Long time no update. Reason? A vacation in Europe - mostly centered around the Netherlands (which I like very much). In the meantime I'll just post some random musings:

• 
  Radiohead rock. I have this thing where, when I hear music that I immediately dislike or "don't get," I feel obliged to give it another go every year or so. It took my years to learn to like Pink Floyd, and even more time to learn to like Radiohead, but after a serious listening session I have to concede that my friend (who we shall term "the rhesus") was right to call OK Computer "one of the 20th century's sublime records."
  
• At Outline 2007 (on which I will expand in a seperate post) I got acquainted with a Dutch tracker who styles himself Cosmiq. Take a listen to his second album, which I actually really liked (particularly track 3, "A Shine Too Much").
  
• You'll notice that I added a button for the FSF's latest campaign, Play OGG, under "advocacy" on the right. I'll take OGG over MP3 any day (on account of better sound quality for size, and no licensing fees for anyone); I don't expect the campaign to be wildly successful, but you never know. Maybe I'll actually be able to enjoy my next iPod or car audio set on my own terms.
  
• Had a bit of time to spare, so I watched The Karate Kid again. The movie certainly looks different after 10 or so years -- it actually looks better (if you discount the obligatory '80s movie influences). Pat Morita is extremely funny, and I've seen much worse actors than Ralph Macchio (who looks much younger than his 23 years at the time). It also happens to be a really quotable movie, mock Eastern wisdom notwithstanding: "to make honey, young bee need young flower, not old prune."

Next on the agenda: Spiderman 3.

I got a heapload of new music from a friend (thanks, Gil!) and wanted to share a couple of recommendations:

• The Flower Kings - a Swedish progresive rock band. I actually made the mistake of thinking them an American band (something about the style struck me as US-oriented), but regardless they really are very good at what they do. I've given serious listening time to Unfold the Future and it's straight at the top of my to-buy list.
• KBB - a relatively anonymous Japanese progressive band. Their first album "Lost and Found" (1999) is positively brilliant. I hope to catch one of their concerts at some point in Tokyo, but the site is completely out of date.

If anyone's interested in progressive rock and/or has recommendations to add, I'd be delighted to hear (just send me an e-mail or drop a comment).

No idea where I found the link (but someone definitely deserves credit for that), but you gotta see this music video for Don't Download This Song, from Weird Al's new album "Straight Outta Lynwood."

Around 21:00, June 22nd 2006, Neve Shalom.

Roger Waters appears on stage for the first time in Israel.

This is the biggest thing to happen here all year, and one of the most important events in my life. I'm still finding it a little difficult to find the right words... and as they say, a picture is a lot more economic, so:

Image by Assaf Carmeli. Click here for more pictures

54,000 people singing in unison the lyrics for some of the best known rock songs in history. It was a three-hour aureal orgasm.

I want to go back.

So I'm sitting at work, listening as I usually do to all sorts of music in the background. I found myself listening to the excellent soundtrack written for A Clockwork Orange (which also happens to be one of the best movies I've ever seen). Some of the classical pieces there have a distinct ring to them, as if they've been performed in a very peculiar and distinct (somewhat synth-y, for lack of a better word) style. It kept bugging me that I've heard this someplace before, and after some 40 minutes it finally struck me: it sounds highly similar to the soundtrack written for the movie Tron (also highly recommended).

I took a better look at the tracks to see who wrote them - a Walter Carlos. This was even more surprising for me, because I recall the Tron soundtrack credited to a Wendy Carlos. What's up?

Some digging in wikipedia proved once again extremely fruitful:

Her first six recordings were released under the name Walter Carlos, although, being a transsexual woman, she had already changed her name from Walter to Wendy. In 1972, Carlos underwent gender reassignment therapy. The last release to be credited to Walter Carlos was By Request (1975). The first release as Wendy was Switched-On Brandenburgs (1979). Carlos's first public appearance after her gender transition was in an interview in the May 1979 issue of Playboy magazine, a decision she would come to regret as it brought unwelcome publicity to her personal life. On her official site, her transition is discussed in an essay stating that she values her privacy on the subject.

The universe never ceases to surprise me.

I'm a self-proclaimed part-time, low-budget audiophile (there's a mouthful), so I often try to combine good performance with reasonable cost. To that end, considering I spend about 80% of my time at work (and, up until recently, home as well) with headphones on my head, the Sennheiser HD600s I got about five years ago for the price of about 200 of today's US dollars after shipping and taxes were the absolute best bargain I've ever made. The Jean-Marie Reynaud Twin MK2 speakers I also bought at about the same time were so impressive that the lowest-priced comparable speakers were 60% more expensive.

Things have somewhat improved since then; the taxes on audio equipment in Israel have been considerably reduced, although at some 34% they're still very high (down from 70%...). I mentioned this before in my post regarding the Yakumo Hypersound Car. Since then I went to an auto shop for some additional equipment, specifically a 6x9" component set, 3.5" mids to replace the crappy ones in my Punto, a 12" Pioneer sub and 2x60w (continuous) amp (I'll post the models number later - damned if I remember).

