Portland, Oregon, fall 2008. Club Satyricon, the revered punk venue which throughout its lengthy history has played host to some of the greatest alternative, punk and metal acts of the 80s and 90s, is currently getting down to a hybrid of hip-hop, electronica and inhuman screaming courtesy of BrokeNCYDE, four neon-clad young men whose excess of hair product is melting under the stage lights.
The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, Part 2 – Is BroNCYDE for real?

As Johnny Rotten said in 1978, at the end of the final Sex Pistols concert before the untimely death of bandmate Sid Vicious, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’
This article has nothing to do with the Pistols, except that its title was borrowed from their 1980 film and it relates to an artist whose music and image, like theirs, were carefully manufactured despite giving every appearance to the contrary. Up until December 2009, Michigan’s Andrew Wilkes-Krier [aka Andrew WK] was best known for the iconic cover of his …

You’ve got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Shimon digs it.
So now, robots can do something mere mortals can’t…………improvise. Shimon the Jazz playing robot, can listen and improvise to any musician, not in any spectacularly impressive manner, but it can capture the tone structure, a basic idea of the artists composition, and work on it from there.

Audio d-touch is making a collection of applications for real-time musical composition and performance freely available. Using a web-cam, computer, and printer, you can play sounds using image processing to recognize physical markers. You can visit the site below to get the application which includes a drum machine and a sampling sequencer, both are controlled by spatially arranging physical objects on an interactive table surface. Each object represents a sound, and its position with respect to the surface is mapped to certain playback parameters. For example, the horizontal …

If you want to learn to play the guitar it should not be that difficult. You can enroll at your local college, browse the classified ads and get a personal instructor, or pick up some video lessons. The difficulty presents itself when you want to learn to play the Banjo. No worries.  Banjo Virtuoso Tony Trischka opened his unique online banjo school today: the Tony Trischka School of Banjo!