This was done by Jesus Contreras and Hannah Manfredi as a music and video collaboration. The story is about a little girl that wakes up to find herself in Mexico. She meets a young boy named Salvador who is on his way to sell mangos at the market. She doesn’t know whether she is still sleeping or awake. The animation and artwork was done by Hannah Manfredi, who also supplies the voice in the narration. Interesting enough, the music and vocals were completed before the animation was shot. All of the music was realized in Live You may need to go directly to the video on Youtube if you have trouble reading the subtitles. This is the direct link to it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=uVREtfM1AL4

Love this tune from Brooklyn folksters Phosphorescent, and I was pleased to discover this spirited and somewhat raucous live performance of it.

Phosphorescent performing the song “Wolves” of their album “Pride” at Cake Shop in NYC on November 1oth, 2007…

Phosphorescent- Myspace

So by now you must have discovered Pitchfork TV, if not happy day for you. The online video showcase was launched recently by the same people who bring you Pitchfork obviously, and features exactly what you’d expect, good alternative music videos (great quality for online stuff)…minus everything you hate about MTV. Here is a fun video following the group Man Man around as they work on their new album “Rabbit Habits”. It’s great to see all the freedom and experimentation that the band exploits in the studio, which is exactly what you should do while recording…I agree with Honus Honus, every song should feature the recorded sounds of a dog in a bathtub.

Christmas music is usually enough to induce an instant vomit reflex in me, but I am constantly charmed by the Christmas albums of Sufjan Stevens…His happy little translations, and honest tunes seem to convey a sense of warmth lost in most of the modern commercial Christmas renditions. Here is a little animation featuring the song “Put the lights on the Tree”. Have a safe holiday and just try to give more than you receive. Just the other night I saw Santa getting busted by the man…so hopefully he will make bail in time to make his rounds this year, if not you know what happened.

From the fertile musical spawning grounds of Canada comes yet another great new band. The Carps are a bass and drums duo who combine a punk rock ferocity with somewhat R&B style singing. You can find this tune on their debut cd out now…and be on the lookout for them in a city near you. This song takes a fresh narrative style to a violent theme, and showcases their interesting sound quite well.

The Carps- Myspace

Good God damn…Carla Kihlstedt totally fucking nails this song (originally written by Ann Ronell or possibly George Gershwin if you believe the rumor mongers!) live with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia playing back up band. She is just an amazingly well rounded musician who continues to grow and expand her talents across multiple genres. She rips and screams and squeals on vocals and violin with her complete monster of a metal goth band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and here she demonstrates how she can flip that completely over and deliver a stunning lead vocal performance, on a song they (Tin Hat performed it on one of their early albums) originally trusted to none other than Willie Nelson!

Carla Kihlstedt- Myspace
Tin Hat Trio- Official Site

Another great duet featuring Bonnie “Prince” Billie. This time he is putting on a skeleton suit and singing with Scout Niblett. The song slowly builds around the “This kiss could have killed me” line…which is one of those nice little truisms to be weary of.

Scout Niblett- Official Site

So Radiohead has claimed they won’t release results on the sales figures for In Rainbows, I’m not sure why not really but whatever, there are some pretty good guesses being floated and it sure looks good. Here is a quote from the Seminal-

According to a source close to the band, In Rainbows has “sold” approximately 1.2 million copies as of October 12th. In comparison, that’s more albums sold in the first week than Radioheads’ last three releases combined. According to an Internet poll of 3,000 people, the average price paid for In Rainbows was $8. If these numbers are accurate, Radiohead has made close to $10 million in one week on this album alone. Read More…

So…they potentially made 6-10 million from sales! That sure sounds good, of course I have no idea how much they make from their label, but I’ll take those figures to the bank anyday. There have been a lot of estimates about the album being downloaded concurrently on Bittorrent, and many have speculated on the reasons for this. My personal experience was that the user experience on the official Radiohead site was HORRIBLE, and I’ll bet they could have doubled their sales if they had evaluated that further. The site was hit hard and was slow as slow can be, and once I found the actual link to pay and figured out what to do the form kept resetting to a value of 0 every time i tried to enter a number (I was going to pay…really, I don’t even like Radiohead much, I just love that they are doing this) and would not let me proceed…I ended up getting the album from a friend who was able to get through to the site, I liked it, and have since been back to fork over some dough. The whole conversion from pounds to dollars thing was poorly handled as well, it’s really not a stretch for that to all be fully automated. I’d call this experiment a success, and say, there were things to be learned, hopefully they will address the UI a bit and make sure to have a scalable solution for the bandwidth to handle the interest next time.

Radiohead- Official Website (considerably faster now)

This is one of the coolest flash pieces since the mind blowingly awesome Polyphonic Spree “Quest for the Rest” game surfaced. Thanks to Gomez the Grand for this link, and be sure to click around while it plays for some interactive neatness.

Arcade Fire- Neon Bible Flash Video

In case you’re living under a rock and missed the news, Radiohead dropped a bomb on us today in releasing their next album (earlier than expected) over the internet…for free basically, or HOWEVER MUCH YOU THINK IT’S WORTH. What an amazing move, and I might say it is great to see a major label artist stepping up to the plate. The labels, and their lapdogs usually are seen as doing all the dirty work while most big time artists sit on the fat contracts avoiding the argument or in some cases fucking up the argument big time *cough* Metallica *cough*. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and even though I am not a huge fan (I like them alright, just not on my daily rotation or anything), I will shell out some cash for their idea alone. This is an interesting time for artists and the industry, the artists have a real opportunity to influence the direction of things to come…so get out and support those who are trying to innovate.