Designer Mico Toledo puts various chin-stroking song lyrics in visual form with his weekly project “Music Philosophy.”

[via Flavorwire]

Pleasant, thoughtful mix of stop-motion like type stuff, “live action” and animation from visual artist Brian Alfred with a soundtrack heavy on sound design including Columbia, Missouri’s own Jon Sheffield.

So why no HD version?

Last April I bought “The Spirit of Apollo” by hip-hop project N.A.S.A. on vinyl; purchased only because of the free digital copy provided since I still don’t have my turntable hooked back up.  But naturally, Epitaph, the record’s label, only gave three chances at downloading it on their sub-site — with a unique code and password — and it resulted in error each time while also counting toward my three downloads; so even if it was fixed, my download quota would need to be reset.

I immediately fired off an email to Epitaph.  Yesterday — some nine months later — an Epitaph intern replied with a MediaFile download link of the the album with a live Tom Waits cut tossed in for good measure.  Even if the audio quality of the .mp4 files finally provided should be better, any act like this is a step in the right direction.

“Make the money, make sure the money doesn’t make you. . . Be about something.”

Make the jump if you’d like to be bored with the actual brief email exchange.

4/18/09

Bought the new N.A.S.A on vinyl with a free digital download, but something is wrong with your site and it isn’t wanting to download right now. Could I please have the download. I’ve used all my credits trying to download the damn thing. Nothing.

—unique code—

—unique code’s password—

Thanks,

(Me)

——

2:54 PM

Hey Josh, we at Epitaph would like to apologize for the inconvenience. We have been undergoing technical difficulties we were unaware of and have just come across your email among many others. To make this right please go to the link at the bottom of the email to download the album. Also, if you could please reply to us a mailing address we would love to send you a care pack for your troubles. We sincerely apologize for the length of time this technical error was unnoticed.

Thank you for understanding,

The Epitaph Team

http://mediafilelinkprovided

——

8:55 AM

Wow, thanks. Like the old cliche goes: better late than never. I didn’t ever expect this to happen which makes it all the better, I guess, even if the audio quality should be encoded at a higher rate. Plus a live Tom Waits cut! More acts like this would help restore my appreciation of bigger labels.

UPDATE: Now available to Pre-Order!

Never has this webspace solicited votes for anything.  That changes immediately.

Above the text, black metal guitar god Olaf Thundarsson beckons you to immortalize him in an action figure toy.  Olaf — the brainchild of my pal Phil Balsman, aka Ballsy Balsman – needs more votes before embarking on the path to toyhood.

See, designers submit (toy) concepts to PatchTogether.com.  With enough votes and attention the design garners ON DEMAND status.  Willing consumers then place pre-orders.  After sufficient pre-orders, Patch Together prototypes and produces Olaf.

But now, Mr. Thundarsson demands only mouse clicking, roughly two minutes, a 1-5 rating and very few words of your choosing.

Olaf will become a real toy when you use your power to vote for him now.

So some musical “outfit” — C-Mon & Kypski perhaps? — are soliciting the help of anyone with a webcam to help “finish” their new music video.

It seems fairly straightforward: visit oneframeoffame.com; a frame from the video is provided; YOU copy it — mimic what you see, and, ahem, strike a pose — with your webcam.

Someone (or something) takes your fresh webcam image and adds it to the work-in-progress video that is supposedly updated every hour.

Nothing particularly striking about the song, but this video creation method is cool enough.

Nearly A Nerd welcomes web programmer and enthusiastic new Droid owner Joel Doetsch who’s also blogged his favorite Android apps.

So, sick and tired of all the iPhone hype, you took it upon yourself to go out and buy a Droid today. Maybe you were ready to break into the ever expanding smart-phone market, maybe your friends were all laughing at your LG8300. Whatever the case may be, you now have a Droid. It’s sleek, it’s powerful, and…the ringtones are godawful.

In the old days, one would either pay the exorbitant amount of $1.99 for a new ringtone from an app store, or go the more tech-savvy route and install bitpim and illegally force your own ringtones onto it. Either way, the issue was solved. You can’t do that with the Droid. I know, you’re probably questioning that $200 purchase now. I mean sure it has a free GPS with turn by turn directions, but what’s that worth if I can’t even listen to my favorite Miley Cyrus song every time someone calls me?

Well fret no more. Here are the simple instructions for getting all your crazy ringtones onto your phone.

First, we prepare the phone.

