My Morning Jacket Torso Accident Forces Band to Cancel Shows
By Mango Starr on 10-08-2008
Due to a stage accident committed by Mr. Jim James, My Morning Jacket were forced to cancel the rest of their Iowa City gig yesterday, and have now officially postponed a couple Chicago shows. I'd paraphrase the rest, but what's the point when you can read it straight from My Morning Jacket:
"As some of you may have heard we had to cancel our show last evening in Iowa City. We were finishing up the last few bars of ‘Off The Record,’ and just like any other night we were all having a great time. Jim went to get closer to the audience on his side of the stage, and as he moved forward to step onto the sub-woofer the lights darkened, and he inadvertently stepped off the stage. Upon falling, he suffered traumatic injuries to his torso, and was immediately taken to the hospital. Per the doctor's orders, Jim will be off the road and recovering from his injuries for the next two to three weeks. Sadly, we must postpone the two shows in Chicago on Thursday and Friday until further notice.For those who attended the Iowa City show, we would like to extend our gratitude for your understanding and cooperation. We take our fans and performances very seriously, and would never cancel a show unless it was absolutely necessary. Please know that we will be making every effort to return to your fine city.
Thank you so much to our fans for the kind sentiments and well-wishes on Jim's behalf. We hope for Jim's quick recovery and to be back out on the road soon.
With Love,
My Morning Jacket
Tourdates, assuming James' torso recovers by then:
$ Neil Young
Merge to Jizz Out Volcano Suns’ First Two Albums on CD for the First Time
By Mango Starr on 10-08-2008
No, not The Ruby Suns and, no, not Joe Versus the Volcano (a 1990 film starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Lloyd Bridges -- fucking great movie). I'm talking about Volcano Suns, a Boston group founded in 1983 by Mission of Burma's drummer Peter Prescott. Likened to groups like Hüsker Dü (Hüsker who?), Volcano Suns released six albums from 1985-1991 with a revolving cast of musicians.
Their first two albums, The Bright Orange Years and All Night Lotus Party, were originally released on Homestead Records, but Merge Records will do the band the honor of jizzing all over the albums January 27, 2009, just how the band always imagined. This will mark the first time the albums see release on CD, and this ain't no shitty vinyl rip using one of those shitty USB turntables either. Both discs will be remastered by Bob Weston, world-famous musician/engineer who at one point played bass for Volcano Suns.
Bonus tracks are expected, but here are the original tracklistings to get you in the mood.
The Bright Orange Years original tracklist:
I really want to watch Joe Versus the Volcano again.
Web-Friendly Musical Scores to Hit Internet, Provide Adequate Short-Term Politico-Economic Distraction to the Truly Poor and Nerdy
By Nobodaddy on 10-08-2008
Attention band geeks, comp majors, and idealistic grade school music teachers with ’70s hairstyles everywhere! Get ready to flip-on the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th and rejoice! NoteFlight, a flash-based service for composing, editing and sharing musical scores online -- which is also, I might add, free to use if you sign up for the beta version -- is here to spruce up that lonely ivory tower of yours. No Faustian pact with the devil required!
Once you've registered for that free account, you can truly let your questionably-legitimate esotericism run (relatively) wild! Shame and embarrass the tiresome, life-ruining work of those great, consumptive Romantic composers by dragging notes onto a music staff to create scores, playing them with your computer's keyboard, editing the notes with the click of a mouse, and sharing them with others within the site's database using a simple URL! You can even embed a finished score right onto your cloyingly doting ‘Rachmaninoff Rules!’ fansite if you’d like. Then, wherever fellow geeks, er, devotees encounter your score, they'll be able to play it back as if they were on the main site, even if they don't have an account. This video does an every-good-boy-does-fine kinda job of explaining the site's basic features. All you have to do is sign up, bone up, and wham-bam! You’ll be shitting-out hits like Shubert shit-out lieder.
"Making music is not a solitary pursuit -- nearly everyone who works with music eventually wants to share it," stated NoteFlight founder and presumably fruitless comp. student Joe Berkovitz. "As both software creators and musicians, our team knows how painful it is to share notated music online today. That's because most musical applications treat the Internet as an afterthought: they’re geared to saving your music on your hard disk, not to sharing your music with other people." Software creators and musicians?? Man, these guys probably know how painful a lot of things are!
But seriously folks, NoteFlight plans to launch a paid version of the service eventually, although certain features will always be free to use. Apparently, if you sign up for the beta, you get grandfathered in and won't have to pay later to register. Which is good, because if you’re excited by this product, odds are you’re poor as hell.
