Mashups and Massive Attack – Good Listening Times
- April 8th, 2010
- Posted in Listening . Music
- By sycobuny
- Write comment
I don’t often post about my musical tastes, as it leaves me ripe for criticism (“oh my god, you like this electro-trash?”). However, I haven’t posted recently and, in want of a more thought-out post, I’ll just list what has been occupying my ear canals for the last week or two. I mean, I added a whole category for it in my blog, might as well, right?
First off, I’ll admit readily that I’m a total mash-up whore. The idea that you can take two songs, sometimes even terrible songs on their own, and play them at the same time and come up with something awesome is just pretty neat to me. While it may seem I’ve found a few I really like in the past, such as these two Ratatat/Michael Jackson ones (I can never figure out which I like more), this Eurythmics/Lady Gaga one (in spite of the quality issues), and this Gnarls Barkley/Avalanches mashup is just crazy awesome. I miss the original video I saw of that last one, which mashed up both songs’ videos and scenes from The Shining.
But no one has quite captured my fancy as much as Robin Skouteris, who regularly tosses six or so songs into the mix and makes it work. I suggest, if you enjoy a good mash-up, go check out his videos, cause almost all of them are good in some way. However, the one I really like is an ambient mix of HIM, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, and what seems like 50 other people:
So, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s continue to a single artist. Massive Attack has been a long-standing favorite of mine. I have most of the CDs they’ve produced or been featured on. Yeah, CDs, right? I know. Anyway, somehow I missed that they released an album in February. I want to buy it, but at this point I’m still on the fence about this whole “digital media” thing. I want to avoid having more CDs to clog up my physical space, but I’m concerned that by downloading the music from iTunes or Amazon, I’ll be getting a file of inferior quality, due either to DRM or just low-rate encoding. I can’t tell much difference about the encoding cause it seems my high-range hearing is terrible, but other people complain when I put that crap on.
In the meantime, I’ve been entertaining myself by watching this incredibly trippy video for “Paradise Circus”:
Now I have to also get “The Fall,” which looks incredibly gorgeous based on this short video. Damn it YouTube, stop making me want to spend money.

Until I can get the whole embedded video thing sorted, the links for the two videos I was trying to show are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdlu_6Qb3N8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O86iI7oXYfA
Apparently you can’t embed video as a contributor, only as an admin:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/304139
For security reasons, I made a separate account without much more privileges than “write stuff”, so I don’t know if there’s an option for “allow embedded media” somewhere, but that’d be thrilling, cause I do not like the idea of having to write a post, log out, log in as admin, embed media, log out, and log back in as myself.
How about you just use admin all the time like me?
My administrator password is more “secure” than my user password. While it’s just a stupid little blog and losing it wouldn’t amount to much, especially since I have regular backups, I don’t know what the ability to install whatever plugins a malicious person wanted to would allow someone to do to the entirety of my home directory on the server, since they’d have regular code execution privileges at that point. The only thing this account is allowed to do is write posts (apparently without embedding) and approve comments on its own entries. It’s got an easier to remember password at the expense of locking up more dangerous functionality.
Of course, ironically (or whatever), in less than a week after I posted this comment, Dreamhost took my blog down “for an exploit.” It was an automated script, and I think took my vanilla “copy the directory” backup with an outdated version of wordpress as some sort of backdoor. I checked through the php files (God help me) and nothing looked amiss, so I just put it back up.