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z=z at Tourfilter Night, River Gods, Cambridge

April 13, 2010

In the Boston area? Join us at River Gods in Central Square, Cambridge, on Thursday night (April 15th, 9-11 pm) for an evening of music chosen by yours truly. It’s for this month’s Tourfilter Night – on the third Thursday each month, the amazingly useful concert site hosts an evening of music from bands that have upcoming shows in Boston. Chris Marstall, the man behind Tourfilter, graciously invited me to be the guest DJ this week.  There are tons of amazing bands coming to Boston in the next few months, so I’ll get to play lots of fantastic songs. If you’re within range, please join us! And stay tuned – I’ll post my playlist after the set.

Image: River Gods by brixton, used here under its Creative Commons license.

Posted in Concerts, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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Watch: The Heart Is A Drum Machine

March 29, 2010

What is music?

That’s the central question behind The Heart is a Drum Machine, a feature-length documentary from Lightyear Entertainment (Moog). It’s addressed by a host of interviewees, mostly musicians, with a sound engineer, a couple of scientists, and an author thrown in for color. A discussion of the Voyager Golden Record project bookends the film, in which the creative director on the project, Ann Druyan, talks about the universality of music to humanity, and the hope that it would prove to be able to communicate beyond our species:  “Hey, that’s a cool planet – they’re making some good music.”

The musicians vary widely in how articulate they are about music, with Wayne Coyne, predictably, at the high end, and Isaac Brock at the low—to be fair, musicians have a whole other vocabulary that they use to answer that question every day. And I never, ever want to hear someone unironically use the word ‘synergize’ with reference to art (I’m looking at you, Juliette Lewis). But many of the interviewees are engaging, funny or thought-provoking. One of the more interesting segments in the film is on deaf musicians, who ‘hear’ the music through physical vibrations alone (the short discussion on how they can tell they’re in tune is fascinating).

As a film, it focuses on presenting multiple facets of the experience of music, so it doesn’t really strongly develop an overall theme. But the individual pieces are mostly intriguing, and at a very brief 73 minutes, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Amazon Netflix

Posted in Uncategorized, Watch | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments »

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Off-topic: Ada Lovelace Day post (kind of)

March 24, 2010

Cambridge-based Science Club for Girls asked a number of women who work in science and technology, including me, to write a letter to our younger selves as part of their celebration of Women’s History Month. Inspired by picking up a soldering iron for the first time in years and making an Atari Punk Console at Music Hack Day last fall, I wrote the following to my 13-year-old self (who, yes, is the dorky kid in the picture), in the summer before I started high school. Note the postscript, which references the first album I remember actively acquiring.

Dear Debbie:

It’s cold and bright here in Boston, and I’m sure it’s hot and bright where you are. Right now, you’re taking Grade 9 math (or, as I’ve learned to say now that I live in the US, 9th grade math) in summer school, before you start high school, so you can get ahead in your math requirements.  It’s a good place to start.

You’ve registered to take auto shop and electrical shop at your new school in the fall. I hate to say this, but the classes are kind of going to suck. You’ll be the only girl in both, and the boys are going to give you a hard time, and the teachers aren’t going to notice or care. And someone is going to steal your notes right before the electrical shop exam. (Don’t worry – you’ll do fine. Just make sure you check your math!).

It’s not going to be the best of experiences, but I want you to hold onto how much you love making stuff. Remember when you were really little, and you spent all your time in the basement with LEGO, Tinker Toys, and puzzles? I know that your favorite free-time activity these days is reading, but I want to encourage you to keep finding ways to create things. Keep writing programs for your Apple IIe. Ask our parents for some of the new LEGO Technic. Look in the phone book for a place to buy model rocketry stuff. Setting off explosions kind of scares you, yes. But I also know that you can do things that scare you – that’s why you learned how to weld in metal shop last year, right?

Because here’s the thing: you’re good at math and physics. Yes, I know you haven’t done any physics yet – I promise you, you’re good at it. And that’ll get you really far – through college (whoops, that’s ‘university’ to you) and graduate school. But no one is really going to give you many opportunities to build things, and you’ll really want to, trust me. There’s a distinctive pleasure to holding something that you’ve made, and you’ll get a tremendous confidence boost from it – it’s the difference between, “I’m not sure,” and “Of course I can.” Figuring out how to solve a physics problem is one thing; figuring out how to put something together is quite another. You’ll get lots of practice with the first, but you’ll need to make your own experiences with the second.

