A music video from the U.N.

Dude, the U.N. totally rocks. Fer serious.

The video takes a minute to load but it's worth it, I promise.

Incredibox

For you long time readers you may remember the signing horses from way back in June 2007. It's remained one of my favorite posts and today's site is a similar but more developed concept.

On Incredibox mix a song by selecting up to 7 loops from the 14 available. When you've used a certain combination of loops it opens "bonuses" which are basically musical break downs with an accompanying visual.

Keep in mind when playing with Incredibox: the order in which you select loops effects how the loops that come after it sound. To get rid of a loop just tap on the guy performing it.

Hey Web Diversions Fans

We're packing up shop here in New York and relocating to Chicago. Posts may be scarce (or non-existent) for a little while until we get ourselves settled in. But don't worry: we promise we'll come back. And we'll miss you the whole damn time.

This isn't much in the way of a video post, but it is a good farewell to home post. See you in Chicago...

Friday Drive In: Bomb the Bass - Butterfingers

This definitely makes me wish the song was as good as the video, but damn this is cute. An animated mixing board? Yes please!

The Lost Art of the Mixtape: Maybe not so Lost After All?

Something sacred was lost when the art of the mix traveled from tape to cd. Maybe it was the knowledge that someone spent 90 minutes or so sitting on the floor in front of their stereo, thinking of you instead of dragging and dropping some files in iTunes in 15 minutes. Maybe it's just the warm glow of analog. Either way, it just ain't the same. I still proffer (and prefer!) to make people mixtapes but now most people shrug and say they don't have a cassette player. So back to the laptop I go.

But maybe there's hope for the mixtape yet, if not as a popular music medium, than at least as a cult icon of bygone days. Besides the recent books Love is a Mixtape and Thurston Moore's Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture some mixtape loving websites are starting to crop up.

First up is Cassette From My Ex, created by Found Magazine's Jason Bitner. It is filled with stories about (and track listings of) mixtapes people received from someone who loved them but doesn't now. The contributors are exciting (Claudia Gonson anyone?) and best of all you can listen to the mixtapes on the site.

Muxtape tries to bring the fun of the cassette to digital mixes. I don't know how successful it is on that front but it is a great site. Anyone can create a free account and then upload 12 songs to make your mix with. You can drag and drop the names of songs on your list around to change the order and then anyone, anywhere can listen to the mix on the Muxtape site.

Mixwit offers much the same service as Muxtape but with a different interface and a couple more goodies. Mixwit let's you add skins to your mixtape including using an image of your own. But where as Muxtape let's you upload songs from your own library, Mixwit requires you to select songs from a url, so yo uhave to host your songs online somewhere or use SeeqPod or SkreemR . Mixwit let's you share your mix on sites like Blogger and Facebook but doesn't give you a simple url to link to like Muxtape does.

So there you have it. The mixtape lives on, if only in our hearts. So go forth and mixaply!

Friday Drive In: The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist

New MP3 Blog: One Sweet Song

One Sweet Song is a new blog by musician Gina Pensiero. Every day (ish) she posts one MP3 of a song she's into and does a little review of it. It's an ecclectic mix, covering artists from The Breeders to Gal Costa. And who can say no to one free song every day?

Crazy Baseball Movie Game Thing

If I spoke whatever language this is in it would surely make a lot more sense to me. Makyu Royale seems to be some sort of flash baseball "game" where you decided what kind of pitch to throw to get the final out. It also seems like you can create your own player stats or something... There's a lot of things you can click around on but over all I can't really decipher what I'm supposed to be doing....

But the design is incredible. The animation and especially the color is superb. It takes awhile to load and you may have no clue what's going on (although you'll probably have some) but it's definitely worth a look. 

Friday Drive In: Kermit sings Elliott Smith

Palmyra - Mis En Scene

Check out this good-looking website for the indie rock band Palmyra.  They're releasing a new album, Mis En Scene,  June 14th (this Saturday) at Flux Factory in Long Island City, Queens. On the new site you can listen to three of the tracks from the new album and download a flyer for the show. 

Make sure to check out the Jess Snyder video for Palmyra's "June's Disappointment" that we posted awhile back

Also, bonus! Download free mp3s of the Palmyra songs "Apathy" and "No Where to Go". 

Friday Drive In:Field's of Industry - Point of Contention

Michiganders Fields of Industry have just released their second album, Two Dogs, A TV. This is the video for an awesome song off Two Dogs, A TV called "Point of Contention". You can buy the new album on Amazon and eMusic via Cerebrus Records.




