Sol Celeste is a song by The Ted Williams Show, a band I joined about a year ago. The video footage was shot by Javier Tovar, of Monterrey, and by NASA. Enjoy!

Last Saturday, the Ted Williams Show, a Blues/Rock/Funk band I belong to, had a gig called “Voz en Off” at the Beaux Arts theater in the Convex Center of Monterrey. The theater is a top-notch venue, with excellent acoustics, very comfortable seats, and an enormously deep stage area.

Unfortunately, although we were able to fill more than half the seats, we weren’t able to recover even half of the production expenses. Still, we enjoyed the gig immensely, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

The video above is very amateur, and unfortunately, the friend of mine who recorded it, failed to record a single song from beginning to end, or to steady the camera. He still did a decent job, though; I’m glad to have this recording.

I was proud to sport my Honduran soccer jersey for the event!

I’ve been overworked, overwhelmed and overexcited. I prepared this blog post last monday, but since I don’t have access to the internet except at home, and have been incredibly busy, here it is, a week late:

Sunday 20090607 11:47 PM

Grubby and noisy, the Iguana cafe isn’t going to win any awards for cleanliness. My past two Sunday evenings have been spent in this place, full of the reek of stale beer and tobacco smoke. A top-notch sound system and stage lighting, and the best emerging rock bands in the city make this the unlikely place for me to be tonight

The band I belong to, “The Ted Williams Show” is performing here in an annual rock competition called “Iguana Rock”. After the qualifying round last Sunday, where 28 bands played until past midnight, we were chosen, with eleven others, to return for the finals.

As I type this, a heavy metal band called “Maligna” tears the night. We’ve been waiting for over an hour to hear the results, and see whether we’ve won. I think we have a sporting chance, and about a 60 percent probability of being in the final 3, and perhaps a 10 percent chance of winning outright.

UPDATE: Monday 20090608 12:31 PM

1am has come and gone, the winners have been announced, and we didn’t win. It is true that we didn’t sound as well as we did the week before, because of a long list of circumstances.

I can’t help being a little disappointed, even though our stated goal has been achieved. Quite a lot of people enjoyed our music, and several asked us for recordings, including two of the judges. All three of the bands who won asked us to play with them, and were very friendly with us before and after the results were announced.

The best thing of all…I’ll finally catch up on some much needed sleep.

Surfing on YouTube, I found this video of an outdoor concert I went to, on Earth Day, in a kiosk in Monterrey’s Macroplaza. There were barely some 80 people there, but the dancing was absolutely wild as you can see from the second minute of the video onward.

This is “La Siniestra” one of the bands I enjoyed the most, singing their song Wepa. The guy singing this song has a lot of charisma, and exuded fun. But there were two bands that inflicted us with the kind of sonic torture that makes me ponder on how excruciating hell would be.

A group of percussion students from a music school opened the evening playing on African instruments. People jumping, neo-hippies, and punk rockers could be seen in the crowd. Nearly everyone was in their twenties, or at least looked it. A young man waved a green flag, dancing barefoot. A young lady swayed slowly and gracefully side to side to the beat of the drums. The few office workers who wandered in look alien in business attire, and wear confused expressions. Preppy “fresas” wearing Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle mingled with people wearing psychedelic clothes that looked old enough to have survived the 60s.

A young lady handed out pamphlets and brightly asked for our emails and cell numbers, happily giving me a sheet of earth-friendly, non-bleached paper to write this entry on. I had my laptop, but didn’t dare call attention to myself by opening a macbook at night in the middle of a city of millions.

Afterward, an eco-punk band provided some unintentional comic relief by tearing the night with screaming lyrics. This sent the dancers into a convulsive frenzy with dances that might have outdone the Garifuna. Thankfully, the sound technician lowered the volume on the lead singer’s mike before she could do much damage.

Next, “La Verbena Popular” gave us a mix of old-style rock and roll, a heavy dose of Mexican pop-rock, and even a slice of Caribbean Reggae. They closed with a hippie-rock song that wouldn’t have been out of place at Woodstock, which set the crowd dancing exuberantly, ignoring the sarcastic grins of the non-dancers.

Then, “La Siniestra” exploded onstage, with an even more Caribbean rhythms, a dash of rap, a pinch of cumbia, positive, slightly leftist earthy lyrics, and contagious rhythms. A spicy-sweet musical feast.

But what came next could only be described as the soundtrack of Hades. I’ll spare you the piercing, horrific, mind numbing, shrieks of the last two bands. When they ended, the place was deserted, except for musicians, sound techs, and the odd ex-dancers lying on the ground.

I am currently involved with two music acts, The Ted Williams Show, a whimsical rock band with blues elements and a heavy debt to Lennon-McCartney, and Miguel Torres, an acoustic guitar, folksy, Spanish, bohemian solo artist. Neither is very mainstream, although creative and talented, with great material. Interestingly, both are producing albums, both with “amateur technology” and on Macs.

How can small music acts succeed in a world where the major music labels and the RIAA are dying out? The suggestion is a simple formula that both desperately need to understand:

Connect with fans + give them reasons to buy = financial success.

The tough part is finding out a way to do it. Piracy is not an issue; for instance iTunes successfully competes with free, by giving us reasons to buy. The labels, used to their monopoly, are kicking and screaming, and refusing to succeed any other way. Their doom is sealed unless they embrace change. This torrent freak article articulates the reasons for the music labels’ decline better than many I’ve read.

The Ted Williams Show are renting a 900-seat theater for a concert the first of August, our biggest gig yet. Miguel Torres is thinking of quitting his day job to concentrate on music. As self-appointed technology consultant for both, I’ll soon create websites for them, and will share some of their music with you.

As always, your opinions and suggestions are more than welcome.

