A compilation album of music by metafilter members is being produced and one of my songs is on it (The Importance of Good Leadership from A Maze of Death, to be exact)! As an included artist, I am doing my duty and, uh, pimping the product here. They are taking pre-orders to generate seed money to produce the thing. It’s going to be professionally mastered and packaged, so presumably it will look and feel like a real CD. Profits will be given to charity, though they haven’t named which one yet. So go place an order and own a piece of internet history.

Strange Little World EP [stream]

I finally got around to requesting a remix from one of my favorite remixers (that I know personally), Dr. Kong. He did a bang up job and his mix is featured on this new EP along with remixes by Aaron Ackerson, MC Jack in the Box and Fantastic Vamps. The EP also includes two songs that didn’t make it onto the final cut of A Maze of Death.

Robbed by a noob friend-flood!

Song Skirmish, the one hour Songfight!, is responsible for this song. You can hear the other entries here.

I’ve got an entry in the new Remix Fight! Check it out and vote for your favorite mix.

Someone commented on my previous post that they couldn’t find the freezepop/hideki tobeta mash-up anywhere online. The reason is that I made it myself. It just sort of happened while I was making the mix. Here is the mash-up all by itself.

While riding in the car the other day, I had this idea to make a mix tape revolving around the word “star” and, on the back of a business card, jotted down a few songs that came to mind. One song was “Cripple and the Starfish” by Antony and the Johnsons, which later lead me to think I should try to incoporate as many songs with the word “starfish” in them as I could manage. However, all I could come up with was a song called “Starfish and Coffee” by Prince (a song that was apparently written for his appearance on The Muppet Show) and one called “Starfish Print” (a song submitted to the very first Remix Fight). A suggestion from moboid to check out the Austin band Starfish yielded nothing usable (party because the mix had already morphed by the time I got hold of the mp3s).

Yes, a morphing mix. Starfish led me to the sea and Star led me to the sky. So, this mix is more or less a journey from celestial songs to underwater ones. It turns out, within music I am familiar with anyway, that there are a lot more songs about the sky than there are about the sea. I hope to remedy this situation sometime in the future. Meanwhile, enjoy the mix.

1. Air - New Star in the Sky (Chanson Pour Solal)
2. Freezepop vs. Hideki Tobeta - Plastic Katamari Stars
3. Stars - Counting Stars on the Ceiling
4. Man … or Astroman? - As Estrelas Agora Elas Estão Mortas
5. Beck - Sunday Sun
6. Radiohead - Sail to the Moon
7. Tom Waits - Fish & Bird
8. Art of Noise - Island (Remixed by Youth)
9. Nassau Ringers - The Water Is Wide
10. Belle & Sebastian - Ease Your Feet in the Sea
11. Antony and the Johnsons - Cripple and the Starfish
12. Björk - Oceania
13. Future Bible Heroes - She-Devils of the Deep
14. Debussy - La Cathedrale Engloutie

I recently got hold of a recording of my performance in the live fight for Song Fight! Live Boston. Before I do that thing where I link to the tune, a short explanation is probably in order.

Once a year the Song Fight! community decides on a place to have a live show. It’s more like a convention pretending to be a show, however. In 2005 the location was Boston (Somerville, techinically) and the tagline was “Sox and Rock” (a tagline I still hate, I should have voiced more support for “More Than A Feeling”, alas). The title that was announced for the live fight was “I Know My Rights”. The live fight is exactly what it sounds like. Each person or band attending writes a song for the title and performs it at the event one after the other. Then, there is audience voting and a winner is declared. The live fight is in addition to each songfighter performing their own short set of Song Fight! entries they’ve written. This makes for a rather epic event. Eventually, I hope to have a recording of the entire set I performed, which reminds me that I should probably post the one from 2004. Anyway, I wrote a song about a guy who is unsatisfied with his mail-order bride. Enjoy!

Two offerings for y’all today. One is a cover of a song by Glenn Case, a prolific and talented Songfighter. The other pitts The Art of Noise’s Max Headroom track against The Faint.

I was unsatisfied with the outcome of the Remix Fight for this song, so I decided to make the source available here.

The RAR archive contains WAVs, the ZIP archive contains 128kpbs mp3s.