Best Downloads This Week

Music

Atlas Sound/Deerhunter mastermind Bradford Cox released four EPs last week for free. The EPs, called Bedroom Databank, can be downloaded at the following links: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, and Volume 4.

ArpLine played the Cake Shop in NYC and NYC Taper has the recording. Plus they played a Sade cover that’s more soulful than you’d expect. Worth a listen.

A band who would top a list of bands that I loved and then kind of forgot about would have been Jucifer. Southern Shelter has a recording of Jucifer playing Caledonia in Athens.

Krewechief posted two live recordings from Bob Dylan’s current tour. Good recordings. Maybe not the popular assessment, but Dylan keeps getting better.

Magrudergrind is offering their new EP, Crushed, for free.

Southern Shelter has a recording of Maserati playing 40 Watt.

Deakin (who just re-joined Animal Collective) has a New York City set up at NYC Taper.

Laundromatinee posted a new in-studio session with Marmoset.

NYC Taper has a recording of Autolux playing Bowery Ballroom.

Obligatory Daytrotter: Brendan Benson, Meridene, Olöf Arnalds, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, S. Carey and Via Audio.

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Photos from Arvo Pärty: A 75th Birthday Celebration for Arvo Pärt at (Le) Poisson Rouge

Music, Photos

photos by Annie Lesser



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The Best Videos This Week

Humor

I Am Harry Potter from Daniel Radcliffe

“I Am Harry Potter”

Etc.

Harrison Ford does a gangload of Special K before he goes on Conan.

You Look Like Shit Megamix – watch more funny videos

“You look like shit.” An over-used phrase is films.

Pilgrims

Film, Humor

Just a little flashback to one of the first quinaz mumblecore comedies. Pilgrims:

PILGRIMS – watch more funny videos

Happy Thanksgiving

Humor

For Thanksgiving pleasure, the guys from Stella (Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, and David Wain) go turkey hunting.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

What Happened on Conan Last Night?

Humor, Television

This may rank with the weirdness of Joaquin Phoenix or Crispin Glover on Letterman, or even Norm Macdonald on Conan when people still knew what Melrose Place was. Last night it seems that Harrison Ford took a boatload ecstasy* and went on Conan to stare awkwardly and rub the inside and outside of his chair for the better part of 9 minutes.

*not really

Arthur Phillips Reads from (supposedly) Lost Shakespeare Play

Literature

Arthur Phillips recently appeared in an episode of Literary Death Match NYC. Check out the video below, and if you want to know more about the play he’s talking about you can hear where he first talked about it – at an InDigest 1207 reading which was episode #1 in the InDefinite Podcast. Listen to it here.

LDM100: NYC: Arthur Phillips from Opium Magazine on Vimeo.

via InDigest

Best Downloads This Week

Music

On Monday the Wordless Music Series and Lincoln Center presented an amazing performance which began with two new compositions by Sigur Rós’ Kjartan Sveinsson titled “Credo,” “Cage A Swallow Can’t You, But You Can’t Swallow A Cage” and a short performance of “In Hydraulis” performed by the Hilliard Ensemble. All of these can be found at the preceding link. But the evening was capped off by the world premiere of Riceboy Sleeps (Jónsi of Sigur Rós, and his partner Alex) as an orchestral work featuring the Wordless Music Orchestra and the Latvian National Choir, orchestrated by David Handler and conducted by Jeff Milarsky. You need to download this piece. It was beautiful and the recording is wonderful.

James Kibbie, organist and professor at the University of Michigan, has recorded the complete organ works of J.S. Bach and posted them online for free. If you have days to spend listening to beautiful music, click this.

Roger Waters performing “The Wall” live at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, MN.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow performed at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn on Oct. 26th, and NYC Taper has the wonderful recording of the show.

Alexa Woodward did a wonderful solo banjo session at Laundo-Matinee Sessions.

NYC Taper recorded Bear in Heaven live at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

One of our favorite acts of this year’s CMJ, Oh Land, has a recorded up at NYC Taper live from Brooklyn Bowl on November 8th.

A Lightning Bolt live set from the Ridgewood Masonic Temple. Crazy as ever.

A live NPR recording of Jónsi performing in Washington DC.

Obligatory Daytrotter: Alejandro Escovedo, Futurebirds, husband&wife, and Suuns.

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John Adams on John Cage

Literature, Music

John Cage was one astonishing individual. A composer we commonly associate with coin tossing, whose most famous piece called for the performer not to make a single sound, he upended long-held conventions about the listening process and prodded us to re-evaluate how we define not only music but the entire experience of encountering art. He was, in the words of Kenneth Silverman’s new biography, “driven by an ideal of nonmythic listening and seeing, of perceptual innocence”; his goal was to compose “a prelapsarian music untainted by history.”

Read the full story here

Best Videos This Week

Humor, Music
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
It Gets Worse PSA
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

It Gets Worse: PSA.

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