In 1970-ish, “The Italian Elvis” Adriano Celentano recorded a song called “Prisencolinensinainciusol”. To the Italian ear it sounds like English, but to the English ear it sounds like gibberish, which is what it is. If the Joycean slurry of near-meanings wasn’t awesome enough on its own, it’s set to a stripped down, crazy-funky droning four-on-the-floor arrangement so that the whole setup prefigures both rap and disco. (That said, I think James Brown and Bob Dylan are the real influences, and there’s nothing magical about the song’s foreknowledge, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling). Add to that the boss dancing, and you have a timeless classic on your hands.

I tried to figure out how the internets learned about this, but I can only trace back so far. There’s this, announcing an edit of the song, and giving a bit of history. (Here’s the mp3 of Greg Wilson’s edit BTW.) There’s this, which gives us the black and white original:

Which is then picked up by Sasha Frere Jones, then Metafilter, then BoingBoing, and then years later, your unreliable narrator stumbles into the whole mess via an Easter egg in the game Glitch. Anyway, the important part is when you search Youtube for Prisencolinensinainciusol and uncover gems like these versions with different sets of subtitles, all set to a mashup of the two videos:

Precinct Calling Ace Vantuso / Prison Colon ends in I choose all / Freezing culmination I choose all.
hope something / poke something / awesome babe!

It’s amazing to see how we project meanings onto sounds. It’s worth adding that in Celentano’s words, from the intro to the TV show staging, the theme of the song is incommunicability, that “we don’t understand anything anymore”, and prisencolinensinainciusol means “universal love”. I also love this karaoke staging of the song for drunken Portlandians, which seems to sum it all up.

Let me just say that when I added the song to iTunes, I chose the genre “heaven”.

God damn. There’s also a video for It Ain’t Hard to Tell.

I expect him to fizzle out any day now. But no, it just gets worse – recently I saw two twentysomething males on the streetcar sporting Bieb hair. (Yeah, twentysomething.)

However, his recent showing at 299 Queen St. drew disappointing crowds. It was because of the weather alert; presumably the parents of the would-be throngs had prioritized blizzard avoidance over temporary satiation of their tweens’ crush glands. The barricades ran crowdless down to Richmond. Pay duty officers stood around, bored. The storm never materialized. It was the opposite image of what was required: what good are your fans if they won’t stand around for hours in a blizzard? Especially a pretend one?

Perhaps that was the moment Bieber began his inevitable substance abuse problem – an exploratory first lungful of delicious hair product.

Shutter Island has many delights. Even a sub-par picture by Marty Scorsleazy is sure to be full of masterful craft moments, as his crew is top notch. This one is no exception: shot by Rob Richardson, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, designed by Dante Ferretti, the names are as predictable as they are excellent. One surprise is old Scorcese pal Robbie Robertson as music supervisor. In the Kubrick style, there is no original score, so this job is more important than simply finding pop songs to play in the background of bar scenes. Even more Kubrickian is the inclusion of Ligeti and Penderecki (you might remember us from such modernist horror scores as: The Shining), but there’s also some Eno, some Cage. One powerful piece is “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, a beautiful, languid, melancholy, near-minimalist string piece. The soundtrack is great. (So is the film, by the way.)

Shutter Island’s last act is full of surprises. Perhaps the greatest – not a spoiler! – is the song that plays over the credits. It’s surprising because it’s a mashup, of the aforementioned Richter track with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”. It’s also surprising because it’s a beautiful mashup, perhaps the greatest I’ve heard. The only credit for the composite work is “mixed by Robbie Robertson”. Quite a set of ears on that dude, to say nothing of the brain that thought of blending these two sources that are so dissimilar but also simply made to be together. Have a listen, but also chase down the originals to see what I’m talking about.

