Pandora Video - Great American Music Hall

Pandora is a great music site but they have also begun producing videos. Here is one highlighting a great music venue in San Fransisco.

The Brazen Heads - Curse Of The Hag

Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie

Some top notch stop action filmwork here:

Uncensored Interview: Sway Dasafo - Art Imitating Life

Uncensored Interview:

UI is a free video destination site for indie bands. We find talent in the underground indie world and interview them for current fans to enjoy and for new music aficionados to discover. On top of it, we encourage users to talk to the bands by uploading v-sponses and share your thoughts and ideas with them.

This is a great statement posted by Uncensored Interview. UK Hip Hop artist Sway Dasafo offers his take on the vicious circle he sees in the art of Hip Hop as it first imitates life. . . and then itself.

The Brazen Heads - Who's Yer Paddy

The Brazen Heads - Who's Yer Paddy

If anybody has been wondering where I have been lately this is why. I just finished the second music video for my Celtic rock band The Brazen Heads

Music: The Brazen Heads - One Eyed Reilly

Click to play

The Brazen Heads are a Phoenix based Celtic rock band with a surprisingly hard driving sound for a band with no electric guitar in 99% of their work. This is primarily because of the amazing drum and vocal stylings of Roy Plisko (who also writes the blog descriptions) The other guys do stuff too though: Liam Mackey sits in front with a guitar, tells dirty jokes and sings most of the songs, Tim Sadow has this long, hairy, stick thing that he strokes a little instrument with, Mark Lanus plays with just about anything he gets his hands on and bass player James Cowley has really cool hair.

This is the first music video released from their new album Who's Yer Paddy.

For more information go to www.thebrazenheads.com and feel free to drop us a message on our band forums too.

Music: Preston Reed - Life

I found Preston Reed while browsing around at the Broadjam Website. It's pretty cool solo guitar riffing. Broadjam is also a cool independent music site where you can upload your songs and get reviewed by the community. They also do videos and let you sell your songs as downloads for 99 cents. One of the downsides is that you can only acess the content on the broadjam website. There doesn't seem to be any way to embed their content into blogs so I can share a direct link to the material. I had to find the YouTube version to share it here. Looks like YouTube gets the clicks this time until Broadjam can work it out.

Music: Tommy Emmanuel - Classical Gas

This is some mindblowingly good guitar playing.

Music Video: Second Life - Virtual U2 Concert

A group of U2 fans, who are also fans of the online 3D environment Second Life, have formed a group called U2 in SL which amounts to the worlds first virtual "tribute band" . . . or at least the first one I have heard of (details here and here). These folks have created online "avatars" who look just like the members of U2. They built a stage, complete with instruments, lighting, and pyrotechnics, they created elaborate animated "scripts" that the stage effects and characters perform for each song and they streamed audio from an actual live performance from a Boston U2 concert as the sound track. Add to this the trimmings of a concert setting such as T-shirt stands and merchandise and about 50 fans who showed up for the event (can't have to many people in one area yet or things slow down) and you have one of the more unique online experiences I have seen so far: an authentic life performance, of sorts, for live people participating in a virtual event. It also looks like they also had some people acting as the "camera crew" who each took video of different members and angles so that they could cut it all together into a concert highlights video which they have posted on YouTube.

Pretty Unique to say the least. They have no affiliation with the real U2. They make no money at all off these events and they have tried several times to contact U2 and their management to legitimize their efforts. The primary goal seems to be to draw awareness to various Bono charities.

What makes this special to me is that it is a creative labor of love that was put together by ordinary people who wanted to push the boundaries of traditional thinking. Because Second Life is a completely open environment that allows members to create and own anything they want (as long as they have the skills or the money to pay someone with skills) it is the perfect platform for these kinds of experiments.

Music: Ship of Fools Productions - The Channel 101 Musical.

What I love about this video is that it really goes for a full blown desktop musical with original music and everyone singing on the recording and then acting it out with simple DV production values. In this case it is a little cheezy and "insider" but it is really a concept that could strike a bigger chord if it is done correctly.

