Coachella is three weeks away, and just like last year the lineup is mostly bands I've never heard of. Also, just like last year, the Coachella website provides 1-2 tracks for most of the artists scheduled so you can get an idea of what they sound like. However the website interface doesn't make the aural exploration easy. It only lets you listen to the songs, not annotate them with your opinions. I was resorting to scribbling down artists I liked by hand last year. So I've been working on a couple of things to make it easier. The first of these is my project for this week, the second may be the project for next week if I get it finished.

Here is the first: a ruby script that saves all 210 of the Coachella tracks as normal MP3s that you can play anywhere. It even inserts the correct artist/title info and image file into the ID3 structure of the MP3. This makes it easier as you can use the iTunes (or equivalent) rating system as you listen to the songs and then sort by rating later to get a quick list of the artists you want to see at the festival.

This was written for OS X, but if you are ruby savvy on Windows you can easily get it to work there too. The main hiccup will be that it depends on a third party library in order to manage the id3 song info in the mp3s. Download this library from Here's the steps, sudo will sometimes ask for your password, just type it in when asked:

1. Save the pullem.rb script to your Music folder.
2. Open a Terminal window
3. Type: cd ~/Music
4. Type: sudo port install id3lib
5. Type: sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install id3lib-ruby -- --with-opt-dir=/opt/local
6. Type: sudo gem install xml-simple
7. Type: ruby pullem.rb

This will start the download. You'll end up with a little over 200 shiny new MP3s.

The port install id3lib part is what installs the third party library. In order for that to work you have to have DarwinPorts installed. And in order to have DarwinPorts, you will have installed the OS X Developer's Toolkit that came on your OS X DVDs when you bought your Mac. The toolkit is not installed by default.

If you are on Windows you can download a binary of the id3 library from sourceforge.

This week's 1/52nd of 52 things is a song called Bucket of Love. I started playing in Garage Band with my keyboard, just testing different instruments and making stuff up. Finally I settled on this harsh distorted electric guitar bass line. Then I added a bit of drum kit to it and decided I could make a go of it as a song. The music sounded like grindcore, so I was picturing the vocals as just some incoherent screaming, but then figured I should write some lyrics even if they were unintelligible. I didn't really know what to write though, so I just listened to the bass and drum kit over and over again and what ended up popping into my head was that creepy dude from Silence of the Lambs who had the line "it puts the lotion in the bucket. " So I wrote some lyrics from his point of view. I only had my iMac internal mic to record the vocals with, and I was a bit worried about my neighbors hearing me across the light shaft, so I tried to keep my voice low. I was able to mostly cover up the vocal recording shortcomings by adding some distortion, which worked with the song anyhow.

In the end, I realize now that I have a not so good version of the complete song, I really should re-record all of the tracks to get the timing and such more rigid, but I really don't have the time to do that right now so I'm just letting it out as is.

Enjoy (ha). Press the play button below.

bucket of love

i have utter devotion
since i got the notion
your beauty is just flesh deep
your beauty is mine to keep

now don't make a commotion
now it puts the lotion

in the bucket of love
bucket of love

you won't go
i will sew

and you'll fit like a glove
fit like a glove
bucket of love

UPDATE

Alex writes Someone was visited by the same Muse as you... (link to youtube video)

A few months ago I bought a toy $40 digital 200x microscope called the Eyeclops. It outputs HD video directly to an RCA input on a TV or A/D converter. Today I used it to make a music video for Colours by Hot Chip.

My canvas for this piece was a printing of Salvador Dali's The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. I chose this one partially because I've been reading a book that corrects the myriad misconceptions most of us have about the native Americans before and after the arrival of Columbus, and partially because it depicted a pretty good face of just about the right size.

The video isn't quite what I'd hoped for. It was a bit hard getting it just right as I wanted to do it all in one take and it's difficult to manipulate the microscope lens just right. Plus the song itself moves a little too slowly. But overall I'm fairly pleased with this one.

For some reason I couldn't get to sleep tonight. I entertained myself partly by writing my first GreaseMonkey script. It takes all of the individual MP3 links on the AllOfMp3 download page and prints them as a series of wget commands. Then you can just cut and paste the block of commands to your terminal window.

Install it here: AllOfMp3 Download Helper

Mie and I went to the Independent last night for the Dungen show. Wow. They opened up with what were my two favorite songs from their album, the title track Ta Det Lugnt and the first track, Panda. At first that disappointed me as they seemed to be just warming up with them and I was thinking I'd have preferred to hear them later when they were in full groove, but I ended up far far from disappointment. The show was an incredible psychedelic guitar romp. It was like Pink Floyd doing Jethro Tull at some points. And all in Swedish. Don't miss them if they come to your town (hint, it helps to achieve a carefully orchestrated lack of sobriety). After the show was over, the audience called for an encore and after a short bit the band came back out and said "we're sorry, we don't have any more songs, but we just wanted to come out and say 'Thank you'," and then the bassist took photos of the crowd. It was a very warm genuine moment.

Update: My friend Paul found a good streaming video of Dungen's live performance at KCRW.

Photo by jodivestar

Earlier in the evening we met Todd and Heidi out for dinner at a new Thai place called Osha, and then an art exhibit at Varnish. This is the same gallery Six Apart used for their MT 3.0 Launch Party, but that wasn't the only familiar thing about it. It was an art opening for Children's Crusade, Frank Garvey's apocalyptic carnival paintings and robot freaks. This morning I searched my archives and realized I've seen his work before and blogged about it back in 2002.

In How the web should be, Anil points out a flash rendition of a Coltrane tune that feels like an abstract version of the sonic wire sculptor. I wonder how difficult it would be to write code to generate these sort of visuals automatically from audio analysis? Obviously this is what visualizers do when playing mp3's in iTunes or WinAmp, but they don't have the same sense of narrative. I think to pull that off the entire audio file would have to analyzed as a whole instead of as a stream.

Eh, cloudy thoughts for a cloudy morning.

I pretty much quit watching music videos when MTV quit playing them years ago, but my friend Paul pointed me to this really disturbing new Mogwai video: Hunted By a Freak. I can't remember the last time I was so scarred by an animation!