1. Return of the North Star (feat. Papu Wu) 2. House of Flying Daggers (feat. Inspectah Deck, Ghostface Killah and Method Man) 3. Sonny's Missing (Produced by Pete Rock) 4. Pyrex Vision (Produced by Marley Marl) 5. Cold Outside (feat. Ghostface Killah and Sugar Bang) 6. Black Mozart (feat. Inspectah Deck) 7. New Wu (feat. Method Man and Ghostface Killah) 8. Penitentiary (feat. Ghostface Killah) 9. Surgical Gloves 10. Broken Safety (feat. Jadakiss and Styles P) 11. Canal Street 12. Ason Jones 13. Have Mercy (feat. Beanie Sigel and Blue Raspberry) 14. 10 Bricks (feat. Cappadonna and Ghostface Killah) 15. Fat Lady Sings 16. Catalina (feat. Lyfe Jennings) 17. We Will Rob You (feat. Slick Rick, GZA and Masta Killa) 18. About Me 19. Mean Streets (feat. Inspectah Deck and Ghostface Killah) 20. Kiss The Ring (feat. Inspectah Deck and Masta Killa) 21. South Star (feat. Papa Wu)
Aaaaah yes! The first video from the album "It's Always Something" is here! Big ups to the Rev. Scooter Jackson for the filming & editing work . . . Ya'll peep the vid below, leave some comments and follow the Reverend's blog too!
Here's some shots of the countryside where I'm currently kickin it - visiting my Moms & little sisters - in the great state of Oregon - Williams, Oregon to be exact . . . It's in Southeastern OR close to Medford and Grant's Pass . . . Great country, great weather (90 - a DRY 90 during the day, and 50 at night!), and did you know that Mary Jane is legal to grow AND possess here? If not, ya learn something new everyday . . . Be back on the 26th . . . TOO SOON!!!
"There is enough energy in high altitude winds to power civilization 100 times over; and sooner or later, we're going to learn to tap into the power of winds and use it to run civilization." Says Ken Caldeira, Professor of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. (Discovery Channel, Project Earth, Infinite Winds episode)
Magenn Power's high altitude wind turbine called MARS is a Wind Power Anywhere™ solution with distinct advantages over existing Conventional Wind Turbines and Diesel Generating Systems including: global deployment, lower costs, better operational performance, and greater environmental advantages.
MARS is a lighter-than-air tethered wind turbine that rotates about a horizontal axis in response to wind, generating electrical energy. This electrical energy is transferred down the 1000-foot tether for immediate use, or to a set of batteries for later use, or to the power grid. Helium sustains MARS and allows it to ascend to a higher altitude than traditional wind turbines. MARS captures the energy available in the 600 to 1000-foot low level and nocturnal jet streams that exist almost everywhere. MARS rotation also generates the "Magnus effect" which provides additional lift, keeps the MARS stabilized, and positions it within a very controlled and restricted location to adhere to FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) & Transport Canada guidelines.
The name Les Paul is synonymous with the electric guitar. As a player, inventor and recording artist, Paul has been an innovator his entire life. Born Lester William Polfus in 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Paul built his first crystal radio at age nine - which was about the time he first picked up a guitar. By age 13 he was performing semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist and working diligently on sound-related inventions. In 1941, Paul built his first solid-body electric guitar, and he continued to make refinements to his prototype throughout the decade. It’s safe to say that rock and roll as we know it would not exist without his invention.
But Les Paul didn’t stop there. He also refined the technology of sound recording, developing revolutionary engineering techniques such as close miking, echo delay, overdubbing and multitracking. He also busied himself as a versatile bandleader and performer who could play jazz, country and pop.
The guitar that bears his name – the Gibson Les Paul – is his crowning achievement. It grew out of his desire, as a musician and inventor, to create a stringed instrument that could make electronic sound without distorting. What he came up with, after almost a decade of work, was a solid bodied instrument – that is, one that didn’t have the deep, resonant chamber of an acoustic guitar.
As he told writer Jim O’Donnell, “What I wanted to do is not have two things vibrating. I wanted the string to vibrate and nothing else. I wanted the guitar to sustain longer than an acoustical box and have different sounds than an acoustical box.” The fact that the guitar’s body was solid allowed for the sound of a plucked string to sustain, as its vibrating energy was not dissipated in a reverberant acoustic chamber.
