Analogue Now, this is clever—quite a decent performance, too.
jackyan reblogged
Rita Coolidge - All Time High (The Theme Song From Octopussy) 1983
Looking for something else to use Tmblr for, as well, you know….
Ten day countdown!!!
‘All Time High’ How well timed. Just finished watching Octopussy again on DVD. This theme song showed just how darned good John Barry was as a composer. It’s relatively timeless, certainly transcending the period in which it was released (1983). Was it the last great Bond theme tune?
Source: youtube.com
jackyan reblogged
Did you know that tape cassettes are super cheap to produce these days and many small, independent music acts are using them as a way to sell physical copies of their albums without risking the farm? It’s true – a lot of black metal bands use tapes to get their stuff out there in hopes of getting label interest. Hip-hop has a long tradition of tapes, too.
This is The Cave of the Lost Talisman, the first album from Kobold, a “dungeon-synth” act that composes 8- and 16-bit music specifically intended to soundtrack your latest dungeon crawl. I love it to bit – it reminds me a lot of the soundtrack to the NES-version of Shadowgate. The tray card interior is illustrated with a dungeon map and a small booklet provides a kind of tone poem description of the rooms as they match up with the track list. It is a really lovely and unique homage to D&D.
I don’t remember who hipped me to this (thank you, whoever you are!), but it was released by a small DIY label in Milan, Italy called Heimat Der Katastrophe. The immediate appeal is the design, which lovingly repurposes the artwork of the late, great Dave Trampier (The cover art is a modified DAT illustration, but I can’t source it – let me know if you recognize it). You can find Kobold pretty easy by searching “Kobold” on Bandcamp. I’d link you direct, but UGH, Instagram.
Tape Who knew? Compact cassettes aren’t dead.
Watching this (and fearing broken ankles with each loop) I can’t helping thinking about that old quote Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.
aprilsvigil
But no, if you watch closely you’ll see she doesn’t even step on the last chair. That means she had to trust that fucker to lift her gently to the ground while he was spinning down onto that chair. That takes major guts. I’d be pissing myself and fearing a broken neck if I were in her place. Kudos to her.
pleasant-trees
I can’t stop watching this.
Whoa.
Okay so this is true, but a tiny part of a wider truth.
Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…
Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him.
Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…
Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!
Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)
This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it.
Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….
Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.
The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins…
So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.
She did everything Fred Astaire did backwards, in high heels, wearing a 20 pound dress, exhausted, injured and standing in a pool of her own blood. And watching her perform, you would never know.
Why Ginger Rogers was badass The above paragraph sums it up brilliantly.
This is mesmerizing to watch.
cockaspiel
actually physically painful to watch because you know months were spent masking all those frames for each of the kajillions of transitions in this
This is incredible. The whole time while watching it I’m thinking, this is too good, It’s almost impossible to believe that it was created by anyone other than Disney. Blows my mind away.
Disney Some serious editing going on here.
jackyan reblogged
Louis Armstrong and his wife, in Egypt 1961 Check this blog!
What a wonderful world Mr and Mrs Louis Armstrong.
I was asked to do that picture, but I was committed. I had too many things to do already, which was maybe too bad. Because of the nostalgia element, it might have been fun to return to the series. But I actually thought that I'd done enough of that—that was the past, just too many years had gone by and the theme wasn’t right anymore. Also, I didn’t think the movie was going anywhere at all. So they asked me who I would recommend. I’d recently heard an Eric Serra score, a synthesized score, but a very attractive score, and I suggested that maybe this might be a new way to go for the contemporary and image. When I finally saw the movie, nothing worked. I was confused. I truly don’t know what happened. It should have worked, I believed that the idea was a good new direction for Bond. But he didn’t do anything close to what I had heard in his earlier score, the score that prompted me to make my recommendation in the first place. He just went off on another tangent.
John Barry, on the Goldeneye score, from The Score: Interviews with Film Composers
Connie Talbot covers ‘Writing’s on the Wall’ Infinitely better than the drivel that is the Sam Smith original. It shows the composition and lyrics are serviceable—even good—but the original performance is severely lacking.
And you can want who you want, boys and boys and girls and girls
It should be normal; hopefully it will be now Taylor’s finger’s on the pulse.
jackyan reblogged
Alan Hawkshaw - Mini Micro (1979)
‘Mini Micro’ High-tech for laquisharedfern.
Bones about it For those of us who were at school with Karl Urban (a.k.a. the most famous guy in our class), who is reportedly dating Katie Sackhoff, and based on the misheard taylorswift lyric.
jackyan reblogged
silencesongbird
Wtf? How many 1000s of hours of Obama tape did this person have to watch cut and clip back together with music to get this.
Cutting Obama I just finished watching the ‘Shake It off’ video (the President doing the taylorswift song). Got to admire the time taken to do these. Love the fact we still call it ‘tape’ in 2015.