While the CD receiver was a breeze to install, I'm pretty glad I didn't attempt to do the rest of it alone; I don't know jack about car electronics and some of the stuff involving the installation of the amp I didn't know to begin with (such as hooking up the negative terminal to the car chassis) and I would've done a heck of nasty job if I tried running some of the wires on my own. On the other hand, contrary to my usual cautious self I didn't do much market research and ended up paying considerably more than the equipment was worth. It was definitely a learning experience, though, and I won't make these mistakes next time.

That said, the sound is great - not perfect but I'm still tweaking it. The Yakumo unit turns out to have very poor amplification; at first I thought the specified 65dB signal-to-noise ratio was a mistype in the product manual, but it turns out rather accurate; there is a very audible hiss at even moderate volume levels (which I couldn't hear earlier because of the crappy speakers I bought the car with) and the rear-speaker sound is bright to the point of being harsh. This may or may not be attributed to the Pioneer component speakers - if so you can bet that they'll be replaced - but in the meanwhile I've found the amplification so horrid that I'm replacing the 2-channel monobridged Pioneer amp with a quad-channel amp to drive both sub and rear speakers (5- and 6-channel amplifiers are prohibitively expensive, so I'll skip those for now).

The Yakumo unit also suffers from some pretty severe usability issues; the TOC indexing times for USB devices (tested with a fully loaded iRiver H320) were nothing short of abhorring (about 3 minutes from iRiver boot). With CDs the problem is less of an issue, about 20 seconds for a 700MB CD, but I still think it's rather stupid that the unit can boot up to the exact location I last powered it off in but has to index the TOC first. The random mode is extremely useful with compressed files, but why does it change track when I turn it on? The fact that I can't navigate by folder (particularly with the existence of a jog dial!) without going through the tedious search function is ridiculous, and I've actually managed to get the unit's firmware to crash once or twice (Update: actually, the unit seems to be extremely crash-prone). I believe most if not all of these problems can be solved with a little work on the drive's firmware, but there is none from Yakumo. In my opinion the solution would be to simply open-source the firmware; it's probably based mostly on LGPL'd code to begin with, and it would allow community involvement in empowering the brand. I, for one, would be delighted to tweak the source code to my heart's content; it would make the unit all that more useful. With the lackluster amplification and usability issues it's very hard to recommend the unit to anyone but a die-hard OGG Vorbis fan.

Update: Having owned this unit for several months I can safely say that it, quite plainly, sucks. It is crash-prone, error-prone, extremely slow on boot up, requires constant resets and provides very low sound quality to boot. Its one saving grace is Vorbis support, and even for me that's not enough to save it from a "piece of crap" verdict. I'm going to replace this thing as soon as I find a decent alternative; the XiphWiki points at a similar product from Silvercrest, but given the track record of these things I'm inclined to forego in-dash players altogether and go for a hard-drive based solution. Now if I can only find a decent one...

Lev (my friend from Eilat) hopped back north for a visit, which was perfect timing to go to the Hot Fur CD release concert in the Koltura club in Tel-Aviv. And let me tell you, it was the absolute bomb!

We arrived a little early (the show was supposed to start at 22:00 with the doors open at 21:00), the place was still nearly deserted and a Frank Zappa concert played in the background. We went out to grab a bite to eat, and when we came back people were starting to pile up. I don't really have much of an idea how many people were present when the show actually started (half an hour late...) but it was probably 150-200 as the place is supposed to be able to hold 400 people and it wasn't horribly packed.

Hot Fur started by playing their new music video for "Adventure In Space", which was hilarious and got everyone riled up and ready for the concert; they immediately proceeded with "The Letter Vav" and over the next 1.75 hours proceeded to play most of their bread-and-butter repertoiré, including (but not limited) to "Sabres 15003", "I Won't Give Up" and (I think) "Tomatoes". Now what's really great about Hot Fur concerts is that they do not only make and play great music, but they also know how to put on a great show:

Between (and often during) musical segments guys related to the band would put on bizarre costumes and indulge in what must be the greatest fun the world: acting really stupid in front of hundreds of people who appreciate stupidity. I particularly liked this character (the main character in the "Adventures In Space" video), who for lack of a better name I like to call The Dude:

Among diverse distractions the band kept throwing roses at the audience, and I finally found myself looking thus:

And eventually broke down altogether:

At the end of the show, we finally managed to get our hands on our preordered Hot Fur CDs (which we've been eagerly awaiting for for the past year). Besides the great music us preorderers were delighted to find our names in the "thank you" section of the CD...

Hot Fur'll be appearing in Koltura again on July 27th (I think). Don't miss it.

Eric Lippert has an incredibly interesting five-part blogpost about the mathematical essence of musical theory, along with some pretty nifty demonstrations. I've dabbled a little in the more practical applications of musical theory before (writing wave and module players and some basic software synths) but honestly have never been really interested in its mathematical/physical aspects.

This, ladies and gentleman, is interesting shit.

• Desafinado, Part One: Eric Continues His Obsession With The Greeks
• Desafinado, Part Two: A Perfect Pythagorean Tuning
• Desafinado, Part Three: Too Many Fifths
• Desafinado, Part Four: Rolling Your Own WAV Files
• Desafinado, Part Five: Getting Down Without Hitting The Bottom

Paniq came out with a new album a couple of weeks ago, the second track from which is called Elektronische Musik (can be downloaded from here). It's in German though, so make sure you read the lyrics.