I turned on Radio 1 today for the first time in years. While I know essentially nothing about the current pop music scene, the unique combination of my decades-old pop music knowledge and a tiny slice of contemporary pop music knowledge (courtesy of my far-more worldly sister) allowed me to identify this song as a Coldplay/BTS colab purely from the singers’ voices.
Unfortunately I don’t really like it :/
I love people making weird instruments out of weird things. Here’s an organ made out of a matrix of mechanical floppy drives.
You can read more about it on Ars Technica.
I enjoyed Eurogamer’s cute, affectionate retrospective of Gitaroo Man.
I always thought of Gitaroo Man as a somewhat obscure game, so it makes me happy to read other people who also hold it dear. Reading Eurogamer’s retrospective brought to mind an early episode of Michael Abbot’s podcast where he revisits Gitaroo Man, and has some kind words to say.
It’s nice that those who remember this game regard it with such affection.
I never had a PS2, and never owned Gitaroo Man. But I have extremely fond memories of playing late into the night with a particular group of friends, handing off between songs, working our way up to attempting S-ranks on hard on all songs (something I witnessed, but never managed). Very evocative of a particular time in my youth. The soundtrack hasn’t left my playlist since.
A while ago, Vi Hart (who I've mentioned before here as an author of the cool interactive essay Parable of the Polygons) made this fantastic short film about mathematics, meaning and music.
It's really something special.
This is old, but it's still absolutely fantastic.
Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.