Monday MP3 Miscellany

So, in lieu of actual content, I bring you a bag of links to audio content, both musical and book-related. This’ll be a long post.

First up, we enter the magical world of musical mashups, where there have been a couple of interesting new releases lately. The kids at Bootie have brought us a CD-length collection of the “best mashups of 2005“, to starts us off. Some of these are lots of fun, but none of them come close to the ALL TIME MOST AWESOME MASHUP DISC EVAH!. Anyway, here’s the tracklist for the collection, with some emphasis by me:

Party Ben – Paid For My Doorbell (Eric B. & Rakim vs. White Stripes) * Torero – Hot Rich Girls Dropped In A Grange (Gwen Stefani vs. Snoop Dogg vs. ZZ Top) * The Lovemakers – Shake That 50 Cent (50 Cent vs. The Lovemakers) * Jay-R – S.L.H. (Sri Lanka High) (M.I.A. vs. The Ramones) * A plus D – An Honest M.I.A. (M.I.A. vs. The Bravery) * Party Ben – Somebody Rock Me (The Killers vs. The Clash) * Ruff Muff – La La Her Madly (The Doors vs. Goldfrapp) * Earworm – Since U Been Gahan (Kelly Clarkson vs. Rex The Dog vs. Depeche Mode) * Party Ben – Walking With A Ghost In Paris (Tegan & Sara vs. Mylo) * Party Ben – Computer Talk (Coldplay vs. Kraftwerk) * Loo & Placido – Black Beatles (Beatles vs. Black-Eyed Peas vs. Ludacris vs. Kelis) * King of Pants – Badd To Me (Ying Yang Twins vs. The Cure) * DJ Riko – P-Funk Is Playing At My House (LCD Soundsystem vs. Gerald A. vs. Katie Enlow) * Thriftshop XL – Do You Wanna Cuz It’s Tricky (Franz Ferdinand vs. Run-DMC vs. The Knack) * Brat – Big Shot Pimpin’ (Billy Joel vs. Jay-Z) * DJ John – It Takes Two To Kiss (Rob Base vs. Prince) * Tripp – Super Holla Tricka (Beastie Boys vs. Gwen Stefani vs. A. Skillz & Krafty Kutz) * Jay-R – My Other Car Is A Beatle (L’Trimm vs. Armand Van Helden vs. Beatles vs. Gary Numan) * Jimmi Jammes – Sgt. Pepper’s Paradise (Beatles vs. Guns N’ Roses) * Cheekyboy – Smells Like Compton (N.W.A. vs. Nirvana)

Meanwhile, over at The Agony Column, Rick Kleffel (the reviewer who, in my searching so far seems to have tastes are closest to my own) has his latest review and interview online. The review is of Already Dead, and the interview is with it’s author Charlie Huston. I was particularly interested in this, since I just picked up the book on my last Boston trip, and thought it was a lot of fun.

You could just read the review, but it’s kind of fun to listen to the audio version, and of course the interview is audio only.

Here’s a bit of the review text:

‘Already Dead’ is anything but the title. Outrageously funny, superbly well-written, gripping and even occasionally touching, ‘Already Dead’ hot-melts gory vampire fiction with noir so hard boiled you could tie it to the feet of someone you really didn’t like and watch the bubbles rise from their mouth as they sank beneath the oil-slicked waves of the Hudson River. In case you think there’s any Rocket Science going on in this novel, let me disabuse you of that notion. ‘Already Dead’ is simple, classic but definitely not classy noir fiction.

Back in mashup land, we’ve got the announcement of a new Beastles album, the second collection of Beatles / Beastie Boys mashups by djBC.

I thought the earlier collection was kinda fun, and I’ve always dug the Beasties, so I’ll definitely be checking this one out. (It’s already DL’d but I didn’t get a chance to give it a spin today.)

He got slammed serving this up, so you should use this torrent link to get the tunes & artwork. (You can also directly DL the MP3s from the mirrors at Boing Boing.)

Back in literary land, the Small World Podcast has an interview with Canadian SF author Karl Schroeder. You might remember that we had a lovely discussion about one of Schroeder’s posts here a while back.

Some print interviews that I’ve seen with Schroeder, like the shallow one at SF Site, or the slightly more indepth one that Locus did (excerpts here), offered hints that he would be a great person to sit down and chat with, but this interview makes that very plain indeed.

Here’s just a few of the things covered in the interview:

• Alexandre Dumas‘ The Three Musketeers
• Master and Commander
• the appeal of blending of high fantasy with science fiction
• why it is more difficult to develop plot lines and characters in science fiction than in fantasy
• what is thalience?
• why brown dwarfs could be the key to making interstellar civilization possible; building
• new worlds to express new ideas
• cognitive science, evolutionary biology, physics, neural physiology
• international organized crime
• Gene Wolfe
• the future of health care in Canada

This has also interested me in this podcast, which I’ve added to my Doppler list. I’ve been browsing through their archives and I’ll definitely check out the interview with Paul Di Filippo and probably the one with Richard M. Smith. Alex (if you read down this far) will probably be interested in the interview with Octavio Arizala, the Modern Vixens photographer. Also, there’s a bunch of music there for me to check out.

Well, here’s a bit of extra-geeky music fun: Canadian music blog Mocking Music brings us 20 “Superman songs” plus a lot of colour commentary.

I suspect this is too much Superman for anyone, but I know some superhero comic geeks who would probably get a charge out of the list.

Here’s the list of songs you can get there:

Killing Heidi – Superman / Supergirl * Ingram Hill – Superman * Blindside – Superman * Throw Rag – Superman * David Bowie – The Superman * Lazlo Bane – Superman * The Matches – Superman * Stone Temple Pilots – Silvergun Superman * Down by Law – Superman * Robert Pollard – Red Ink Superman * R.E.M. – Superman * The Flaming Lips – Waitin’ For A Superman (Live w/Beck) * The Kinks – (I Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman * Crash Test Dummies – Superman’s Song * Goldfinger – Superman * Firewater – So Long, Superman * Atmosphere – Superman* 13 & God – Superman on Ice * Our Lady Peace – Superman’s Dead * Stereophonics – Superman

Of course, if Superman isn’t your bag, you could always pop over to the WMFU blog to download the Batman and Robin soudtrack album.

The music on the LP was credited to “The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale,” but in fact the band was one of the greatest uncredited session combos of all time, including the core of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Al Kooper’s Blues Project. To keep the music licensing fees to a minimum, all the tracks were based on public domain items like Chopin’s Polonaise Op. 53, the horn theme from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, and generic rock riffs.

Finally, you can get a dose of Old Time Radio science fiction, in the form of MP3s of the whole X Minus One radio show. SfSignal lists links to over a hundred of these shows, many of which are adaptations of classic stories by some of the masters. Some examples include:

• “First Contact” by Fritz Leiber.
• “The Iron Chancellor” by Robert Silverberg
• “The Haunted Corpse” by Frederik Pohl
• “The Green Hills of Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein
• “Lifeboat Mutiny” by Robert Sheckley

I plan to download a whole pile of these for in-car listening during my daily trips to the day care and back.