Gaming, Music, The Internet, Whatever….

One of my favourite sites of the year has arguably been SoundCloud, one of the ever growing number of “targeted” networking sites. Where as the quite well known YouTube and slightly less well known Vimeo deals with video and it’s various forms, SoundCloud deals with Music but as opposed to the likes of Spotify or Last.fm that help established artists, SoundCloud is there for some of the more “experimental” or “legally dubious” pieces that 20 years ago would have been passed on White Label vinyls or 10 years ago on unmarked CD-Rs.

There are many, many well known electronic artists on there and my current personal favourite is West Country legend, legally denied Jedi Knight and all round genius Tom Middleton who’s uploaded many of his remixes, both official and unofficial to the site. But two of my favourite pieces up on the site at the moment are at both ends of the musical spectrum and show just how much variety there is on the site.

First up is something done by my friend Tim Maughan over at his eponymous site Tim Maughan Books. Here he’s done a mix under his pseudonym Shinohara Heavy Industries, which I’m sure is a reference to a particular company from an Anime. Better ask him, he’s the expert after all, something you’ll realise after a visit to his site. He’s put together a deep house techno mix with just a hint of minimal here and there, so gets a solid thumbs up from me.

Girls and Mechs and 909s – Part 1 by Shinohara H-Industries

The second one is perhaps slightly more well known in that it’s been linked by every man and his dog on Twitter but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of even more exposure.

Here’s a thought. What if we took this guy and slowed him down to 1/8th of the speed so that one of his songs took 35 minutes to play? Would sound awful, no? Surprisingly not. The whole track was stretched using a program called PaulStretch, something that was used to create the 9 Beet Stretch project, one which played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony stretched out over a 24 hour period. Which I’ve heard and is an odd experience, I can tell you. This however, is beautiful and just about the right length.

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

The bit around the 21 minute mark pretty much stopped me in my tracks. Well, it would have if I hadn’t been sitting down but it’s still pretty epic.

So there we are. A wide world of music out there and all of it free to listen without adverts. One in the eye for Spotify I think. And Mr. Tim Maughan shares a blog post with that Beiber Boy. He’ll be so thrilled.

Probably.

Making jokes about there still being music vids on MTV is kind of old hat, a bit like making jokes about how almost all the things in Ironic by Alanis Morisette aren’t actually ironic (though that hasn’t stopped Ed Byrne but still.) Anyway, while browsing said music channels I stumbled across the video below. At first, I couldn’t actually believe that it was for real. But it sadly is.

I like to put this video in the same bracket as 2Girls1Cup; see how long you can stand of it before you have to turn it off. And I’m really looking forward to seeing the Analytics for who comes to site after entering 2girls1cup and Justin Bieber….

Despite it’s clear awfulness, and me being me, I just needed to know who this kid was so if there was even the slightest chance I could hear any of his music again I could turn it off ASAP. So, let’s get the basics out of the way first.

Justin Drew Bieber (is a Canadian pop/R&B singer.

Oh, that explains a lot. A CANADIAN R&B singer. Following on from the great, errm, thingy. Who of course followed on from, errm, the world famous someone or other. Seriously. He’s a Canadian doing R&B music. Don’t really need to add much more than that, do I? Ok, maybe I do.

He began his professional career on YouTube, where he was discovered by his future manager, Scooter Braun.

Yes, I’m sure as a twelve year old posting videos of himself on YouTube he had lots of people offering to manage his “music career”. That and come round to offer him Werthers Originals and look at the new puppies he got the other day.

Braun flew Bieber to Atlanta, Georgia, to consult with Usher and soon signed a record deal with Island.

That’s right ladies and gentleman, the great label that gave us U2, Grace Jones, The Orb, DJ Shadow and many, many, many others is now reduced to offering us 15 Year old Canadians doing R&B produced by Usher. How the mighty and so on. Now, before I get lots of angry comments from tweenagers complaining that I’m missing the point (something I learnt last year when a certain reality TV personality became ill and later died) I should add that his Wikipedia entry claims that “he taught himself how to play the piano, drums, guitar, and trumpet” which is a hell of a lot more than I could play at his age (the recorder notwithstanding) and it’s obvious from this vid that he can play the guitar a lot better than I can.

It’s just sad to see someone who clearly has a talent having it wasted doing fuck awful R&B, even more so when he’s clearly one of the whitest CANADIAN teenagers I’ve ever seen. Not that I have seen alot of them but you get my drift. I guess the gist of this post has turned from an angry rant about the state of music and more to a rant in the way the music industry loves to take genuine talent and set about fucking it up. The kid can clearly play so let him, rather than wasting it on committee produced R&B that makes him more Vanilla Ice than JT.

God I’m old.