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War Again by Balkan Beat Box off of their new album blue eyed black boy.  Reminds me of a southeastern European Black Eyed Peas.

A couple of weeks ago I was working in the yard midafternoon right as the busses start coming to drop the kids off.  Just as my sister’s bus was coming to a stop, red lights flashing, stop arm extened, a kid nearly drove past it and the bus driver layed on the horn.  The kid stopped, bus driver was pissed, and from out of the kid’s window I heard Nuetral Milk Hotel – The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1.  I started thinking to myself, had he gone past the bus, and the cops been called, as a witness I probably would have lied in his favor, just because he was listening to decent music.  Why  stop there?  I spent the whole afternoon trying to imagine a legal system where penalties where more lenient if you were listening to good music at the time you commited the crime.  Suddenly iPods became even more valuable because every criminal would need to have one.  Even though they were more valuable,  all of the criminals already had them so they weren’t being stolen anymore.  It’s kind of strange how messed up things get and the weird positive consequences that stem from them.

Thumb Piano!

The box was already mostly made by my dad and sister years ago and was abandoned in my work area.  I sealed it up with some caulk put a lid on it and made it into an instrument.  The “keys” are nails that I hammered flat.  Using a 3lb hammer on the bottom as an anvil doesn’t work so great.  There are only 3 good notes on it right now I need to make some better metal tabs and then tune them to be useful.  If you watch the video you’ll hear the 3 good notes sound like carol of the bells, ding fries are done…

video0011

Record a cover of a song.  I haven’t picked what yet, but since my voice is so terrible it will either be an instrumental or I’ll mess around with some auto-tune t-pain style.  I’ll probably want to use both my trumpet and piano.  I’ve had both an electric piano with midi out and a soundcard with midi in for a while, but I’ve never hooked them up.  Also this will probably involve making a microphone-preamp pair to use for recording my trumped since the built in microphone on my laptop is absolute crap, and picking up the trumpet without distortion is hard without have the microphone really far away.  Hmm, and while I’m at it I’ll hook up the guitar hero: world tour drumset to the midi connection too.

Apparently this is an ipod commercial, I don’t know cause I don’t watch tv.  But what I do know is that I just had an awesome weekend, thanks friends!

Give me that thing,

give in my friend,

give me good good times around the bend

I’ll stay forever

First cd I’ve actually purchased in a long time.  The cover art is amazing, the insert tears apart into 16 separate sheets and 5 clear ones so you can put them back in any order to make your own cover art.

This is one of my favorite bands ever!  When I saw them this past summer he was just as crazy as he is in this video.  I’m not sure how many people will enjoy the balkaneskness of the music, but at least you’ll have gypsy-punk crossed off your list of genres to listen to.

Bonus for you creepy types, over to the right side you can now see the last 10 songs I’ve listened to.

I don’t really have anything to say about this song, I just want you to hear it.  I think it would be better if you didn’t watch the video, just start playing it and hide it in the background, come back here and read some of my drink reviews, then go try some of them.

Come back for another song next weekend!