Category: Recommended

Reviews, praise, or otherwise promoted.

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Recommended

Yo La Tengo Is Murdering The Classics

This was just brought to my attention:

> They said it shouldn’t be done, but we did it anyway. Starting in 1996, we’ve made an annual visit to WFMU during their fundraising marathon. People who pledge money to the station while we’re on get to make a request, and we try to play it. And guess what? It’s not that easy. Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics is a 70-minute compilation drawn from 1996-2003, a Best-of, or Best-of-the-Worst, or Worst-of-the-Best, or . . . oh, what’s the use, it’s dreadful. No song titles will be provided, don’t ask. Beautiful cover art by Adrian Tomine. Order at your own risk. No refunds.

A true delight of a cover album.

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Recommended

DJ Max

Like many others around the globe, I am completely enthralled with the recent release of Pentavision’s [DJ Max](http://www.play-asia.com/SOap-23-83-iff-71-bj-49-en-84-j-70-15ww.html) for the PSP. It is a solid recreation of my much beloved Beatmania series, except perfectly adapted for a portable. It has over 50 tracks (many of which are surprisingly good), a metric ton of things to unlock, and a nice steady difficulty curve.

If you own a PSP, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. And if you have already picked it up – or even if you haven’t and just want more information – I’ve started work on translating as much info about the game as I can and slapping it on my wiki. Contributions are always welcome. You can read the info at:

https://vjarmy.com/wiki/index.php/DJ_Max

If you don’t have a PSP, don’t fret: Beatmania’s US release for the PS2 is just over a month away. And if you want to learn more about that, why, there’s a [wiki page](https://vjarmy.com/wiki/index.php/CS_USA) for that too!

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Recommended

A Music Geek Holy Shit Moment

I’ve always been interested in the intersection between pure music and pure technology – perhaps this explains my music game fixation, or the mashup addiction.

So when I saw a picture of Kid Beyond giving a demo of Ableton Live at NAMM, I had to ask my former roommate and resident DJ expert Dave Cross (not the comedian!) what he knew about it. He had, after all, been telling me how much he loved Live not a few days beforehand.

Timely as ever, he linked me to a video of the same sort of demo, also given by Kid Beyond. It is fucking unreal. It’s turned me into some sort of stuttering fool who can only say things like “The beatbox…loops…foot pedal…holy SHIT”.

If you’re any sort of geek who’s into music technology, you MUST see this.