Christmas and new years is over and I just came back from a crazy week in Sweden with nothing to show for it apart from a three day fever I came down with as soon as I got back to London. Three days in bed means three days wasted if you ask me, but at least I kept my head clear enough to crawl to the laptop, push play on winamp and make it back to bed again. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry for the lack of updates and I haven’t given up listening to music!
So, here’s one of my favorite producers, The Bulgarian. He’s got a quite identifiable crazy fidgety house sound, yet every one of his tracks seems so different from each other. Not sure how that works really, you better just listen for yourselves. Disfunktional Caterpillar is an all time favorite and the first of his tracks I heard. The bassline kills it!
Being of the 8-bit generation I really love the retro chip music sound. I used to make chip tunes when I was still making music on trackers, but my tracks were nothing like the craziness they’re coming up with today. A few years ago I went to a club in Stockholm where they had a guy playing live on gameboys and some other retro 8-bit looking systems. Had a blast just sitting down and watching computer nerds dance next to trendy pop chicks, finding some common ground in the low-fi 8-bit music coming from the speakers. I have to go back next time I’m over there..
Bubblyfish creates her music mainly using gameboys with the nanoloop software, although in some of her tracks she’s adding effects and using a “real” sampler. I have no idea what the track at 08:30 in the video is called but I like it. And check out her sweet dreams remix at 05:15, or on her myspace.
The only problem with trying to find chip music online without really knowing what to look for is that there’s so much of it! But this is some quality 8-bit madness from Atari-ST music collective dropdabomb. These two are from stu and you really should listen to more of his stuff on his site, his myspace or on the buy page for his Atari Solo album on retinascan. I especially love the those low bitrate samples and the small glitchy bits in chiprape.
Here’s a quite bizarre research paper by Philip Maymin on how the beat variance (not the average beats per minute) of US Billboard top 100 songs for any given year relates to the US stock market. Even though he doesn’t establish if the mood of the public affects the type of songs they purchase or if the mood of the public comes from the music, I can make an estimated guess that people buy the music they feel like listening to.
I compare the annual average beat variance of the songs in the US Billboard Top 100 since its inception in 1958 through 2007 to the standard deviation of returns of the S&P 500 for the same year and find that they are significantly negatively correlated. With the recent high stock volatility, people should now prefer less volatile music. Furthermore, the beat variance appears able to predict future market volatility, producing 2.5 volatility points of profit per year on average.
Philip predicts the songs on the US charts for 2008 and 2009:
With the current high volatility environment, we should expect the 2008
year-end popular songs to be less musically volatile than prior years. Given the
average beat variance of the year-end chart-toppers to be released soon, we will
also be able to predict the market volatility for 2009.
I’d be more interested in a research paper on the emergence of new musical genres and how the sound of those genres are linked to the financial climate of that period. Surely someone must have writtensomething about that already?
I can’t say I love hip-hop but I did buy Eminem’s 1999 album “The Slim Shady LP” and so I’m giving this a listen anyway. The later albums haven’t been very interesting but maybe a low-fi bootlegged mixtape is just what I need to get back in to it. Not sure how “official” this is since most of the tracks except for one are old, but hey, it’s Eminem so it’s worth a shot even if it isn’t “official”.
01 Intro
02 In This Game feat Notorious Big
03 Monkeyz
04 Soldier (Remix) feat G-Unit
05 Till I Collapse (Remix) (Exclu) feat 50 Cent & 2pac
06 The What feat Method Man Royce Da 59 & Dj Clue
07 Ill Hit Em Up (Exclu) feat D-12
08 Touchdown feat T.i
09 Drug Ballad (Exclu)
10 Square Dance
11 Low Down Dirty (Exclu)
12 Bodyguard feat Dr Dre & Obie Trice
13 We Came 2 Party (Exclu) feat 40 Glocc & Jayo Felony
14 Dead Wrong feat Notorious Big
15 If I Get Locked Up Tonight feat Dr Dre
16 Peep Show feat 50 Cent
17 Hands On You feat Obie Trice
18 Jimmy Crack Corn feat 50 Cent
19 Im Having A Relapse (New Single)
This guy is as crazy as he is entertaining. He’s playing in Camden tomorrow together with Simian Mobile Disco, which I’m unfortunately missing because I’m going to see Avenue Q instead.