Ben Allison - Little Things Run the World

Up late taking a break from a marathon Reason programming session, digging on the latest Ben Allison joint, Little Things Run the World. I heard a piece on him on NPR a while back, and had to order the record as soon as I got home. He's a bass player-cum-band leader, and his compositional and arrangement skills are mad, to say the least. The first track, "Respiration," features some deliciously skanky guitar by Steve Cardenas that brings to mind Nels Cline or Marc Ribot. The band as a whole works together to create propulsive grooves with complex tonal colors and plenty of room in the middle for stuff to rattle around in. This is not sloppy jam-band rock "jazz," but serious composition executed by sho-nuff players.

Check him out.

Controlling Ableton Live from an iPhone

Not quite my dream of a cellphone beatbox, but still pretty sweet.

Shameless self-promotion

I've been playing around over at RedBubble of late; it's a great way for artists and designers to move from bits to atoms with virtually no risk or upfront costs. You can upload designs for t-shirts, wall art, greeting cards, and so on, or you can just hang out and look at art by talented people.

I'm testing the waters with a couple of t-shirt designs. Go by one and validate me.



Wear one of these shirts and take a little tay0 wherever you roam.

Yahoo's new media player thing is teh r0x0r5z

Forget where I stumbled across this thing, but it's pretty slick. Pretty much, you post some links, and then point to their script, and you're done. I'm playing with it here. Click on the Play button beside any of the song titles at the bottom to launch it.

Dude...

[Via Gorilla vs. Bear]

"You have no right to be here!"

Apparently in the Land of Lincoln, they believe in something. And if you don't believe in that same something, then a certain elected official, who one would presume would have a working knowledge of the Bill of Rights, doesn't believe you have a right to be heard. Click the link for evidence (as if you needed any) that frighteningly zealous theocrats can come from either party.

George W. Bush pwned my wife's Sunday morning

See, my wife had to get up at 6:00 this morning to take her mom and sister to the airport, except she got up at 5:00 AM instead because my clock radio thought that this weekend was the "Spring forward" deal. Because that's when it used to be, before W and his crooked rubber stamp Congress (the one before the current incompetent, utterly baffled as to what they should be doing Congress) caved to the golf lobby and the let's-sell-everybody-new-clock-radios lobby and changed the freaking dates! So thanks for another pointless blunder, W. Your awesomeness continues to amaze and chafe me.

Chuck Heston dead at 84

Takes me back to the late 80s - a great band called Stump put out a quirky little disc called A Fierce Pancake, the centerpiece of which was the song "Charlton Heston." Click here to check out the whole record; "Charlton Heston" can be streamed in full. If you dig that Mick Karn style of fretless bass - sounds like a cow playing a trombone - then this is your kinda breakfast music.