Special Bonus! Right click to download the Fields of Industry song "I'm Not Afraid of a Fight" (or just click to listen).

Name That Theme Song!

Think you're a real TV buff? Play Name That Theme Song and put your pop culture knowledge to the test! This game has the added bonus of a 2 player option. See you on the High Scores list...

Friday Drive In: Ooh Girl

Friday Drive In: The Terrordactyls - "Devices"

This a sweet video for the Terrordactyls song "Devices", which features Kimya Dawson.

Friday Drive In: Nina Simone - Four Women

Nina Simone is one of my favorite musicians, maybe my flat out favorite. Her piano playing, her voice, and her strong, almost threatening, intensity all make her a fascinating artist. Here she is singing a haunting version of "Four Women". Written and composed by Simone, this song outlines the four most common stereotypes of black women. It continued her role as the songstress of the civil rights movement. 

This video leaves me wondering: who's Elmira? 

AlbumBase: it's ba-ack...

For any of you who enjoyed AlbumBase I'm sure you were as sad as I was when they got busted by whoever busts people for that sort of thing.

The good news is they aren't really gone! The whole ordeal has just been moved to AlbumWash.

For those of you unfamiliar with either site: this is a great resource for free mp3's. The best part is that you don't download songs individually but by album, often times including the art work. For a more detailed description, check out the review we did of AlbumBase last summer

AlbumWash seems to have less content than AlbumBase did, but it will probably take awhile for it to get back to where it was. Grab the opportunity before this site gets busted too and go get you some free music!

Friday Drive In: June's Disappointment by Palmyra

The new indie rock group Palmyra, which features former Umberto headliner Gina Pensiero, is about to release their first album, Mis-En-Scene, on the i am janet! label. 

Web Diversions is proud to present the world premiere of the music video for "June's Disappointment" one of the tracks off the new album. This video was created by artist Jess Snyder, whose video for Canry in the Cave you may remember. 

Friday Drive In: iBand

This band consists of two iPhones and a Nintendo DS. They are using PocketGuitar and iAno . Rumor has it they'll soon be adding a new member to utilize BeatPhone. THE FUTURE IS NOW PEOPLE!

Friday Drive In: White Magic

In an attempt not to ruin the awesome, I shall say no more.

Friday Drive In: A Different Kind of Blue

In 1995 a weird album by an unknown band was released and hardly noticed. The band was The Passengers and the album was called Original Soundtracks 1. Supposedly this was a collection of songs The Passengers had made for various films. Each of the films included a detailed synopsis. Take for example this description of the film "Elvis Ate America" (for which The Passengers wrote a song of the same name):

After finishing 'Popcorn', his first film, in 1978, Jekk Koons continued his emerging exploration of pop iconography with the now legendary "Elvis Ate America" - a four minute work using a fragment of super 8 footage shot by the teenage Koons at one of Presley's Las Vegas 'Rhinestone' concerts in the early seventies. The final edit of the film was destroyed by fire but Koons is considering remaking it.

Or how about "Ghost in the Shell" (the accompanying song is called "One Minute Warning")

"Ghost In The Shell" was an animation feature directed by Mamoru Oshii in 1995. It was adapted from Masamune Shirow's graphic novel where an internationally notorious computer criminal surfaces in Japan. Codenamed "The Puppet Master" for his ability to manipulate people's minds, thsi unique and mysterious 'super-hacker' is suspected of a multitude of offenses including stock market manipulation, illegal data gathering, political manoeuvring, terrorist acts and infringement of cybernetic ethics. Section 9, Japan's elite secret service is called in to capture this elusive criminal, but only to discover that the elaborate web of evidence leads back to Japan's own Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a computer virus secretly created by them as the ultimate tool in political and commercial espionage.

But here's the thing: neither of these movies exist. In fact NONE of the movies described in the liner notes of Original Soundtracks 1 exists and, really, neither do The Passengers. The whole thing was a lark put on by U2 (remember when they were still cool?) and Brian Eno. U2 decided they wanted to make some really weird music with Eno and Island Records, U2's label, felt a little hesitant about associating that weirdness with U2. And thus The Passengers were born.

Here's a video for "A Different Kind of Blue". The fake film it was associated with was "An Ordinary Day", about a couple whose Houston hi-rise apartment is actually a time machine causing them to age in reverse.



Check out the rest of the fake films' synopses.