Quite Random

I attended a film workshop with Central School of Speech and Drama a short while ago, a rushed thing that was part of a staff ‘team building’ type exercise at work. The staff event was somewhere beyond odd. It was all designed to get everyone  in the office to express themselves, unleash their talents. There were moments awkward enough to make me want to gouge out my own eyeballs. Theatrical types with voices like warm chocolate make you want to listen to poetry. Muscular, athletic people performing interpretive dance are a pleasure to behold (if that’s your cuppa). IT professionals in jeans pushing office chairs round a stage or pretending to be trees just look like contestants on The Generation Game, however. Never again.

I digress, back to the film workshop. For inspiration, our Central dude played us a a stop-frame animation on YouTube made as part of a film project. The animation was nice enough, but I really liked the music. With nothing identifying the tune, it’s at times like this that Shazam comes into its own. I whipped out my phone, and Shazam tagged the track. It took ages to find it, partly because the album the track is from has been discontinued – even the band’s label couldn’t help. Eventually I tracked the music down on YouTube again, and stripped out the MP3 using an online YouTube to MP3 converter:

Homelife – Tractor Chain (from the album ‘Cho Cho’)

I’ve written before about rare music – how MP3 files living on the Internet are preserving rock music from 1960s Cambodia that may have disappeared completely if left on corruptable, chewable tapes and scratchable records. Sublime Frequencies in Seattle collect and preserve music from all over the world, and raremp3.co.uk offers a stack of rare music in MP3 format.

Thousands of blogs offer rare tracks, B-sides, remixes and mashups, and rootling through them is nearly as enjoyable as flipping through scratchy-covered dusty LPs in an independent record store. Yes sir, authentic limited edition this one – embedded artwork by Warhol, no less. Only fifty ever encoded. 320 kbit/s? Pffft, that’s tricky. And as for FLAC, you’re having a laugh.

Some rare music online (recommendations welcome)

• Sublime Frequencies
• Rare MP3 Music
• Cambodia Rocks (Cambodian rock music from the 1960s and 70s taken from cassette tapes bought in Phnom Penh)