Tag Archives: radiohead

Music

Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood & DOOM – Retarded Fren

November 2 – 7:01 am

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood teamed up with DOOM to record a song, and it sounds exactly like you’d expect: strange but somehow compelling.

DOOM, Thom Yorke, Johnny Greenwood – “Retarded Fren” by Treetop

Props: Pitchfork

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Geek

The Piracy Debate in England

October 4 – 12:37 pm

2009 Septiembre LILY ALLEN @ LUNA PARKThere’s been a lot of talk over the UK government response to illegal file sharing. 

The basic premise is that the UK government supports a plan to disconnect users who have been found to be illegally sharing copyrighted files.  First they get a warning, then the eventual step is the ISP stepping it to cut off access.

Now this has raised serious eyebrows all over the place, but no more so than at the Featured Artists Coalition, which is a basically a bunch of big name British musicians.  For a while, the official stance was opposition to this proposal, coming from some of the same artists that a law like this is designed to protect.

Lily Allen launched a blog (that she has subsequently removed) that called for musicians to support this, and collected submissions from other artists.  However, even this wasn’t without controversy because there are allegations that she plagarized her rather moving first post.

It still seems like she won this battle.  The FAC has now, essentially, backed down and has actually issued a statement in support of Lily Allen.  This seems like quite the turnaround, and many believe that it was simply because of Allen’s shockingly successful campaign.

I’m still not sure I believe in the internet disconnection idea, but if you take something away from this it my just be that a little publicity can be a powerful influence on politics.  It’s not exactly a novel concept, but I think this was an example of a very succesful operation.  She launched, she conquered, she deleted the blog. 

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Music

Cadence Weapon vs. Radiohead and Britney Spears gets indie-fied

October 3 – 6:44 pm

As part of their ongoing experimentation with Web 2.0, Radiohead is once again hosting a remix competition for a track from In Rainbows.  This time, it’s for the song “Reckoner.”  

The band has made each of the song’s component parts, or stems, available for purchase on iTunes.   This allows budding (and established) producers free reign to re-assemble the track’s vocals, bass, guitar, piano/strings and drums in any way they see fit.  Throw in the ability to add outside samples (but only those that are copyright-free, of course), and you can see how potentially dope this competition could be.

One of the remixes garnering some attention is by Canada’s very own Cadence Weapon.  Check it out:

Also on the remix tip is this crazy-slash-awesome remix of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” courtesy of Welikeit.indie.  We don’t normally feature a lot of Ms. Spears here at 4080, but this remix was just too good (especially at the 1:20 mark) to pass up: 

Britney Spears – Womanizer (The Teenagers Remix)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[Image yanked from For the ‘records’] 

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Music

Radiohead’s much cooler than Prince

July 5 – 5:10 am

The Coachella festival, which happened ages ago, was a huge hit.  Many big stars played there, including the one and only Prince.

Now everyone seems to love Prince, and I sure am not going to hate on the guy.  What shocked everyone was that Prince came out and paid some tribute to Radiohead by covering “Creep”. So obviously fans were pretty stoked, and rushed home to check it out on Youtube. And all was merry…for a while.

Prince, through his label, decided to make a copyright claim to Youtube and forced them to take down the videos.

Well before you knew it, Radiohead and waded into the fray and fully backed up Youtube, asking Prince to unblock the video;

“Really? He’s blocked it?” asked Yorke, who figured it was their song to block or not. “Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment.” Yorke added, “Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our … song.”

And thankfully, other sites on the ‘net still have videos of this.

I don’t think that Youtube should have bowed down, considering it can’t be a copyright claim by an artist who covered someone elses song.  Especially if he didn’t have the rights to do so.  Radiohead seemed surprised when they found out that Prince had covered the song in the first place.
[Source: Billboard]
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Music

San Francisco’s Outside Lands Festival looks awesome

May 21 – 2:23 pm

The lineup for this festival looks unreal.  It goes on August 22nd – August 24th.  If you’re ANYWHERE near the area, you better be going.

The Outside Lands Festival is like Rock the Bells for alternative music.  They’ve got some huge names playing, from Radiohead and Beck, to Tom Petty.  For the hip hoppers, they’ve got Lupe, Little Brother, the Cool Kids, and Canada’s own K’Naan.

