Electronic Music NewsWhat Did You Call It?
The News Review:
- What Did You Call It?
- Desire for electronic devices cuts across all boundaries
- Rockit man
- Microsoft makes Facebook a club you don’t want to join
What Did You Call It?
New York Times – Oct 28, 2007
” ne featured a clip from “The prah Winfrey Show” at the Miraval resort in Tucson in which Ms. Winfrey attached to a wire and wearing a harness around the lower half of her body swings through the air and announces “My vajayjay is paining me. ” A YouTube video set the clip to electronic music with Ms. Winfrey as an unwitting M. The swift adoption of vajayjay is not simply about pop culture’s ability to embrace new slang. Neologisms are always percolating.
Desire for electronic devices cuts across all boundaries
Pakistan Dawn – Oct 28, 2007
The Chinese market is dominated by mobile phones as many consumers get their hands on their first handset while the Japanese market is dominated by people upgrading to plasma and LCD TVs. Nowhere is the general trend towards declining prices boosting sales more obvious than in the mobile or portable device market. GfK estimates that more than 1. 6bn portable devices from mobile phones to digital music players will be sold next year. Portable devices have become big sellers in developed markets as music has gone digital and Apple’s iPod has revolutionised the market more than 10m were sold in the last three months alone. But it is mobile phones that make up the lion’s share of the portable device market. An estimated 3 billion people have a mobile phone and more than a billion more phones are expected to be sold this year alone.
Rockit man
Malaysia Star – Oct 28, 2007
His band members’ original names by the way were Bennie Maupin Eddie Henderson Julian Priester Buster Williams and Billy Hart. Even more outlandish than their costumes and names was the otherworldly music the group made during its three years together. Boldly announced by the 1970 album that like Hancock and the group was also dubbed Mwandishi the sextet’s music was a remarkable fusion of traditional African rhythms complex jazz idioms the odd funk groove and oodles of electronic experimentation and free-form improvisation. What emerged naturally enough was music that bore little resemblance to all that had come before. Even the most daring works of rnette Coleman John Coltrane Thelonious Monk and co was never played with the same sort of spanking new technology that the Mwandishi band was exposed to. The Mwandishi album contained stinato which was a daring tribute to Black Power activist Angela Davies the funky You’ll Know When You Get There and the free-form epic Wandering Spirit Song which was loosely written by Priester who had cut his teeth with another jazz maverick Sun Ra. This set a formula for Mwandishi’s records whereby each album featured two shorter 10 minutes (or so) tracks and a side-long improvisational epic.
Microsoft makes Facebook a club you don’t want to join
Guardian Unlimited – Oct 28, 2007
It’s the iPod Touch and you can think of it as the Apple iPhone without all that annoying stuff for making voice calls. It has the same elegant glass-and-stainless-steel construction and the same touch-based user interface. As a colleague of mine said: who would have thought 10 years ago that Unix machines would wind up looking like this?The device plays music of course; that’s why it’s called an iPod. But that’s the least interesting thing about it. The Touch is in fact the best hand-held browsing machine we have yet seen. Its capacity to render web pages and make them easily readable is simply astounding. And it does wi-fi like a native… For decades the Holy Grail of the computing industry has been the UND – the Ultimate Networked Device – because the only way to harness the potential of a ubiquitous internet is to have a small device that can always provide a window on to it. Various industries fantasised that their technology might be the basis for such a device. Newspapers for example thought it would be ‘electronic paper’ ie a lightweight foldable high-resolution display. The mobile phone industry fantasised it would be a phone. Television executives fondly imagined that the magical device would be a TV.