Shit dude, forgot to post this here. It’s a massive 40-something-samples-in-8-minutes mashup frenzy featuring Slick Rick, Big Baby Jesus, Chewbacca, Fucked Up, Raffi, Ella Fitzgerald, and whatever else seemed like a good idea at the time.

SHE: Oh Shit, Dog shit
Suck my dick, bitch

HE: No, its:
Raw shit, aw shit
Slapped in the face with dog shit
I see some haters
Get on the ground and shine my balls, bitch
No, that’s the second half. The first is… What is it?

IPOD: Raw shit, raw kicks
Get in the way, might get your jaw split
Aw shit, I see some haters
Don’t step to me until you get some balls, bitch
Raw shit, raw spit
Get smacked in the face with dog shit
Aw shit, I see some bitches
Get on the floor and shine my balls, bitch

HE: Pretty hard to remember.

Did a little mashup action here: Led Zeppelin vs. Silent Hill.

I watched both the original and the remade Friday the 13th last weekend; I had never seen either. The remake was pretty meh, as could be expected. The original was surprisingly shitty. It’s essentially plotless until the end, when there’s a twist. But it’s not like the twist is especially powerful, since you don’t give a shit about any of the characters.

You may have heard Psycho described as the godfather of slasher cinema, and Friday the 13th seems to be the missing link, as it’s heavily indebted to Psycho. Not to say it’s Psycho-good, it’s just clearly very much inspired by.

The film has a moment of beauty, though, right at the end. And it comes with some beautiful music. I felt inspired to do a little chop-up job on both, and here it is.

He’s Still Out There from dsankey on Vimeo.

Wow, have I really taken this long to post this here? Musical alter-ego Snake Eyes has released an EP. Grab that shit. If you like hip-hop and country, your idiosyncratic tastes are to be commended, and you should totally listen to this album. It’s free for what may well be a limited time – I just ask that you subscribe to the Snake Eyes RSS feed, which will undoubtedly be pretty low-traffic.

Thanks to Matt for turning me on to Fucked Up, the Toronto hardcore band. I haven’t listened to hardcore since the early 90s, but this shit is awesome. A couple quotes from the wiki entry demonstrate why:

• “This single was in tribute to the Viennese Actionism a far left art movement during the 1960s, and the Situationist International. The record featured one song spread over two sides, and illegible liner notes, meant to shock and annoy the buyer.”

• “The Looking for Gold 12” contained no liner notes or credits, no song titles, and a hidden track. It was self-released by the band in 2004 in two limited runs of 300 & 400 copies and immediately became one of the most sought-after modern hardcore punk releases, selling for over $100 on internet auction sites like ebay. The title track was 17 minutes long, used 19 guitar tracks, had a three minute drum solo and contained 4 minutes of whistling, all unconventional by punk rock song-writing standards.”

And here’s the performance on MTV Canada (thanks, Teddy). It has to be some of the best television I’ve seen in a while.

And here’s their blog. I think.

This is pretty rad. It’s a service that manages your band’s site, taking care of versioning, streaming, paid and free downloads etc. Interview with the founder on waxy.org, and also this screencast:

Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.

OK let’s see here, fire up robot radar and analyze: what happened in the past week?

The post-E3 review drew to a close with game critics choosing their nominees for the best games of E3, with Fallout 3, Spore, Little Big Planet and Gears of War 2 doing well. (I’m just going to shrug and forego judging the wisdom of choosing the ‘best’ unreleased games.)

Nintendo got aggressive and sued flashcart makers like R4 for enabling piracy. As CDM points out, this has a special impact on the homebrew music scene, which relies on flashcarts, and which contrasted with the Japanese release of the first commercial DS music title, Korg’s DS-10. And, inevitably, the DS-10 ROM was leaked, so various musicians downloaded it and loaded it onto their flashcarts and used it while waiting for their legal, Japanese import to arrive.

Comi-con just wrapped up, and I’m still sorting though what went down there, but a highlight seems to be some new Watchmen footage (cam of trailer). There was a Terminator: Salvation panel as well. Oh, and Method Man showed up to promote his comic! Yes, a Method Man comic.

