I can’t look out my office window on a grey rainy day like today without imagining Spinners weaving through the buildings, crowds of people with glowing umbrellas and shady eyeball craftsmen working their frigid magic on the streets.And as the 21st century grinds on, I’m more and more convinced that Blade Runner is coming true. It’s like some window in an alternate future was left open, just a crack, and all that alternate reality is whispering through, one invention at a time.

Listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack really helps this vision coalesce, too. Vangelis’ haunting ambient score over the sounds of busy, rainy city life are mixing really well with the view outside. A great geek friend of mine hooked me up with the motherlode too, a while back: a collection of ambient background noise and sound effects from Blade Runner.

And of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t want to share … help yourselves to ambient background sound and effects from Blade Runner, as well as Vangelis’ score, laid over sounds from the film:

Blade Runner sound effects

Vangelis’ Blade Runner Soundtrack, Part 1
Vangelis’ Blade Runner Soundtrack, Part 2

If any of you are motivated to mash up or remix these sounds into something, please share …

Popularity: 25% [?]

The previously mentioned lord and master of 21st-century New York subway graffiti is at it again. He’s started a Flickr page under the name “Poster Boy NYC” with a lot more images, but these are the ones I liked the best out of the current crop of new releases.

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Popularity: 26% [?]

Last week, I posted about the giant mashed-up colorform graffiti on the New York Subway system. The post got picked up by Gawker, Art Fag City, Neatorama and some others, garnering a little attention.

A few days later, I got a comment that said:

i know the guy who does this stuff. i can get you more info and pictures of the originals if you’re interested. these pics don’t do the originals justice. you have pics of them after they’ve been tampered with …

I got a bunch more photos out of him, and he’s right … these are way, way more fun, especially this Iron Man remix:

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Popularity: 27% [?]

Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.

Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”:

You can see the whole billboard and a gold-bikini Princess Leia mixed with Iron Man after the jump …

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Popularity: 57% [?]

I posted a link to an unaccompanied, unreleased vocal track by Smashmouth about a week ago, noting how spectacularly god-awful it was. It got a little attention from BoingBoing and a few other blogs … and as you might imagine, the comments just came rolling in. Many of them more or less agreed with this guy, who said

How is this humorous or worthy of posting? This is a raw, dry vocal track (obviously through a quality pre and with compression applied). There is no music and no discernible reverb applied to the vocal. It seems most of the negative commentary on this comes from folks who have no experience in the audio field, or comes from people with little experience with music production.

True. Very true. However. I have no experience in the stand-up comedy field, and little to no experience in stage production — but I stand by the fact that Gallagher sucks, no matter how well-crafted his props are.

Admittedly, the track was unreleased, just left to lie there in the studio. And if someone took a page out of one of my notebooks, scanned it, posted it and laughed at it I wouldn’t be too thrilled. But if I had a couple smash hits under my belt, millions in the bank, money for nothing and chicks for free, I’d probably shake the insult off pretty quick.

A couple folks got in the act, too, and actually made and posted mashups of the track! I couldn’t be more thrilled, frankly. Web 2.0 — it lets so many strangers strewn about the country, throughout time, lift our voices in a brilliant, unique harmony. Or in this case, burp the entire alphabet.

Check out the mashups, though:

From Chris at Agents and Reactants: Terrible Smashmouth Electro Mashup

From Jimbo, who says

… his vocals reminded me a little of trent reznor so i took a recent NIN remix and added Steve Harwell’s vocals on top, made a purdy nice mashup …

Nine Inch Mouth

If anyone else has got one, I’d love to hear it …

Popularity: 8% [?]

Get over FM radio, forget black lights and cheap weed and wait until that awful memory of slow-dancing to “Stairway” dies a quiet, smothering death deep in the frustrated folds on your 9th-grade brain. Get past indie rock, forget techno and see punk rock for the marketing technique it’s become.

Then try Led Zeppelin again.

They never changed, they never died, they never had any goals or grand artistic mission beyond forming up like five fingers on the hand of God and rocking you like a giant floppy sock puppet. They do it time and again, year after year and squeal after squeal — they are thunder, they are the thudding ocean and a perfect glass of bourbon on a hot summer evening.

Talk about Page all you like — his guitar was hot lava, but Bonham’s drums were the plate tectonics that let that lava squirt up so pretty in the first place. Every beat was perfect and every hit was an asteroid making a crater. Bonham did for drums what Leatherface did for chainsaws — nobody will ever hear them the same way again.

I found these tracks, outtakes from Zeppelin’s recording of “In Through the Out Door.” Bonzo’s totally isolated from the band, apart from studio chatter and the faint sound of Zeppelin down the hall in their soundproof cubicles.

These things are dense, luscious snapshots of perfect rhythm and a window into a time long dead, a time when rock was a dinosaur and dinosaurs ruled the earth. Listen in bed, in the dark, with your eyes shut. You can see the smoke curling up from a cigarette, smell the sweat spreading across a shirt and hear the engineer sigh.

And man, are these ever ripe for mashups, remixes and some incredible hip-hop. Go nuts if you’re inclined, send me what you make with ‘em and I’ll definitely post it here.

Here’s the link, crammed with SEO keywords:
Bonzo bangs out Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door

Popularity: 13% [?]