Now who you jiving with that cosmik debris? –  Zappa

So, a new feature. From time to time I’ll list other blogs and/or social media stuff I saw recently and thought worth sharing with you. I’d like to do this weekly or at most, biweekly depending on what good stuff I find and time I have. We’ll see how it goes.

–The first one is a blog called Music Machinery which is “about the world of online music discovery and recommendation.” Basically in this post, they compared various geographical regions to see how musical tastes diverge. You can compare any regions you want but in this instance they compare Tennessee (Bible Belt) and New England (statistically, the least religious part of the US) with predictable results.

So for example, a Christian rock band called Hillsong United is rated 97th in Tennessee, 1097th in New England. You can also see results by age and gender. I’ll go out on a limb here and speculate that a fifty-something guy likes classic rock and a teenage girl likes Taylor Swift.

–There’s a British musician named Tom Caswell who blogs. He is doing a variety of cool things, not the least of which is writing the definitive biography of Derek and The Dominos. Now if you follow music at all, you probably know that it’s recorded on multiple tracks in the studio and mixed down to make a song. But what’s really cool here is that he has somehow managed to find isolated tracks from the recordings of various artists.

So if you go to his site, you can hear isolated tracks for the Beatles “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun“, Queen and Bowie’s “Under Pressure“, and my favorite, the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica.” (My Allman Brothers posts are imminent BTW). On the latter, for example, you can listen to the guitar solo or the bass or the piano solo individually. These are the real studio tracks and it’s really cool. Don’t have to be a musician, I think, to appreciate.

–Bowie tributes sprang up everywhere this week. As mentioned in a comment on the blog this week, my favorite was the spontaneous outpouring in the London district of Brixton where people just showed up with guitars and sang his songs. I was there in spirit.

Carnegie Hall has a Bowie tribute, apparently long-since planned. The addition of Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney to the performers has made it all the more interesting and, I might add, impossible to attend. Radio City Music Hall has one the next day.

Some churches (!) and various and sundry individuals did tributes using bells and whatnot. I especially love the piano version of ‘Space Oddity” by the guy from the band Dream Theater:

Bowie tributes

–Lastly, for you Springsteen/Bowie fans, here’s David doing Bruce’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” Just for, as we say in these parts, shits and grins.

RIP David. We love you, man!