There are craploads more too.  Broken Social Scene will be there, Stars, even Ben Harper and Jack Johnson.  A one-day ticket will cost you $85, and you can buy them here.

RADIOHEAD
BECK
MANU CHAO
THE BLACK KEYS
COLD WAR KIDS
STEEL PULSE
LYRICS BORN
BLACK MOUNTAIN
THE FELICE BROTHERS

TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS
BEN HARPER & THE INNOCENT CRIMINALS
PRIMUS
STEVE WINWOOD
CAFÉ TACVBA
LUPE FIASCO
REGINA SPEKTOR
GALACTIC’S CRESCENT CITY SOUL KREWE
M. WARD
DEVENDRA BANHART
MATT NATHANSON
TWO GALLANTS
DREDG
SIDESTEPPER
KAKI KING
THE COUP
LIARS
DONAVON FRANKENREITER
NELLIE MCKAY
GOAPELE
SEAN HAYES
RUPA & THE APRIL FISHES

JACK JOHNSON
WILCO
WIDESPREAD PANIC
RODRIGO Y GABRIELA
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE
ANDREW BIRD
SHARON JONES & THE DAP-KINGS
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
STARS
ALO
JACKIE GREENE
THE COOL KIDS
GRACE POTTER & THE NOCTURNALS
LITTLE BROTHER
BON IVER
IVAN NEVILLE’S DUMPSTAPHUNK
THE MOTHER HIPS
NICOLE ATKINS & THE SEA
K’NAAN
BACK DOOR SLAM
CULVER CITY DUB COLLECTIVE
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Music

Radiohead says “No more free music”

May 1 – 8:37 am

We’ve made a pretty big deal about Radiohead’s “pay what you want” scheme when they released In Rainbows.  It was revolutionary, we declared.  We were so proud of having a band show that maybe the major labels were inadequate, and that embracing digital distribution didn’t have to be hard.

It could change the music industry! Unless the group leading the way decided not to do it ever again.  Radiohead has decided that it was a one-time thing.

Here’s what Thommy boy has to say

“Yes. It was a one-off in terms of a story. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time,” Yorke told the Hollywood Reporter.

I guess it’s important to note that no one really has accurate numbers on just how successful the initiative was.  It was, undoubtedly, a PR coup.  It made Radiohead seem like the mighty little band standing up and thumbing their noses at the big bad labels.  But, if it wasn’t successful, it’s not exactly a sustainable model.

Ah well, I guess the grand experiment is over.  On the plus side, other bands have started to follow suit, and I can only hope that people will keep experimenting with digital distribution as an affordable method of making music available.

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Cool Music

4080Records Presents: Radiohead remix!

February 27 – 3:50 pm

Okay okay, I take it back.  As every day goes by I think I get more and more attracted to mashups.  This is the latest in our growing series of random internet compilations.

Radioheads latest album, In Rainbows, made music history when the the band decided to cut out the middleman and release the album directly the public.  When it first came out, this album was available to download from the Radiohead website on a pay-what-you-want basis.

That’s right.  You could pay whatever amount you wanted for the album and could download it.  That’s incredible.  And while it appears that no one really is sure how well the album sold online, it seems as if it went decently enough!  And the album is now available to buy in traditional methods (CDs, iTunes etc) and so you can pick it up at your corner record store.

AmpLive, one of those internet phenomena, has decided to do a little remixing of this album.  At first, in traditional legal strategy, Radiohead and/or affiliates tried to put the kibosh on the project.  Cease and desist letters rained from the electronic skies onto this poor kid.

However, after a pretty impassioned plea from AmpLive, Radiohead decided to show their class (which no one doubted) and allow the album to be released.

Here’s AmpLive’s own words about the project:

“Rainydayz Remixes is composed exclusively of source material pulled from In Rainbows, re-envisioned by Amplive and complimented by vocal work from Too $hort, MC Zumbi of Zion I, Chali2na of Jurassic 5, Codany Holiday, and Del The Funky Homosapien.”

Sounds pretty dope to me.  How can you go wrong with some of the best underground hip hop talents rapping over some of Radiohead’s beats?

Download the album below, but be sure to check out AmpLive’s site here.

http://www.onesevensevensix.com/download/AmpLive_Rainydayz_album.zip

And if you’re interested, check out AmpLive’s online plea to Radiohead.

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