Image by Nine Inch Nails, used with a Creative Commons license

I’ve been brainstorming what to call a yet-to-be formed band. I have several ideas. I’d like the name to be as inclusive as possible, because my musical tastes are rather eclectic. What do you think

Vertebra

A bone from the spinal cord. Wouldn’t the logo look cool?

24

The date of my birthday, the number of hours in a day, etc.

Aeolus

An extension of my initials AEOL, and the Roman god of wind.

Vesuvio

A majestic mountain and active volcano near Naples, Italy.

Laughing and Grief

A pun on the school subjects Latin and Greek, from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”. Reeling and writhing anyone?

Lepton Ooze

Part of an anagram of my name

Which one do you think is better?

Image by “photobunny”, used with a Creative Commons license

My first song, which lacked even words, bordered on the autistic. I didn’t have the powerful tools that now make producing electronic music child’s play. I didn’t even know much about music theory or composition. I was a 10-year-old fourth grader who had been given a Radio Shack computer with color Basic instead of an Atari, like his next-door neighbor.

The song simply goes through each letter in the scale starting with A, and alternating it with each of the other notes in the scale in turn.

It is interesting that this simple “algorithm” creates a song with almost every possible sequence of two notes in the key of C.

Almost. I was so ignorant of music, that although I knew the scale as do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do, I didn’t even know there was a note called “G” in English music, and that it corresponded to “sol” in my musical alphabet.

Here are the notes in each verse of the song. Each phrase is composed of 12 notes and is three bars long. Needless to say, my musical abilities have improved vastly, I hope. I’m tempted to orchestrate it into something more interesting, if not less haunting.

AAAB ACAD AEAF
BABB BCBD BEBF
CACB CCCD CECF
DADB DCDD DEDF
EAEB ECED EEEF
FAFB FCFD FEFF

FFFE FDFC FBFA
EFEE EDEC EBEA
DFDE DDDC DBDA
CFCE CDCC CBCA
BFBE BDBC BBBA
AFAE ADAC ABAA

In order to play this song, I wrote a Color Basic program much like this:

10 PLAY "AAABACADAEAF";
20 PLAY "BABBBCBDBEBF";
30 PLAY "CACBCCCDCECF";
40 PLAY "DADBDCDDDEDF";

and so on…

I re-discovered Internet radio last week through website Deezer.com. While the concept has been around for a while, and has been launched by giants like Yahoo (Yahoo Music), selection has been very limited, and many people couldn’t take advantage of it because of slow connections.

I think there is only one final step to be taken, to combine the internet radio station and the music store. The result would be a website where people go to discover music, and buy it. Poeple could listen to the music free of charge, but be able to buy DRM-free downloads in order to store tracks in their iPods, PDAs or computers.

Who loses with such a scheme? Only those recording labels who greedily refuse to relinquish the absolute control they enjoyed in the 20th century. Do they necesarily need to lose? Of course not. They need to see themselves are music vendors and not CD vendors. If they embrace change, they can take advantage of opportunities that could turn them tremendous profit.

A few years back, no one but Apple dared to make an internet music store, even though the concept was an obvious one. The iPod, and the iTunes music store weren’t original, they are simply very daring. Apple would never have been successful if they hadn’t taken the risk, and embraced change. Everyone else was afraid of being sued to oblivion by a legion of lobotomized lawyers.

Only a large company can successfully navigate the treacherous gauntlet that protects the profits of media moguls. I hope the right companies come ahead with web sites like this. And, even better, that the music labels recognize that they have much to learn and gain in the process.

Youtube has increasingly become a favorite place to listen to music, and as such, a thorn in the flesh of greedy RIAA henchpersons. Gotta be PC you know (henchmen, hench-women, hench-children?, etc …). A few days after anyone uploads anything worth watching or listening to—that isn’t a commercial, of course—it will be taken down.

In response to this, MTV recently launched a video streaming site, mtvmusic.com, with thousands of music videos which can’t be seen (legally) anywhere else in the internet.

Funnily or eerily, take your pick, MTV decided to censor out the words “Morpheus”, “Grokster”, “Limewire” and “KaZaA” from their video of Wierd Al Yancovic’s ridiculous anthem “Don’t Download This Song”. What were they thinking!? Scorching and flattening irony!

Speaking of iron and magnetism, Lars Ulrich, Metallica’s drummer, is specifically mentioned in the lyrics because of his outspoken opposition to music piracy, and his subsequent lampooning on the utterly distasteful cartoon cesspool, South Park. Note the smiling sharks at the end of Yankovic’s video, and this explanation of why they’re there.

My favorite part of the song, barely audible at the very end, is when Yankovic says “You cheap b*****d”! Al, you’re my hero.

Source, this Techdirt article

The lyrics to a song came to me today in a small park near where I work, after sleeping too little, drinking too much caffeine, a Red Bull, and listening to the Beatles for a few hours. I guess drug-induced stupor does wonders for creativity, be they legal drugs or not.

The day dawned bright but misty and cool. Monarchs wind though the sky, migrating south to survive the winter.

ASKING FOR THE WAY

VERSE 1:
The waters have closed over my head.
My faith is gone; I have nothing.
My friends floating by, oblivious,
Enjoy pretty lights as I drown.

CHORUS:
But then I fly
Like a monarch in a hurricane.
I wish I were an eagle,
But it’d be useless anyway.
Yes I fly
Like a monarch in a hurricane.
I wish I were an eagle,
But it’d be all the same.

VERSE 2:
An old man walks by, feeding the birds
they’re defining his life with their greed.
And I wait for an answer, wait for a sign,
A reason for life, to believe.

(repeat chorus)

BRIDGE:
I’m lost in the haze of translucent days,
In a ragged phase of despair.
Then a friendly face asking for the way
Makes me realize that you’re there.

(repeat chorus)