So go out there and start making things. And keep making things.

But let me tell you – the future is pretty awesome. Just one example: you know that new Apple Macintosh computer that Ms. Hamilton, the librarian, got this year to catalog the library? And how cool it was compared to all the Apple IIs in the computer lab? You will not believe what I’m holding in my hand right now…

Much love from the 21st century,

Deb

PS: Can I ask you a favor? David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the LP that you have? Would you mind hanging on to it? Your future self thanks you.

[cross-posted from here]

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Lady Gaga vs other artists: a graph

March 22, 2010

It’s conventional wisdom that songs need to be heard 5-7 times before they ‘register’ on the listener (hence the motivation for payola).

Thanks to, and commiseration with, Mark, who helped inspire this graph.

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Mobile collaborative playlisting (a prototype)

March 19, 2010

One of my colleagues at Olin College, Mark Chang, teaches a course on Mobile Applications Development. Instead of a midterm exam, he runs a design contest. We invited Paul Lamere of Echo Nest to campus to talk about their APIs, and Mark’s students had ten days to build an app for the Android that used those tools – kind of like Music Hack Day. Mark was kind enough to ask me to be a judge, so I got to see all the great prototypes they came up with.

While all of the apps were excellent, the one that I thought had the most interesting concept was the DJMixr (by students Miguel Bejar, Rhan Kim, Hyeontaek Oh, and Poorva Singal), an app to make a collaborative playlist for a party. The app would allow guests to add songs to the playlist directly, and also would scrobble song information from the phone’s music player (it would be backed with a streaming on-demand music player, so it would only transfer the song information, not the songs themselves). The Echo Nest back end would be used to interpolate recommendations based on the seed songs, in order to allow smooth transitions between songs to avoid musical whiplash.

While this app is just a prototype, of course, one of the things I find intriguing about this is that it’s a different social model for the music at a party. Rather than having one person be responsible, or at best having people wandering over to a laptop between drinks to maybe add a song or two or change the Pandora station, an application like this would make it possible to have a truly collaboratively generated soundtrack to an event. It seems like there would be some interesting emergent behaviors, like maybe a metastable equilibrium between music for the people who want to dance and those dedicated to indie rock. What do you think?

Posted in future of music, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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Lyrics: how important are they to you?

March 11, 2010

How integral are lyrics to your experience of music? Do you just hear the music unless you are consciously listening for the lyrics? Do you always reach for a lyrics sheet when you get a new album?

After a recent post, in which I discussed the emotional effect of music and lyrics, I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve said, “I don’t really notice the words.” One of my friends remarked that he can’t be trusted to make mix CDs for people who do notice lyrics, like his wife, since he’ll inadvertently include songs on wildly inappropriate topics. I’m in the other camp; for example, I generally prefer instrumentals in techno or electronica, because any words are usually considered as a musical element. Since the meaning itself is usually secondary, they tend to be, for me, distractingly inane.

But this made me wonder: what proportion of people are in each camp? Do you notice and pay attention to the lyrics? Or do you not generally notice them?

So I hereby present a highly unscientific poll:

Feel free to amplify your response in the comments.

MP3: Matias Aguayo – Minimal (DJ Koze Radio Edit)

Image: “Singing some Mendelsson tonight:” by Flickr user brownpau, reposted here under its Creative Commons license.

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Music infographics: two sets to explore

February 27, 2010

Visualizing the Beatles: Graphic designer Michael Deal is heading up a collaborative project of Beatles-related infographics, Charting the Beatles. Some stunning examples are on his site (the one above, for example, is a visualization of the keys of songs in Revolver; click here for the full graphic and key) and many more, in a wide array of styles, can be found at the Flickr group. [via Visualizing Music, which you should be reading if this stuff turns you on.]

Sample Maps: Author and musician Ethan Hein is currently writing a book titled Cold Technology, Hot Beats: The Soul of Electronic Music. As part of this project, he’s been preparing ‘sample maps,’ graphics that show the relationships between songs and artists via samples (the one above is for Bjork – click for a larger version – and you can see the full set here).

