Drop The Needle, It's Christmas

2011-09-20T01:45:00.000+01:00

So it's the end of International talk like a pirate day and so to "celebrate" and hopefully start of some better updating of this blog here's a Pirate themed play list:

Captain Dan & The Scurvy Crew - A Pirate Christmas
The only pirate rap group around (and only one needed) with a track form a normal album but with a pretty entertaining video

The Scurvy Pirates - Christmas Day in Pirate-Town
I can't much on this other than this suggesting it was freebie.

Gastronomical Unit - Pirate's 12 Days Of Christmas
I got this from the now defunct music.download.com so it's now only available to buy but you can be a pirate and have yet another bad parody of the 12DoC.

Tom Smith - A Pirate Christmas
From iTom 2.0 which you can buy on the album even though it's got a CC licence

Rapp Scallion - Can of Grog
From their Me Christmas Grog EP that I can't find anywhere but they have this one track on Last.FM for download and only samples the other two.

But saving the best till last
Kevin Mahler has two tracks on two of the Suburban Sprawl Music XMAS compilations
Pirate at Christmastime (2002) and Pirate's Christmas (2003)

And of course if you need more you can buy a whole album of Pirate Christmas songs I'd add it to my collection if it was a hell of a lot cheaper.

For Some Children The Grinch Didn't Steal Christmas: The Man Did

2009-11-19T19:35:00.001Z

I've had this blog too long, to not have post this up yet. So here it is gwEm and Counter Reset's awesome:

Star Child.

Tracking the Atari ST YM2149 using his very own maxYMiser tracker gwEm pelts out the raving chiptunes while Counter Reset beats out the drums for me and for you while they both "throw lyrics like snow balls down your neck".

Grab this now, it's already to late now Windows 7 is out.

The Christmas Adventures of UltraJoeBot

2009-11-10T22:20:00.001Z

Browsing through some of last years downloads I noticed one of the tracks was from an album with Binary in the title which for some reason (probably my love for chiptunes) made it stick out. I played the track and before it had even fully kicked in I was hunting down this We Wish You A Binary Christmas and A Happy New York album it said the track was from. And thanks to the wonders of correct MP3 tagging I was in a few more seconds shown that UltraJoeBot (with help from Friends) has made 3 EPs of Christmas music this far and there they all where ready to be sucked on to my hard-drive. The same magic can happen to you if you click the picture of UltraJoeBot as he appears in his web comics or click this more obvious link.

It's easy to make comparisons between the sound of these releases and that of The Postal Service, I only say that here so that anyone thinking they may be able to find a Postal Service Christmas song will find these instead. These D.I.Y release are possibly some of the best Indietronica (if that's a tag I'm allowed to give) Christmas tracks I've found to date and that's not just because as have to confess (though I shouldn't) the only such songs in genre I can think of. The covers are given a fresh touch with the computer sequenced beats, the one "parody" track Carol of the Cat doesn't suck at all but the stand out piece have to be the originals (which I've marked with an *). The guitar's tend to play a much stronger role in these tracks that have a good set of original lyrics. Fat Suit has become one of my favourite tracks of the year, telling the story of Dave who now needs to wear a fat suit to play Santa after losing 30lbs. All I wonder now is if this is a great song based on true story or an even better song for having the creativity to make such an inventive track in the mall-Santa genre.

Top Marks go and download now

We Wish You a Binary Christmas and a Happy New York (2005):
01. Chinese Tea Dance (from The Nutcracker)
02. Snow*
03. Do You Hear What I Hear?
04. Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming
05. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

We Wish You a Binary Christmas 2.0 (2006):
01. Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy (from The Nutcracker)
02. Coming Home*
03. Carol of the Cat
04. Wonderful Christmastime
05. O Holy Night

We Wish You a Binary Christmas 3.0 (2008):
01. March (from The Nutcracker)
02. Fat Suit*
03. NYC/XMAS*
04. Christmas Time is Here
05. The Drive Home 12/24*

Dreaming of a White Noise Christmas

2009-11-04T22:24:00.002Z

I fell in love with 65 Days of Static when I found them, the I discovered they had Christmas song, well in fact it's more a video (the one you see above) that was released on their DVD Unreleased/Unreleasable Volume 3: 'The Kids Have Eyes'. The song/mash up/65dos is in the vien of there other Unreleased/Unreleasable 'release' in that it's mash up of this that and the other, mainly Audio from Eddie Murphy's 1983 Trading Places. When I hunted it down and found an AVI. file of the video which had been taken of Youtube on the bands forum and tought the extracted audio might might a nice 'exclusive' on here I found that you can now download MP3 over at a 65 Days of Static fan site called 65kids. and probably could along.
Any way if you enjoy the video you can get the audio over here.

65daysofstatic | Last.FM

Let's kick start this thing with some whoring gabba.

2009-11-04T22:03:00.002Z

I've been pissing about now trying to set up some sort of proper theme/style/manifesto or whatever for this here Christmas music blog and it's gone pretty much nowhere so I'm just going to get on with it and post loads of the albums and songs that have inspired me to start in the first place. Any ideas of how I can make it look or even help with such things would be gladdy appropriated.

Item #1 The Centrifuge Christmas Collection

A bit of IDM, Gabba, Acid to kick things off.

Can't quite remember how I came across this but I think I was just looking up The Centrifuge after I saw they were playing a gig near me with DJ Scotch Egg amoung others. If you know who DJ Scotch Egg and appreicate Christmas music then this is probably a good place for you to start. For it to be the start of this blog just happen to be that I'm listening to it right now and not for the first time but it's fitting. Firstly it's different, "The Centrifuge is a UK-based digital arts collective pushing back the boundaries in experimental electronic music, code, AV, interactivity & augmented reality, art and their myriad combination."1 Their Net-label of cause focuses mainly on the electronic music with, at the time of writting 34 release. While I haven't found time to give the other release a good listen, this compilation has given me good reason to believe there's worth checking out. Secondly, it's released on a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 to be precise). It was through Christmas music that I discovered net-labels and Creative commons, which in simple terms are way that artist legally share there wares somewhere between Copyright and losing it to the world. Any way read up on these things or even just watch a video about them. In all it means that there ain't now way posting the music on line will get me in trouble, not that I'm looking to me getting cease and desist orders but who knows.

Right to the album:
You can download it here or here with it all nicely tagged.

Track Listing
1. Myoptik - We Three Kings Of Orient Are
2. Oxynucid - Watmm Wedding (xmasmix)
3. Mark Swift - The Midwinter's Swift
4. Communicon - It Thinks Its People
5. Chaotic Sadism (Sadistician vs Captain Chaos) - Whoring Gabba Is Sexy At Xmash
6. LJ Kruzer - The First Nowell
7. Manglebot - Rocking Around The Xmas Tree
8. Oxynucid - Vienna (boxmix)
9. abscissa - Cyberhymnal (Theme Of David's Lament)

You'll learn just as much as me from reading the links to the artists Last.FM profiles all I can say is that the style here are varied, from the almost cheesy The First Nowell to the gabba of Whoring Gabba Is Sexy At Xmash. Down load it and give it a listen, it's free and you may like it. Yeah I'm not in much of a reviewing mood at the moment hence the slowness to get this blog going.

The Centrifuge | Last.FM | Discogs |