Lights

Lights is Valerie Poxleitner, a Canadian singer-songwriter of the synthpop genre. I found her stuff in the wake of the seemingly sudden popularity of Owl City (who I also like but seems everyone knows about already) after his Wikipedia entry gave her a mention. Lights is maybe a couple clicks more dance-y than Owl City.

While I wouldn't go as far as putting either group in the same category (sound-wise) as bands like Erasure, Depeche Mode, OMD, etc it's nice to see that synthpop as an overall genre hasn't completely died and can even become mildly popular once in a while, heaven forbid.

yodaslap: do you listen to owl city
jeekbot: ya
jeekbot: sounds like something you might like
yodaslap: sounds just like postal service, as was confirmed in the wikipedia entry
jeekbot: postal service meets echoing green
yodaslap: just postal service meets postal service

I bought her EP LIGHTS (released in 2008) off iTunes the other day. The two singles from the EP are February Air and Drive My Soul, both of which I happen to like.

Some links:

http://www.iamlights.com/ - Official site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_(musician) - Self-explanatory

http://twitter.com/lights - If you're into the Twitter thing

It Might Get Loud

I'll let the trailer do the talking.



http://www.sonyclassics.com/itmightgetloud/

Jay-Z Declares the "Death of Auto-Tune"

Moment of silence, please, but I'm not crying.

Jay declared war on Auto-Tune on the same stage that featured performances from prominent Auto-Tuners like Ron Brownz, DJ Webstar, and former Jay tourmate The-Dream.

After his verse from Jeezy's "Put On" remix, Jay performed "D.O.A." for the first time.

http://pitchfork.com/news/35541-jay-z-declares-the-death-of-auto-tune/

Check out T-Pain's appearance in the linked shaky camera-phone video.

compression reponse

yup. thats the name of the game now. mastering engineers now are all pros at maxing out levels to the brim. most music these days is compressed to "tape." compressed during mixdown. compressed during mastering. and radiostations and TV will compress again during playback. so that your everyday pop song looks like this. with no digital headroom.



and this is a waveform of a beethoven symphony:



its one "better" than the other? not really. its just different. apples and oranges. and is compression a bad thing? not at all. its a completely necessary and very useful tool for controlling dynamics. is a lot music out there compressed to death? yup.