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Music and mood

February 20, 2010

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen this tweet about a week ago:

Warning: Listening to @TheMagFields‘ “All the Umbrellas” can induce psychosomatic cardiac fracture, even in asymptomatic individuals.

followed a day or so later by this:

I am declaring a temporary moratorium on the Magnetic Fields, the National, and the Mountain Goats for the sake of my emotional health.

One of the reasons why I love pop music is the perfect fusion of lyrics and music to create an enormous emotional impact. And these three artists are absolute masters: the cello strokes underlining the chorus in the aforementioned “All the Umbrellas in London,” the way John Darnielle’s voice reaches for and breaks on the high notes in “Woke Up New,” the world-weary timbre of Matt Berninger’s baritone in “Slow Show.” But my decision to take a break from three of my favourite artists was prompted by these words by that other aficionado of the three-minute pop song, Nick Hornby:

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

(Some of you may remember this as the opening soliloquy in the film version of High Fidelity.)

I decided that, much as I love these three artists, I was on track to test out that second hypothesis. And I figured it wasn’t the kind of experiment that would get ethical approval.

In terms of music and mood (‘affect regulation’), there are two general approaches: to listen to music that aligns with your mood, or to listen to music to distract you or change your mood. There’s some evidence of gender differences: women may be more likely to listen to music that allows them to focus on their negative mood, while men may be more likely to choose music that lets them overcome it.  But it doesn’t seem to be terribly well-understood right now. A new iPhone app, MoodAgent, classifies your music and allows you to create playlists based on mood. It’s only been out for a month or so, and already a psychology professor has announced that he’s planning on using it as a tool to examine these relationships between music and emotions.

(focus) MP3: The Magnetic Fields – All the Umbrellas in London [buy]

(distraction) MP3: Mission of Burma – 1, 2 ,3, Partyy! [buy]

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Why do we love the songs that we love?

February 9, 2010

I love the movie Zero Effect. I’d recommend it to you, but I’m not sure you’d like it. It’s not the best movie out there, but something about it just speaks to me.  It’s my favourite example of how my regard for something has both a component that is a recognition of technical proficiency (how good something is—in the case of Zero Effect, Jake Kasdan‘s debut feature film, decent but not amazing) and a component that’s just, well, how much I like it.

I thought of this film recently as I got sucked into the exercise of creating  a list of my hypothetical personal top 20 songs (I say ‘hypothetical’ because  I don’t know how many will end up in the list. I’m not a listmaker by nature; I’m always impressed by the singlemindedness of someone like John Peel, who can say “This is my favourite song ever.“) Collating the songs I loved turned out to be an interesting exercise because of, not to be overly solipsistic,  what it says about myself. I’m incredibly lyrics-focused (if you’re reading this, that presumably comes as no surprise) but I was also struck by how all of the songs engendered such a strong emotional response from me.

With an essentially infinite number of songs out there, what distinguishes the ones we love from those that we merely like? I suspect that, for most of us, it’s not going to be the technical proficiency. It’s going to be the songs that just speak to us, that resonate with us emotionally. Since we all have different personalities and experiences, we’re necessarily going to have highly idiosyncratic and individualized response to music.

If emotional resonance is a significant factor in how we feel about a given piece of music, then how we get exposed to new music is likely to affect how much we like it. Think about the music in these situations:

  • something you hear on the PA in a store
  • a new song that comes up on your Pandora station
  • an artist you check out based on a positive review
  • an album recommended by a trusted friend
  • a mix CD made for you by a new lover

It’s pretty easy to surmise that the latter few situations will give the music in question a big boost on the emotional resonance front.

What do you think? Why are your favourite songs your favourite songs?

MP3: The Undertones – Teenage Kicks [buy]

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Crowdsourcing the “I Hate [City]” playlist

February 3, 2010

Despite being dedicated urban dwellers, a couple of my friends and I started talking about songs that express an antipathy toward cities; in particular, songs that expressed a dislike for a specific city. We have a starter set (see below), but I thought I’d crowdsource it a bit – can you think of songs that fit the description? Suggestions in the comments, please!

EDIT: Quinn adds: “Bonus points for songs that hate on SF!”

