pent up frustrations about iPhones, sit back, relax with the iPhone video from the Will It Blend folks.