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Musical Friday, the binary solo edition

Just to get Donald Trump's visage off the top of the blog, I bring you "The Humans Are Dead" by a New Zealand comedy group called Flight of the Conchords.

Musical Friday: the tentative but postapocalyptic return

Yeah, yeah.

Two Canadian pieces, from the Vancouver electronica group Delerium.  The first is "After All", with the singer Jael from another band.  It's from their Chimera album.

The next is "Angelicus", with Armenian-Canadian singer Isabel Bayrakdarian doing vocalizations without lyrics.

Notice a theme here?  Yep.

Musical "Friday", airbrushed photo edition

E Nomine is a German group that mixes heavy metal with operatically-influenced orchestral music, melodramatic choral singing, and Euro techno-dance stuff.  I understand that this sort of combination has been popular in Germany since, oh, Wagner.   Many of their music video clips are on YouTube, and I am going to present to you two of them this "Friday".   They both come from E Nomine's lengthy opus, Die Prophezeiung, which is an extremely overwrought long apocalyptic fantasy heavy-metal symphonic poem.  It's not called "The Prophecy" for nothing.

The first is their very famous and popular "Deine Welt" ("Your World") from near the beginning of the opus.  It involves the growly voice of E Nomine's narrator proclaiming things about "the biggest apocalypse in the world" or something like that. (Even a non-German speaker should be able to tell when he says that.)  He is backed up by a strenuous operatic choir singing agitated claims that "That is the hour!"  In the middle there is a calm segment and a woman singing in Latin.  In most of Die Prophezeiung, singing parts are done in Latin and spoken parts in German, but "Deine Welt" has some German song.

The second is "Der Blaubeermund", which is still close to the beginning but after "Deine Welt".  As far as I can tell, with my poor German, it means something like "The Blueberry Mouth."  I don't understand the German growly narration, but apparently it has something to do with obsession and necrophilia.  It alternates between the narrator and a female operatic singer who declaims "I love you, my beautiful star" in Latin and is backed up by a male chorus.

Both songs have a dance beat and some other alterations that make them a little inferior to the versions I originally heard, which comes from a (re?)mix of Die Prophezeiung that's much more weighted towards the operatic than to the techno. And that concludes today's "musical" "Friday".

Musical Friday

Today is another non-YouTube video day, and I'm short on time so this is going to be fast.  Pandora introduced me a few months ago to Art Circus, a group produced by the indie label Infinity Cat.  Like a lot of good indie pop music, they have a very whimsical sort of tone.  Their myspace page has my favorite Art Circus song, Be Your Own Pet.  (And yes, Infinity Cat also produces a group called Be Your Own PET whose music video I posted a couple of Musical Fridays ago.)  Here's also an .mp3 file containing Art Circus clips available on this page.

Musical Friday, food edition

I've been away from an Internet connection, so I hope that my baying hordes of excessively demanding readers will understand (hah!) if I haven't updated much in the last couple of days.  Actually, I just wrote a post for you, but I had a mysterious and rare Firefox crash, so this is going to be a retry.

First, the music.  Since I haven't had time to search for amusing YouTube music vids, I present to you an old favorite, The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra.  That link takes you to their page of music clips.  And for artists who make music on instruments that rot, they're pretty good. 

And another favorite: Cookie Monster.   Ah, the memories.

Finally, and not specifically music-related (but it has music), the V for Vendetta trailer spoof with Cookie Monster.

And that's good enough for me!

Musical Friday, disturbing and distressing edition

This YouTube music video comes from a relatively unknown (to me, at least) group calling itself Be Your Own PET.  It's disturbing not in a gory action way, but in a cleverly distressing sort of way.  It's quite tragic.  I shall remember not to hunt people in bunny suits. The song is called "Adventure".

This video is Björk's "Where is the line?"  It's truly nauseating, but still worth watching/listening

Musical Friday, obstruction of justice conviction edition

I don't recall.

-- I. Lewis Libby

Unfortunately, this one is out of sync. There's a good one posted by Sony BMG itself---but they don't allow embedding. Foolish.

This one is even more conventional, but the "meta" aspect of the music video amuses me.

Musical Friday

Today we return to a more serious type of music video, at least briefly. 

This is the Norwegian group Bel Canto's piece "Birds of Passage," sung by Anneli Drecker.  It has some similarities with ethereal electronica, although I'm not sure it quite qualifies.  I'm not sure I understand the symbolism, but at the same time it's kind of moving in its own way.

Now we're back onto amusing/weird.  I've been amusing myself with the 80s, but I actually realize that it's not quite the 80s which amuse me, but the surrealism.  So here's the Dandy Warhols for you:

Apparently, heroin is so passé.  Who knew?

Musical Friday

I am still on an 80s kick, for some reason.  You know, the 80s, where we all existed in a strange state of suspended panic, since we were half certain that we were going to be instantly incinerated in a giant nuclear conflagration, or worse: that we would suffer a slow agonizing death in a nuclear winter with our hair falling out and our emaciated flesh gradually and painfully necrotizing...

Well, nowadays, we have more heinous and abundant ills, but we also have more of an air of abstracted indifference.  But in recognition and remind of our prior panic and the surreal sense it spawned in some, I present you with the music video for "True Faith" by New Order.

And as far more recent bonus, here's something that might amuse some of you.  It's definitely not the 80s.  Beware: it's a tad high-pitched.

Musical Friday

Craig again forgot to put up the Musical Friday post that you might recall he promised last week (I have written evidence of it in the comments to last week's musical friday).  So it falls to me to perform this neglected task.

Well, so, it happens that when I like a piece of music, I keep listening and listening and listening to it for weeks on end until the next thing I like comes around.  So I am still listening to Sleepthief's The Dawnseeker again and again and again, but I already posted what parts of it were available on the Internet. However, some of the songs were covers of songs sung by other groups.

So without further ado, I present you the YouTube video of Duran Duran's original "The Chauffeur," performed live in surreal-o-vision:

And for my next number, this is the original "The Metro" by Berlin, which is actually a California group (not European as I said in my previous post).

And finally, "The Metro" again, except it's the System of a Down cover, so it's actually the screamy variety of heavy metal (I think).  I'm not at all a fan of this particular genre, but I thought I'd present it for completeness. 

Now, think of these discordant songs redone in an extremely harmonious and well-ordered electronica form with female voices only, and you have the awesomeness that is Sleepthief.

Edited to add: I got it in right under the midnight wire, so it's a valid Musical Friday post.  Sweet!