MP3: (Winnipeg) The Weakerthans – One Great City! [buy]

MP3: (New York) LCD Soundsystem – New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down [buy]

MP3: (Boston) Dismemberment Plan – Ice of Boston (live) [buy]

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Music, culture and tech roundup

January 18, 2010

Fun stuff from around the web:

Konks release vinyl + circuitry: Possibly the coolest answer ever to the ‘why should I pay for a physical version of music?’ Boston band The Konks released their new vinyl 7″, “Nerves,” in a limited edition of 500 that comes with an electronic music device built into the cover of the LP. Says Bob Konk, “…you can touch the letters of our logo and the board makes a bunch of squeaks and squawks that sound kinda like a theremin. It has an on board speaker as well as an output jack so you can plug it into an amp to annoy the maximum amount of people at maximum volume.” While it can be purchased pre-assembled, by far the cooler option is to do your own soldering (you can either get a bag of the requisite parts, or a link to an online retailer to buy them yourself). Naturally, it comes with a bunch of other goodies too. Look for it at Static Eye Records shortly.  (Via Boston Band Crush, and special thanks to Sophia for bringing it to my attention.)

Prehistoric bird named after punk/country band. World, meet Late Cretaceous bird Hollanda luceria, named after the band Lucero. As well as being quite the honour in its own right, it puts them in pretty good company. (Via The Stranger’s LineOut blog.)

What makes music emotional? Why does music in a major key sound cheerful and in a minor key sound sad? Researchers at Duke University may have part of the answer. They compared the frequency distributions of sounds in minor- and major-key music with that of speakers reading monologues in either a subdued or excited tone of voice, and sure enough they matched. More details in this New Scientist article, or you can read the abstract (or, if you’re Mike Epstein, the whole thing) here. (Via @danlevitin.)

Does music get popular because it’s good, or just popular? Columbia scientist and network-theory pioneer Duncan Watts did a gorgeous experiment to see if music gets popular because other people say it’s good, or because people actually think it is good. The answer, it turns out, is both. Watts uploaded 48 songs to a website, had people listen and rank them, and then repeated the same experiment with many different groups of people but the same songs. A few songs consistently did well, a few badly, but the rankings of most varied widely with each group. Go read Clive Thompson’s article for full details of the study, including a devious tweak.

MP3: Lucero – Darken My Door [buy]

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zed equals zee happy hour returns!

December 20, 2009

Live in the Boston area and interested in music, culture, and technology? Couldn’t get enough of the conversations at Music Hack Day? Come to the second zed equals zee happy hour on Monday, January 4th, 2010 (!) at the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, from 6 to 8 pm. Join me, Chris Dahlen (a writer for Pitchfork and ‘total badass’ moderator) and a host of Boston music and tech types for drinks, snacks and discussion. Feel free to RSVP via e-mail or in the comments so we know to expect you, but just showing up is fine too. Please join us!

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

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The zed equals zee gift guide

December 13, 2009

We like music, geeking out, and indie manufacturers.

Two gorgeous prints by Cat and Girl. The one on the left is a timeline of hits by genre, and the one on the right is a list of first names in hit singles by here (click images for larger images and purchase links).

Indie rock snark from Diesel Sweeties. Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of rstevens and his webcomic. He has a range of music and indie rock shirts with slogans like, “I’m a rocker. I rock out.” and “I liked you better before you sold out.”

Music +  Science = Sexy. What more is there to say? Get it on a t-shirt. From Questionable Content.

Destroyer’s Rubies infographic limited edition print. By Jez Burrows of the UK-based graphic design collective Evening Tweed.

Atari Punk Console sound generator. I blogged about making one of these at Music Hack Day Boston. Jimmie Rodgers has just put some of the kits on sale at his website.

Since I’m stupidly late in posting this, we’re hard up against Christmas deadlines. Go! Go now!

What do I want for the holidays? I’m thinking a subscription to a UK proxy server so I can watch BBC TV and listen to Spotify…

http://modern.jezburrows.com/

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A reason to regret the demise of radio

November 24, 2009

I never thought I would lament the end of radio.