I linked to it earlier in the week but man, thanks to doombot for reminding me to actually watch Dr. Horrible. It’s Joss Whedon, and it’s beyond awesome. Enjoy it soon as it vanishes on sunday.

Perhaps the association superhero=jock, supervillain=nerd was always obvious to everyone, but it only breaks through my thick skull with the help of Captain Hammer’s… er, hammer. Whedon really loads up every superhero cliche with meaning. The freeze ray is what will let the awkward Horrible pause time to think up something witty to say to his crush, for example. And hey, you get lots of jokes, songs and Nathan Filion.

Whedon is such a great writer that even this master plan is a joy to read.

As of yesterday, Girl Talk’s latest release Don’t Feed the Animals is available for download from Illegal Art on a pay what you can basis. We had some people over last night and I played this twice back-to-back and everyone was thrilled. It’s mashup taken to its logical, ADD, lawyer-nightmare extreme, hearkening back to the megamixes of Steinski (another Illegal Artist). People just get this delighted look on their faces when they hear some of the combinations. If you like it, get Night Ripper as well, and check out the Steinski retrospective also available on the site.

Sigh. I’ve been working on a big review of GTA IV, but it’s taking me forever. I want to be thorough and fair. And you spend so many hours playing a game, it seems like a waste to review it in two paragraphs, so shit gets long. I also have perfectionist tendencies, so massaging every sentence of a multi-page review gets a little time-consuming and frustrating.

Anyway, long story short I decided I needed to stop making a big production out of writing for this site so much and just let some shit fly. I’ve been playing Rock Band solo drum tour; y’all still playing Rock Band? I sure as hell am. Besides actual band playing, I went through guitar solo tour on medium, about halfway through it again on hard and then switched to drums. I got some of those drum silencers (which work fabulously, by the way) and now I don’t feel neighbour guilt about banging the gongs for an hour or two here and there. I had done some drumming in band play so I just said fuckit, I’m doing this on hard, baby. And, wow. Best time ever. Look out, Pert and Bonham. I tore through the first couple cities without failing once. I even got 99% on one song. Now, shit toughened up for real around “Blitzkrieg Bop” – definitely had to practice a few. But I am committed to excellence now. And hey, it’s kind of a workout! Sorta.

I’m late late late on this but better late than never – the Hipster, Please! remix & mashup album Ol’ Nerdy Bastard was released last week and is awesome. Check ‘er out fer sure.

Love this stuff!

In my ever increasing exploration of tunage to share with you I found this version of Kraftwerk’s Pocket Calculator.

Love the voice in this one. Video is just static though so heed it not…Just enjoy the sounds!

I also really liked this video for Computer Love:

And here’s an awesome Japanese version too:

But the MOST awesome thing is a live tv performance video of Kraftwerk back in the 70’s. Has if this isn’t a frakking cool performance! These guys are dedicated to the techno logical.

So I continue on with my musical tributes for the end of dreadful and long weeks. Actually, this week the weather here in Toronto has been fab, some dark skies but for the most part it’s been great and only getting better. That makes me happy. And when I am happy I like thinking of other things that delight me. Enter classic NES themes! I found this collection of the Top 15 NES themes and I have to say I agree with all of them (mostly, Link isn’t high enough on the scale).

My favourite right now after hearing them has to be Double Dragon. It’s just so good. I also have a mad crazy urge to play Mega Man, any version, again.

Anyway, enjoy and have a great sunny weekend!

Oh my god. Dudes. So for this Friday’s tune I give you Total Control by Golden Shower. The band consists of two guys and a computer virus, awesome. No, for serials it’s a great story.

Anyway, love this video. Robot Funk indeed…

I like this. Someone has taken Boston’s Foreplay and turned it into 8-bit.

I think that’s just nifty.