The Droid comes with a 16GB SD card already installed. It should also come with a USB cable. You’ll want to attach it to your computer and to the Droid. If you can’t figure out which end goes where, please contact your nearest tech savvy friend.

From the Droid, at the top of the screen you’ll see the USB connector icon. If you pull that down on the touch-screen you’ll get a box called “USB Connected”. If you then click that box, you’ll get the option to “Mount” (you’re a dirty person by the way). Hit that, and now you’re connected to your PC.

In your PC, go to “My Computer” and you’ll see a Removable Disk. If you click on that, there will be a number of files and folders already on the SD Card. Create these folders if they aren’t already there

Create a folder called media inside that folder create another folder called audio

Finally, inside that folder create 3 more folders:
ringtones
notifications
alarms

Those 3 folders will take care of all the different types of ringtones you’ll need on your fancy phone.

So now your phone is prepared to take in music, now how do you get it there?

Go to the marketplace and download an app called Ringdroid. This is an application that allows you to cut pieces of an mp3 out for use as a ringtone. It’s also free as of this writing. Also useful would be to download an application called Astro, which is a file manager. But it’s not completely necessary

Once you’ve done that, take your Miley mp3 and copy it into the main SD Card directory (what you saw when you first opened the removable disk). Use windows “safely remove hardware” button to unhook your USB and then turn off the USB on your phone the same way you turned it on.

Open the Ringdroid app, and select your song. From there it’s basically straightforward. Pick the start and stop points, and hit save. You can also delete the original mp3 from the top directory to save space. Rinse and repeat for any other In my experiences, it’s automatically saved it in my ringtones directory. If that’s what you were going for, then stop. You’re done. Congratulations!

If you want it in a different directory you can either

A) Reconnect your USB, go to the ringtones directory you created earlier, cut and paste the file into the directory you want it to go into (notifications or alarms)

or

B) Use the Astro file manager to do the same thing. It’s a fairly intuitive program, so I won’t get into the details of that. If you can’t get it to work, you’d best go with option A.

I hope I have enlightened, entertained, and otherwise enamored you with my instructions. Have fun, but don’t hold me responsible when your co-workers beat you within an inch of your life for having “The Safety Dance” constantly play when you’re called.

-Joel Doetsch

A mention of Future Perfect Radio made the new issue of Wired magazine.  Future Perfect Radio is newish web radio featuring over 25 channels of independent music — everything from singer/songwriters to far out experimental and noise rock.  And stations dedicated to upcoming music festivals add a particular uniqueness.

The past couple of days I’ve been listening to my fair share of mainly three of four of its channels.  The programming is pretty damn good which is the most important factor.

Where Future Perfect Radio gets it wrong is in deployment and distribution — basically how you can listen.  As far as I know, you must visit the site and launch a pop-up player.  The ability to block an artist on the site’s player is a plus, but why no iTunes integration?  Why no option to embed?  I want to be able to listen in a variety of ways.  Allowing multiple listening methods would only expand Future Perfect Radio’s span, scope and listenership.

This  is a video performance by Dan Deacon at Todd P’s (which I think is in NYC).  It comes from NOISEVOX who say of themselves:

NOISEVOX is an open music magazine and media network created by journalists, photographers, musicians, and you.

Not much other self-referential information can be found out on noisevox.org.

NOISEVOX has artist interviews or performances or both, including those by:

• The Thermals
• Animal Collective
• Moby
• The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
• Crocodiles
• Dan Deacon
• Japandroids
• Here We Go Magic
• Arctic Monkeys
• Hymns
• Health

(Former) MTV music journalist John Norris — who never seems to age — appears to host and conduct the interviews for the time being.

Techcrunch recently posted a post about music sites called “Your Guide to Music on the Web — Part 1“.  Here are the sites it includes:

• Pandora
• Last.fm
• Deezer
• Finetune
• Amie Street
• Jamendo
• SoundCloud
• TheSixtyOne
• Project Playlist
• Jiwa.fm
• Jogli
• MixTube
• Lala
• Musicovery
• CitySounds.fm
• Jango
• RadioBeta
• TheRadio
• Aupeo
• Tun3r
• Play.fm

Some of the sites/services are very similar and some are naturally better than others, but all are worth briefly checking  if you admire tuneage.  Or you can read the TechCrunch article if you’d like a description/write up on each.

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “Run Run Run” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

• Beck covers the Velvet Underground & Nico album in one day. (via Brain Pickings)

• The NIH sets a goal to complete a region-to-region map of the brain in five years by encouraging collaboration among neuroscientists.