He experimented with different designs until he had his non-vibrating guitar body, which he called “The Log.” Gibson Guitars initially turned him down, calling his invention “a broomstick with pickups” and pointing out that this meant guitarists would now have to carry around two instruments – one electric and one acoustic – which they viewed as prohibitively inconvenient. As a result, Paul was beaten to the marketplace by Leo Fender, whose Fender Broadcaster – the first mass-produced solidbody electric guitar – was introduced in 1948. That same year, however, Paul unveiled overdubbing, a breakthrough recording technique that would forever change music. Capitol Records released the Paul’s experimental eight-track recordings of “Lover (When You’re Near Me)” and “Brazil,” which he’d made in his garage workshop.
Paul’s career as a musician nearly came to an end in 1948, when he suffered near-fatal car accident in Oklahoma, skidding off a bridge into a river during a snowstorm. The guitarist shattered his right arm and elbow, and he also broke his back, ribs, nose and collarbone. He managed to salvage his career as a musician by instructing surgeons to set his arm at an angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a year and a half to recover.
Paul subsequently made his mark as a jazz-pop musician extraordinaire, recording as a duo with his wife, singer Mary Ford (who was born Colleen Summers). Their biggest hits included “How High the Moon” (1951) and “Vaya Con Dios” (1953), both reaching #1. The recordings of Les Paul and Mary Ford are noteworthy for Paul’s pioneering use of overdubbing - i.e., layering guitar parts one atop another, a technique also referred to as multitracking or “sound on sound” recording. He also speeded up the sound of his guitar. The results were bright, bubbly and a little otherworldly - just the sort of music you might expect from an inventor with an ear for the future.
In 1952, Les Paul introduced the first eight-track tape recorder (designed by Paul and marketed by Ampex) and, more significantly for the future of rock and roll, finally saw the release of the the gold-top solid body electric guitar that bears his name. Gibson’s Les Paul Standard went on to become one of the most popular of all models of electric guitar. Built and marketed by Gibson, with continuous advances and refinements from Paul in such areas as low-impedance pickup technology, the Les Paul is a staple instrument among many of rock’s greatest guitarists. He introduced the latest model in 2008. According to Gibson U.S.A., its design amendments include “a new asymmetrical neck profile that makes it one of the most comfortable and playable necks ever offered on any guitar.”
The list of musicians associated with the Gibson Les Paul include Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton,, Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Page. Paul is guitarist Steve Miller’s godfather. Jimi Hendrix consulted him about the construction of Electric Lady Studios. In a British periodical, Led Zeppelin’s Page once wrote of Paul, “He’s the man who started everything. He’s just a genius.” While sharing a stage with Paul, Eddie Van Halen once told him, “Without the things you’ve done, I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I do.”
Over the ensuing decades Les Paul has remained active on all fronts. He recorded a Grammy-winning album of instrumental duets with Chet Atkins, Chester and Lester, in 1977. From the mid-Eighties through the mid-Nineties, he performed weekly at Fat Tuesday’s, a New York City jazz club. In 2005, at the age of 90, he released American Made/World Played, which featured guest spots from several of his most illustrious rock and roll disciples and won him a pair of Grammys.
Paul performed weekly – at New York’s Iridium Jazz Club – and indulged his inventor’s curiosity in a basement workshop at home in Mahwah, New Jersey up until his death on August 13, 2009.
Well . . . the other portfolio has size issues on some laptops so I took a page (no pun intended!) from my man Garcia's site and used this dope app called TiltViewer . . . Anyways, here's the lick - so hit em up!
Check out my portfolio of graphics constructed over the past couple of years. There are 3 different sections - FLIERS : LOGOS : ALBUM ARTWORK - and you must have Flash installed on your machine to be able to view them. If you don't have Flash, you can get it here.
Drove down to check SoS on tour for their new album "No More Heroes," and they came through and inspired like always. Swamburger is the essence of the word 'beast' on the mic - dude is bananas! DaVinci should be sold on the market along with several other beat machines - his concepts and methods are MADNESS! Alexandra brings that lovely voice and powerful message that only a siren could . . . And Tonya stays ducked off in the cut until it comes time to drop that spoken word on em . . . AND BAM!!!
DaVinci doing with his kicks what most can't even do with their hands!!!
Oh that's not enuff? Well - I'll just handle 2 MPC's and a Kaos pad with my FACE!!!