Ship of Fools Productions is a project that began in 1999 and it is a collaboration of 3 men: Actor Mike McCafferty who has had some success as a Hollywood actor, Jason Makiaris, who is a collaborator and composer, and Ben Plummier who is a writer and director of photography. Together they have made over 25 short films and counting. There motto is to always be shooting which I think is good advice [YouTube posts HERE]. The above playlist is all 5 parts of an episodic series that was submitted to a web competition known as Channel 101.

Channel 101 is an interesting story in itself. It is a website presenting itself like a TV channel that always has 5 shows running. The shows come from a competition where producers submit a pilot to be reviewed. Not all of them get past that stage. If the pilot is accepted, it is then screened before a large audience that meets regularly to review the submissions. Each show is rated and they are either canceled or greenlighted based on the ratings that this audience gives. If it is greenlighted, it goes on the front page of the Channel 101 website which is what they call their "Prime Time" spots. They then have a deadline to create a new episode which is then rated by the same audience in the same manner except it is competing with all the past winners and new submissions all over again. Eventually the show gets canceled but the trick is to see how long you can keep it running in the competitive bloodbath.

Now, back to Ship Of Fools Productions. Ship of Fools created a full blown musical about people trying to come up with a great idea for a Channel 101 TV show. It was so unique and clever that it became incredibly popular. They did several more episodes and claim that they were the only show ever in the history of Channel 101 to make as many episodes as they want and then walk away on their own terms. Quite an accomplishment.

Music: Animusic - Pipe Dream 2

Animusic is a company founded by Wayne Lytle who had always envisioned electronically synchronizing music with animation on a computer [Wikipedia link]. In 1995 he teamed up with computer Artist David Crognale to create a project for a commercial client. Since then Animusic has produced what they call video albums that is a CD like group of songs, only on a DVD, with animations to go with them. The first one was released in 2001. A great deal of their stuff has found it's way onto the internet. This clip is from their latest video album "Animuisic 2"

Music: Sunday Morning Old School Gospel - Don't Take Your Joy Away

I was surfing around YouTube and I came across this video of a gospel music performance by Kirk Franklin and The Family that just blew my mind. We hear this in pop music now but it is easy to forget that this sound, and this style of singing, was born as a form of worship. These people are in Church. This is a prayer. Why can't the whole world worship this way?

I know it's a real old school style, and it's actually a clip from TV apparently but. . wow. . if this womans voice doesn't make your spirit soar on a Sunday morning. . . I don't think anything could. The hip hop video that follows it is a horribly jarring crash back to earth next to that gospel song . . . I don't know why they put them together like that. Unless you are a big rap fan then feel free to ignore it

Documentary: VBS.TV - Heavy Metal In Baghdad

Part 1



Part 2




Go see the rest of it




VBS.TV is a web media network in Brooklyn that looks like it could become a real player on the web media scene pretty soon. They have recruited Spike Jonze as their creative director. I had the pleasure of working with Spike on that Daft Punk video with the guy in the dog suit. Spike is a very talented guy and he is giving this network startup an edgy young vanguard feel and a web user experience that makes your computer feel like a TV. They are offering what looks like a mix of all original high end (in the MTV reality show sense) and lower tec looking productions such as video logs and journals under a variety of subjects. The flash based media player that VBS offers is a very slick experience including a decent full screen view. It looks like they are going to take a traditional TV advertising approach to support the programming eventually.

Above are two episodes around 5 minutes each in a 5 part series: Heavy Metal In Baghdad. This is an interesting story about two VBS producers who got in touch with a Heavy Metal Band in Iraq and arranged to visit them and do a story. Things don't go as planned and the story becomes much different than they expected. What inspires me about this work is that they took a very empathetic subject, Iraqi guys trying to be headbangers, and told two stories at once. The story of the band, and the story of the world they live in which has become very hostile and tragic. American influenced artists, living under American occupation, dodging bullets, gangsters and kidnappers. It grabbed me immediately. It also has a really well put together vanguard style.

If you want to jump right in you start from the top on their own website you can begin HERE. It will go through the whole series hands free. Or, you can continue after watching the clips here. If you really like it there are two more series after that. One is 6 parts and the other is 7.

Music Video: TIMZ - Iraq

An Iraqi American rapper defending his old hood in rhyme. Not something you see every day. This video originated on YouTube where there is now a collection of videos documenting TIMZ's activism.