Tag: mp3

MP3 tech note: lame 3.9.7b1

The most recent version of LAME (a new one after a very long time) is a huge improvement at least for me. I was previously using 3.90.3 which the mavens at hydrogenaudio said was the best version. They started recommending this new beta and wow! I’m getting 8.5x instead of 2.8x ripping speeds with “–preset fast standard”. Sounds great, too. Highly recommended. Source is at this sourceforge link, and binaries for those who do not compile are at Rarewares.

Purchase sampler: I buy, you win.

I got my package from Aquarius Records, including the new Jello/Melvins opus, the 1981 L.A. no wave/postpunk compilation “Keats Rides a Harley”, a two volume set of Tibetan Buddhist rituals, some pipe organ madness, and the Jack Palance album. It’s everything I can handle, and more!

Here’s a sampler of mp3 from each. Links likely to expire, please mirror if you want to spread, etc.

Jello Biafra & The Melvins Kali-Fornia Uber Alles 21st Century (Live). Everyone made the lame joke about the DKs redoing “California Uber Alles” after we got governated. Jello and the Melvins did it, and very very well. There are better tracks on this CD but here’s the crowd pleaser.

Jack Palance, Hannah Jack talks his way through one hell of a tearjerker country ballad in his very best psychotic murderer voice. This will either be much better or much worse if you’re drunk or tired. Let me know.

100 Flowers, Salmonella (from Keats Rides a Harley compilation) This compilation came out in ’81 and has a load of L.A. weirdos I used to know: Leaving Trains, the 100 Flowers/Danny and the Doorknobs axis, the Meat Puppets, all doing weird underproduced stuff. It’s really good, especially for people with obsessive interest in underground rock of the early 1980s. Hello, obnoxicant? Twenty years later people called this music “Indie” but it was dead by then.

Georges Montalba, The Washington Post March PIPE. ORGAN. MADNESS!

Long Trumpets Auspicious Ending from the Tibetan Buddhist Rituals set. No one makes a really long series of honking noises sound as cool as Tibetan Buddhist monks. I want these guys to play my wedding.

And your kid has a face like a walnut from the ice cream.

I saw Leo Kottke perform this song in 1986 or so? Dunno. It was at McCabe’s. He introduced the song by saying that he’d stayed up really late one night and smoked a whole lot of cigars while playing guitar in an effort to become Joe Pass. He did not become Joe Pass. However, he woke up in the state of mind the next day that caused him to write this song.

This is how I, and many of us, feel in the morning.

Jack Gets Up (.mp3, 6.5 meg)

Thanks for the pen.

I was talking to a friend tonight about her crap office job, and thinking that about half the people I read on the elljay have crap office jobs of one kind or another. They all work for neurotic incompetent failures who bully them, are paid badly and screwed on their benefits, and get impossible workloads followed by blame dumped on their heads.

This is because I know lots of people who are around 25, and if you’re a smart 25-year-old finding a career you end up being the slavey for 35-year-old failures who’ve topped out at the supervisor level. They may start out human, but quickly decay into little Napoleons in chinos. There’s a pompous, patronizing sadism this sort of toy emperor practices that’s just the thing for grinding down younger, smarter employees.

I used technical skills to get out of this mess quickly and only had a couple of jobs this bad. Most of my friends, though, spent the 1990s working in places like this: temp office gigs, entertainment companies, variants on Innotech. Greg worked in a mailroom at a movie company for a while. His supervisor was too old to be the mailroom supervisor and be going anywhere, but had delusions of a future. He dressed for success, combined over his bald spot, and lied to his bosses about his skill at cost-cutting and improving efficiency. He made sure that no one got raises or got to use their vacation time, and never paid overtime, to show that he was made for the corner office. Once, unbidden, he decided to let everyone in his domain know what he was destined to achieve: “I see myself, in ten years or so, in an executive position. Because that’s my goal, and I achieve my goals. I am going to have a mistress, and my own jet, and three houses”. The young musicians and artists and soon-to-be graduate students sat there as the 35-year-old single mailroom supervisor from Burbank told tales of his future empire.

Greg wrote a song for him that was recorded on the Ferdinand CD Demoted to Greeter, a record that more than any other tells the story of all of us 80s kids getting fucked by the 90s. Here it is:

Thanks for the Pen (mp3, 2.9 MB). It’s pretty loud and thrashy.

Let’s call it as it is
You don’t care
You won’t back me up
Thanks for the pen!
I got it right here…
Thanks for the pen
Gonna throw it right back at you

Beware, posers, of the Necrowizard!

Impaled Northern Moonforest is an acoustic black metal band whose hit tunes include “Lustfully Worshipping The Inverted Moongoat While Skiing Down The Inverted Necromountain Of Necrodeathmortum”, “Awaiting The Blasphemous Abomination Of The Necroyeti While Sailing On The Northernmost Fjord Of Xzfgiiimtsath”, and “Masturbating On The Unholy Inverted Tracks Of The Grim And Frosbitten Necrobobsledders”.

Go sign their guestbook, already. Via The Null Device.

Me and the corp’ral out on a spree

Here’s two for the boys overseas, originally made for their compatriots from the last Empire.

“Banks of the Nile” – Richard Thompson

“Island of No Return” – Billy Bragg

“I get free medical care because we lost the war. I lost it real good for them, too. They look at my record and say ‘How much Demerol would you like today, Mr. Trout?'” —Bob Trout (UDT veteran, Vietnam)

“When the flag comes out, it’s only a matter of time before someone’s handing you a rifle.” —My great-uncle Richard Sears. (Army grunt, WWII, Sicily invasion)

We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;
While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, fall be’ind”,
But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind,
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind.

—Kipling, “Tommy”