01. Marvel 02. Harriet Tubman Pt. 2 03. New Sheriff In Town 04. Gotham City Chase Scene 05. Look 06. Popcorn 07. The Curse 08. Dolla Dolla 09. The Roots Of Kinte 10. Fittin’ In 11. Death Of The Muse (Feat. Ma Dukes, J-Live & Chali 2na) 12. 4 People 13. Heroes 14. Solillquy (The 4-Telling) 15. Bulletproof 16. No More Heroes (The Illusion Of Silence)
This is the hottest rendetion of Beat It out there . . . Save for the random intervals of the ass clowns trying to steal the bands' thunder . . . This is my man Kaneda's father-in-law and uncles-in-law . . . YOU BETTA BEAT IT!!! R.I.P MJ . . . EZ
(WIRED) -- Like an aspiring indie band, the Cybraphon has many instruments, plays them on an irregular schedule, likes to have an audience around it -- and obsesses over comments on its blog, the number of friends it has on Facebook and how many fans follow it on MySpace. The Cybraphon plays music based on how well its blog and social networking pages are doing.
The Cybraphon plays music based on how well its blog and social networking pages are doing.
The difference is that it is a handcrafted musical robot and one whose emotion meter swings from delirium to desolation based on its online popularity at any given moment.
"The Cybraphon has an almost egotistical desire for fame," says Simon Kirby, one of the creators of the robot.
When the needle hits rapture, the Cybraphon's built-in orchestra of mechanized acoustic instruments clang in harmony to belt out an upbeat tune. But without online attention it slips into dejection and spews out a sad melody.
Three U.K. based artists -- Kirby, Ziggy Campbell and Tommy Pheron -- built the robot over eight months using a £5,000 grant. It's a mechanical marvel that stuns with its attention to detail and construction. An antique wardrobe houses more than 60 robotic components including musical instruments such as cymbals and an organ as well as electronic parts including a PC and a controller. Kirby and his colleagues first created a sketch of what they wanted and then sourced the parts from antique stores, junk shops and donations.
The Cybraphon's emotions are accessible via a Twitter feed but also appear on a on a 100 year-old galvanometer housed in the wardrobe (pictured above).
Kirby says the Cybraphon is devised as a "tongue-in-cheek comment on people's obsession with online celebrity." And it is almost Julia Allison-esque in its quest for attention. The device scours the web all day looking for mentions of itself and tracking how many friends it has on Facebook and MySpace.
"It is happy when it feels its popularity increases but is miserable if it is being ignored," says Kirby.
The musical instruments inside the wardrobe include an Indian classical instrument called a Shruti box, an organ and cymbals. But they had to be tweaked to play on their own. The team attached a motor-driven crank to the drives of the Shruti box and modified it with 13 robotic servos. The organ was retro-fitted with robotic keys while a fan pumps air through it. Cybraphon includes 12 chimes that are struck by suspended solenoids and percussion instruments that are hit by beaters attached to motors. A custom made vinyl record is cued to play through antique brass gramophone horns.
The Cybraphon also has infra-red based motion detectors to sense when there are people around it. It then comes alive, playing the music that is driven by its current mood.
"The Cybraphon is switched on all the time but it really wakes up when someone walks up to it," says Kirby.
The brain of the system is a Macbook Pro notebook hidden inside one of the drawers of the wardrobe. "That, a few Arduino boards and lots of wire," says Kirby.
The computer runs software written in Python and MAX/MSP to monitor the web and update Cybraphon's emotions according to its rate at which its popularity is changing. "The software takes email alerts from Facebook, Google and so on, processes them and compares the current activity to that in the last 24 or 48 hours to calculate the rate of change," explains Kirby.
But no matter how much attention the Cybraphon gets, it always eventually slips into depression, says Kirby. That means online attention could cheer up the Cybraphon in the short term but once the initial excitement dies down, the robot is disillusioned. "We modeled it on an insecure, egotistical band," he says.
Though the Cybraphon's current mood is accessible via Twitter, and you can follow it on Facebook or MySpace, its music is not available online. However, you can watch a demo video of it here.
"A streaming feed, although perhaps a nice idea, is possibly too literal," says Ziggy Campbell, one of the creators of the Cybraphon. "Regular bands don't stream live performances all day long and neither does Cybraphon. It keeps things more exclusive."
The Cybraphon will be shown at the Inspace gallery in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Art Festival in August.
Campbell says the Cybraphon's continued existence amuses him.
"Bands by their very nature tend to be volatile and prone to implosion," he says. "I'm surprised that the Cybraphon, a highly neurotic beast with some questionable electrical wiring, hasn't hit self destruct yet."
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