In the pre-Internet age, commercial radio, TV news and the front page of newspapers, all provided a shared experience to their community (not, mind you, that this was an unmitigated good). Unlike the other two media, though, radio also reached back in time, since it didn’t just present the music of the day. I grew up with a good independent radio station, and as a result, I had a de facto education in alternative music from the rise of punk onwards, which was augmented by listening to this show every week. That kind of historical context can be lost if you’ve gotten all of your music online.

I thought about radio on the weekend when this question came up: “What is the most influential modern instrument?” (post-electric guitar, not post-sousaphone). My immediate response, “The drum machine,” was met with incomprehension. While you could argue whether this is the right answer (and please do, in the comments), you have to have some knowledge of the antecedents of today’s music in order to answer the question.  I’m not sure how widespread that will be from now on.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shoo some kids off my lawn.

Exhibit A: New Order – Blue Monday (12″)

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Infographic: Seattle music connections

November 18, 2009

Rachel Ratner’s Cartographic Study of Musical Incest is a giant (60 sq ft) map of the connections between Seattle bands, from Nirvana to Fleet Foxes to scores of bands that you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re an Emerald City local. If you are, you can also see the full map (the above is a detail) at the Expo 87 art show next week.

Also, I’d love to see one of these for the Boston music scene? Anybody game?

(via Line Out)

Rachel Ratner’s Cartographic Study of Musica

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Here from Hypebot or Daily Swarm?

November 5, 2009

portrait-debcha

Thanks for stopping by! zed equals zee is a music, culture and technology blog based out of Cambridge, MA.

You might also enjoy the following posts:

Streaming vs downloading: Do we really want a jukebox in the sky? Or does it make more sense to hold it in our hands?

Music, webcomics, NPR and money. What can independent artists learn from the business model of webcomics and NPR?

What will music fans pay for? A longer version of the post on Music Think Tank.

The future is what it used to be. An appreciation of an astonishingly prescient 1991 essay by Momus. Music industry, don’t say no one saw it coming.

The name-your-own-price-model: some data. An independent videogame company tries the NYOP for one of their games. What can musicians learn from their experiment?

Read: Fans, Friends and Followers: An interview with Scott Kirsner, author of Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age.

128 or 320 kbps – can you hear the difference? Test yourself to see if you can distinguish between low and high bitrate MP3s.

Feel free to poke around the rest of the blog. If you’re intrigued, you can subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.

(image: a commissioned portrait of me by rstevens)

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Music, tech and culture roundup

October 13, 2009

sunboxes

Help with research on music blogs: This came out a month or so ago, but I forgot to share it. Sophie Vernon, a master’s student at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, is trying to understand the relationship between music blogs and word of mouth. She’s put together a survey; it’s really short, and if you’re reading this it’s relevant to you, so go help her out.

Billy Bragg on piracy. A couple of weeks ago, a group of UK artists convened to discuss the issue of Internet piracy. Billy Bragg wrote an editorial for the Guardian where he makes a point I haven’t seen very often: he argues that any attempt to suppress filesharing entirely (by the recording industry asking legislators for ever-more-draconian sanctions) would entail giving unacceptably high control of the Internet to corporations. Read the full editorial here.

Sun Box installation: Important Records is hosting an installation art piece by Craig Colorusso this Saturday, October 17th. The piece consists of an array of speakers, each playing a guitar sample. As they’re solar-powered, what you hear will depend not only on your trajectory through the site but also the length of the day. Important is a Boston-area label, but it’s not clear where the piece will be set up; you can e-mail for details. (Via Justin Snow of Anti-Gravity Bunny.)

Policing leaks with politesse. Last year, z=z covered the new Hold Steady album, which had been leaked. We had noted that a company called Web Sheriff was sending ‘highly civilized takedown notices’ to blogs posting leaked tracks, so we posted a link to the approved track—and received a thank-you note, much to our surprise. The Guardian has an article on the company that is policing unauthorized tracks with reason and social engineering, not by threats.

What CD sales mean for artists. Last year, of 115,000 CDs released, only 6000 sold more than 1000 copies. Over at CNet, Matt Rosoff takes a sobering look at what different levels of CD sales means for artists. This is not likely to be news, but it pretty succinctly makes the case that CD sales alone aren’t going to make being an artist sustainable.

