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A celebration of the internet (pt.2)

It’s been a while since my last celebration of the awesomeness that is the internet, and the stuff that can be found on it. When I re-made this website last time around, it was with the full intention of providing an audio-blog which would expose some of my favorite obscure tracks and artists at low bit-rate to my eclectic readership. Unfortunately DreamHost got rather restrictive with copy-right at the time, and in the end I couldn’t provide the mp3 tracks that I wanted (which is ironic considering that aurgasm.us does exactly what I wanted to do, and was at the time hosted with DreamHost). Instead I’ve got to go about this by way of proxy, so I’m sharing pretty much anything that I can find available that I think is really rather cool, through links to other sites. Mostly YouTube.

Recent and not-so-recent musical discoveries

I listen to a lot of music, and I love a lot of it. Which means I want to share a lot of it. I’m splitting off the music stuff from the ‘general’ internet goodness here.

Susanna and The Magical Orchestra - “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

A cover of Joy Division’s classic song. I absolutely love and adore this version, it is stunningly beautiful, and a stark contrast to the original recording. Needless to say, I’ve got Susanna’s album on order through Amazon.

Archive - “Again”

I recently bought the Archive album “Londinium”, and I can say that in so doing I’ve discovered one of my favorite bands of all time. Not since Spiritualized have I head a Wurlitzer organ and Harmonica used to such gorgeous effect. The video is pretty cool too.

Spiritualized - “Broken Heart” played live

Speaking of Spiritualized, here’s an absolute classic, which i first heard way back in ‘97 when they released the brilliant “Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space” (also, if you picked up the limited edition box, the best CD packaging ever). No Wurlitzer in this, but check the harmonica solo. I advise ramping the volume up half-way through. When that choir kicks in it’s heart-rendingly tear-formingly beautiful.

Kirsty Hawkshaw - “Battleship Grey”

OK, so this isn’t a recent discovery, I’ve had the Tiesto album it’s featured on for years, but it’s a beautiful song. You can safely ignore the video itself, because it’s got nothing to do with the track - unfortunately it’s the only video I can find with the song in it.

General internet goodness

Moving along from music, here’s some general internet goodness for your consideration.

Gear of War promo advert

I adore the backing track to this advert, which is a complete contrast to the normal first-person-shooter computer game ad. The song absolutely makes the advert, and it’s really good. As a nice side note, these are the game-engine graphics. We’ve come a long way since the first Unreal Engine (Gear of War uses the Unreal Engine 3)

Kiwi

This is a brilliant and touching animated short, go Kiwi!

Amateur

Here’s what the ability to edit time-lines on a video can do for your musical talents

Tony vs Paul

Stop-motion fighting, with lots of neat little video tricks.

The following links are all adult-orientated

As I know there are people of more sensitive disposition reading my blog, I’ve bunged all the more ‘mature’ funny videos down here, as links off-site. You have hereby been warned that crudeness ensues. So “caution adult content” and all that jazz.

As a person brought up on StarTrek, I find the following video hilarious (especially as it’s the real characters doing the voices). Word of warning - it’s a Family Guy skit.

Two Pints Of Larger And a Packet of Crisps is a British sit-com which has been on for quite a few years, but I only discovered a few months back. There’s one episode in particular which is pure genius. It’s much funnier if you know the characters, but even if you don’t the ‘musical’ episode is rather funny. Here are a a couple of highlight tunes from that episode: Casanova, We need some slags, Biscuit rap, They fancy Donna or Louise.

Entry Information

Posted:

Sat, 13th Jan 2007 at 20:01 UTC

Filed under:

• My Two Cents

Tags:

• music
• review