One of my favourite quotes this year was from Damon Albarn discussing why Gorillaz will never appear on Glee:

"It's a homogenization of everything and it ultimately will lead to emptiness."

His point being that young musicians should avoid writing for TV shows and write their own material since covering songs will not allow you to form your own identity and may make you beholden to TV producers.

The discussion was with Jian Ghomeshi while appearing on Q:

A lot of the extended interview talks about their creative process, loosely about celebrity, and what it means for Gorillaz to be successful.

At Northern Voice this year Darren Barefoot led a discussion surrounding online art — mostly just asking the question of where are the great works of online art? The most common theme was that of the collection, where curation and organization are what makes online art. Some examples are mashup music and the Big Picture photo blog.

I wanted to expand on another idea that was briefly brought up. Most people would agree that art is personal and one of my favourite quotes is that “art is for making people feel less alone.” Following that, what if art was very personal? Some services that can provide this for you are Last.fm or Apple's Genius. For Last.fm, it builds a database of your preferences based on the kinds of music you most commonly listen to and the music that you ‘favourite’. It then compares your preferences to that of the wider community to help bring you custom playlists with new music. Here, the art is in building a playlist that can mean something to you.

Last.fm, to me, is somewhat hit or miss, but here is what Last.fm just did for me (don't watch the videos, just listen, hopefully it's raining where you are).

It is raining outside and I turn on Last.fm. As I'm getting my umbrella out, walking down the steps, crossing the street, and walking through the mushy park up to the bus stop, this is playing:

(Fila Brazillia – Place de la Concorde)

Then as I hop on the bus, which is mostly silent and wet, this is playing...

(Blockhead – A Better Place)

It takes me to my stop where I get out and wait with another dripping woman for the elevator.

As soon as I enter my apartment, the following starts playing. It's warm, and fun but still sounds like rain:

(People Under the Stairs – Time To Rock Our Shit)

Sometimes technology can bring a little nuance.

Last week I had the chance to attend not one, but two Library Voices shows here in Vancouver. As I've mentioned before, Library Voices is one of my favourite upcoming Canadian bands, and neither show disappointed. Yelling along with their lyrics was definitely the highlight of last week which coincidentally was my Spring break!

Library Voices has been touring constantly for at least the past two years and they're starting to get some wide recognition. They have tons of literary influence along with a strong dose of good old Canadiana — they are from Regina after all. Following are some photos I took at the shows.

February 15, 2009 at The Media Club:

The Media Club show was definitely the best. The venue is slightly larger and for whatever reason everyone at the show was just... nicer.

Here are some pictures from February 18, 2009 at The Railway Club:

As kind as Library Voices were to come to Vancouver twice, Vancouver was not nice to Library Voices. While they were here they had about $10,000 worth of gear stolen from their van. Here is an appeal to get there gear back from CBC Radio3 on YouTube:

If you haven't listened to them yet, check out their Myspace page; they're really nice people and it's been great to see their fan base grow. Definitely excited to see them come around again!

Here's some more press on Library Voices:

• Library Voices in the Calgary Herald
• Library Voices feature by CityNews.ca
• Profile on CBC Radio 3

Casey and I spent some time over the weekend with our friend Adrienne putting together a brand for their little music collective, which is named Violin and Stuff. Casey plays cello and Adrienne plays violin and together they play wedding music and are also available for studio work. They are both classically trained but what makes them special is their indie-feel and ability to play creatively by ear. They offer a base of normal wedding pieces and will also learn your requests to make each performance unique.

We created a nice logo that has some of the feel of what they represent. Casey really wanted a highly typographic logo with a serifed, traditional font and we thought it might be neat to incorporate the F-hole from a violin or cello. We started with some more traditional fonts like Caslon, Garamond, and Times but none looked quite right. We eventually drifted towards Jos Buivenga's fantastic free font, Fontin. To get an F-hole we needed a nice italic F. Fontin's F wasn't quite what we wanted so we ended up blending together the stem from Garamond with the serifs from Fontin. Here is our final result:

Next we needed to make some nice business cards so that they can market themselves in the real world (a lot of their business will be word of mouth). We pictured something handcrafted and because Casey had some of the equipment hanging around, ended up silkscreening them. We bought neon pink paint and some nice paper from Opus. We had some friends over and had a little business card making party — and with a lot of help from our friend Caitlin they turned out great:

Finally, since all that the business cards have is a URL we needed to get the site up as soon as possible. I created a design mockup a few weeks back and it was just a matter of translating it to real HTML and CSS. It is built in Drupal and should be easy to extend and for Casey and Adrienne to change when they like. Now that the basics are done, I would eventually like to get a Muxtape-like player up in order to easily sample their music.

I'm very happy with how this turned out. We created a strong brand for them to market themselves and we have so many good ideas on how to build on this in the future — we're even thinking of a photo shoot sometime soon!

Just stepped in the door from a night of quality music! Some friends of mine hosted a show at Lick in Gastown and I thought I would give a brief description of the night. First up was...

Search Parties — These guys got us all to a great start with their limitless energy. Too bad it was too hot in the venue for more dancing...

Catamaran — Their cutesy guitar lines and lyrics are still rolling through my head, I just wish they could have been clearer as the drums were too loud. I've seen them before and they still resonate for me as a band worth watching.

Library Voices — I had seen this group before in their band National Frost and it didn't take much convincing to bring me back. They have tons of collective energy and manage to stay away from being muddy despite having eleven members. They have a great mix of rhythm and fun melodies and someone complimented later saying "these guys make me happy and good music should do that." I even bought their CD! Definitely check them out if they hit your town or city as they seem to be touring constantly.

The Barcelona Chair — Mikey and Adrienne created the perfect blend to help bring the evening back down. They have lots of emotion and complexity, something I am finding more each time I see them. They are somewhat reminiscent of groups like Boards of Canada or The Album Leaf but with considerably more edge.

Library Voices at Lick photographed by Steve Louie

Here's a great way to find music from Muxtape.com. Say I am looking for Chicane's song ‘Offshore’, then I would search Google for something like this:

site:muxtape.com chicane offshore -amazon (link)

By using '-amazon' I avoid all of the outgoing links to Amazon.com and just get the Muxtapes that match my keywords.

I'm finding this is also a good way to find new music as it's likely if someone included one of your favourite songs they might have similar musical taste!

Do you have any Muxtape hacks?

I just switched radio stations to 'The Beat' 94.5, a decidedly pop-centric station, and it turns out that Kate Perry's 'I Kissed A Girl' is one of the top songs right now (?!).

It's kind of catchy but not that great. The whole song is simply Am - C - Dm - F over and over again, here's how:

Nice and simple – sing along with your friends!