And, finally, some nerd love. Rolling Stone has a track-by-track guide to They Might Be Giants breakthrough album, Flood.

464 Massachusetts Avenue

Arlington, MA  02474

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Music, webcomics, NPR, and money

October 5, 2009

box of money[click for full Diesel Sweeties strip]

The topic of creators and money seems to be in the air at the moment. Last week, Amanda Palmer wrote a blog post, “Why I am not afraid to take your money,” which is burning up the Twitterverse and the blogosphere, and a recent PBS MediaShift article discussed financially self-sustaining webcomics.

In the webcomics article, Richard Stevens, the creator of Diesel Sweeties, describes how he makes a living off his work by selling merch, like t-shirts. His site gets about 30,000 hits a day; he reports that he only needs one or two percent of these readers to buy something to make the whole thing self-financing. While he provides something to everyone for free (the comics), he also provides the opportunity to support the comics by buying something.

It dawned on me why this sounded familiar when I turned on my radio to discover that WBUR is in the middle of a pledge drive: it’s exactly the model that NPR has been using for decades. It’s the nature of digital distribution that, above a certain threshold, works have an incremental cost of zero: once something has been created, the cost of instantiating and distributing the creation is pretty much negligible. NPR is one of the few cases where this was true in the pre-digital age: once they’ve paid for their news bureaux, staff, and transmission, it doesn’t matter if ten (or a hundred, or a thousand) extra people tune in—it won’t cost them anything extra. And even though only a tiny fraction of their listenership donate, it’s enough to make up 30% or so of their operating budget. NPR puts more emphasis on your money supporting the programming and less on the Car Talk CD you get, while Stevens puts more emphasis on you getting the cute red robot and less on supporting the comic, but the net result is the same: the fraction of the people who pay for physical items can support the whole digital (or radio) endeavour.

NPR and webcomics are native to the world of zero incremental cost, and have a financial model that reflects this. The music industry, on the other hand, does not. They were in the business of recouping their costs with every CD sold, and now they are trying to recoup costs with every track downloaded. But that’s clearly not working anymore. More on this to come.

PART 2: What will music fans pay for?

MP3: The Flying Lizards – Money (extended mix) [buy]

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This weekend in live music: z=z picks

October 2, 2009

BurmaBikes

This is a killer weekend for live music in Cambridge, at least in the z=z worldview.

Friday: Montreal’s Besnard Lakes are headlining at TT the Bear’s, and a lineup of bands including Kingsley Flood are playing a free (as in beer) show at Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville.

Saturday: Double-plus-good bill tonight – first up is another show at TT the Bear’s with local luminaries The Motion Sick, Aloud, Sidewalk Driver (CD release) and John Powhida International Airport. A couple of blocks away, Electric Laser People is playing at the Cantab Lounge.

Sunday: The main event – it’s Mission of Burma Day! The legendary Boston band is playing a free outdoor show at MIT to celebrate the release of their new album, The Sound the Speed the Light. Head on over to the East Campus Courtyard at 2:30 pm.

[for a less idiosyncratic and more comprehensive view of what’s happening in Boston musically, I urge you to check out Boston Band Crush’s listings]

MP3: Mission of Burma – 1, 2 ,3, Partyy! [preorder]

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Music, tech and culture roundup

September 28, 2009

oblique strategies

Auto-Tune, by way of Brian Eno: Montreal’s Islands (opening for the Psychedelic Furs and the Happy Mondays at House of Blues on October 10) are taking flak for the track “Heartbeat,” off their brand-new album, Vapours, for the heavily-Auto-Tuned vocals. In this interview over at Street Carnage, Nicholas Thorburn defends their decision to  use it, inspired by their use of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies in the studio.

What does your music look like? Paul Lamere is spending a lot of time thinking about visualizations of music these days. Want to help? He’s collecting visualizations of musical taste. Grab a marker, sketch out what you think your music looks like, and upload it Flickr, tagged with ‘MyMusicTaste.’

Indie music stars on the big screen. Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney and James Mercer of the Shins star in upcoming release Some Days are Better Than Others. You can watch the trailer here. No word on whether they’ll be contributing to the soundtrack (via Line Out).

MP3: Islands – Jogging Gorgeous Summer (no Auto-Tune, I promise) [buy]

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