Eclectic Method made a really cool remix of the band Phish’s list of “99 Albums”. The video premiered at their Festival 8 Halloween show in Indio, CA.

Taking Phish’s brilliant viral “99 Albums” online promotion to the next level, the London born/Brooklyn-based trio sourced content from all 99 albums, and remixed them into a single, profound, beat-driven AV collage, screened to the tens of thousands of fans in attendance just before the band took stage to perform their Halloween ritual of covering an iconic album.

via Boing Boing

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“Headphone Wall”, a hard rocking ad for the NYC electronics store J&R.

via Jason Laskodi

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“Fly In A Bottle”, a documentary about the avant-garde jazz trio Medeski Martin and Wood directed by their drummer Billy Martin, is scheduled for release on November 24th as part of the Radiolarians: The Evolutionary Set, now available for pre-order.

As an amazing finale to the entire box set, Billy Martin directed the first feature film in Medeski Martin & Wood’s history entitled Fly in a Bottle. Tirelessly working through footage of MMW in the studio and on the road, the film provides an extremely intimate portrait of the band. It highlights the trio’s intricate relationships with each other and with the music they have worked to create over their past 19 years as a band.

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Introducing the new Weezer Snuggie. Order now and they’ll throw in the new Weezer album “Raditude” for free.

via Nerdist

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ThinkGeek has a Electronic Rock Guitar t-shirt with a touch-sensitive guitar fret that you can actually play. A mini amp clips to your belt that you can turn up to 11.

The Electronic Guitar Shirt is not a toy that plays pre-canned musical riffs, it is a real musical instrument that allows you to play your favorite songs and sound great doing it. All major chords are recorded from a real electric guitar, and the included magnetic pick allows you to strum just like you would a real guitar. The included mini amp clips to your belt and gets plenty loud with great sounding amplification circuitry. The tone knob on the amp lets you adjust the sound just like a real guitar.

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An awesome tribute to Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes, the Cantina Band from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, doing a street corner serenade in San Francisco.

“Alderaan Road EP” photo by occlupanid

UPDATE: Steve Rhodes shot some photos of the Cantina Band playing around San Francisco on Halloween.

photo by Steve Rhodes

via SF Slim

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Inspired by the Total Eclipse Of The Heart flow chart, love all this created the Hey Jude Flow Chart to help you unravel one of The Beatles’ most complicated songs.

via Merlin Mann

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Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer presents 30 years of hip-hop history in five minutes on the banjo in his latest song “Chap-Hop History”.

See Also: Cup of Brown Joy by Elemental & Tom Caruana, A Teacore Rap Song

via Boing Boing

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Grocery Store Musical, the latest mission by Improv Everywhere.

For our latest mission, six undercover actors burst into song in a grocery store in Queens. Three minutes and lots of silly choreography later, they returned to their roles as shoppers and stock boys. The mission was filmed with hidden robotic, lipstick, and wearable cameras.

photo by Katie Sokoler

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photo by Bob Masse

West Fest, a free concert celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock, takes place from 10am-6pm on October 25th at Speedway Meadow in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The event will be live streamed via TodoCast.

42 bands, 3 stages and 26 poster artists. Solar domes, Alternative vehicles, Electric bikes, Native American Tipi Village, Sustainable Living Road Show, Conscious Art Gallery, Light Temple, Holistic Healing Section, Hooper Heaven, Rock’n Green Kids Zone and Eco Village vendors. Narada Michael Walden featuring Vernon Ice Black leading 3,000 guitar players and closing the show with the Hendrix Experience reenactment and Superstar Jam.

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During their October 10th show in at Park West in Chicago, Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm performed the 19 tracks from the 1990 They Might Be Giants album “Flood”. On his blog Jonathan explains that TMBG were in town the same night playing “Flood”, so they decided to perform the album as well so fans would have a less difficult decision when it came to choose which show to attend.

MrSctw has video of the show which they have uploaded to YouTube in 9 parts.

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“Sweet Frown”, the latest music video by My First Earthquake from their first full length album “Downstairs”, features a rockin’ reenactment of Marie Antoinette and her court. The video was made by Jesus Beltran and Zumpango Films.

My First Earthquake will be playing at the Earthquake 20th Anniversary Party this Saturday, October 17th at Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco, along with The Chop and Goodbye Nautilus.

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Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day is a new book by our good friends Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, that chronicles the history of punk rock music in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Outside of New York and London, California’s Bay Area claims the oldest continuous punk-rock scene in the world.

Gimme Something Better brings this outrageous and influential punk scene to life, from the notorious final performance of the Sex Pistols, to Jello Biafra’s bid for mayor, the rise of Maximum RocknRoll magazine, and the East Bay pop-punk sound that sold millions around the globe. Throngs of punks, including members of the Dead Kennedys, Avengers, Flipper, MDC, Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, and AFI, tell their own stories in this definitive account, from the innovative art-damage of San Francisco’s Fab Mab in North Beach, to the still vibrant all-ages DIY ethos of Berkeley’s Gilman Street. Compiled by longtime Bay Area journalists Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better chronicles more than two decades of punk music, progressive politics, social consciousness, and divine decadence, told by the people who made it happen.

photo by unknown

Litquake and Porchlight are hosting a book release party, Journey to the End of the Bay: Punk Rockers Spill Their Guts, on Monday, October 12th at Broadway Studios (the old On Broadway) in San Francisco.

The Litquake literary festival and Porchlight storytelling collaborate for true tales of punk-rock anarchy and excess. This huge tribute to the Bay Area punk scene features stories and music all night long, in the legendary On Broadway space, which helped give birth to punk rock on the West Coast.

Other events include an author talk and book signing at Booksmith in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 13th, a punk rock show at 924 Gilman in Berkeley on Saturday, October 17th and an author talk and book signing at Powell’s Books in Portland on Monday, October 19th.

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guest post by Doctor Popular

Cyriak has created “Meow Mix, a bizarre music video using audio and video from his cat. Obviously this sort of thing has been done a million times before, but Cyriak’s video is a little more… visually intense… than most videos. Cyriak has also made the mp3 file available for download.

See Previously: Bizarre & Surreal Animation by Cyriak Harris

Thanks Unwoman.

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While in Los Angeles last week we stopped by Vibrato Grill Jazz, a beautiful restaurant and jazz club in Bel Air owned by renown musician Herb Alpert. Our friend Tony Campanale is the manager there and during our visit he introduced us to Pat Senatore, a charming man, who along with being the music director of the club, was the bass player for Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass.

The band performing the night we were there was the Rick Vittallo Quartet and at one point Slim Jim Phantom from the Stray Cats sat in on the drums.

On our way out I noticed a series of jazz musician sculptures over the bar. I asked Tony about them and he said that they came from the lobby of A&M Records. Herb Alpert is the “A” in A&M Records which he co-founded in 1962 with Jerry Moss.

Herb Alpert and his wife Lani Hall are currently on a US tour.

photos by Scott Beale

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PS22 Chorus class of 2009 sings “Pictures of You” by The Cure.

via Lori Dorn

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guest post by mikl-em

photo by Michael Rauner

How to Survive the Apocalypse, a Burning Man-inspired rock opera opens Monday, October 5th and runs through October 20th at Teatro ZinZanni in San Francisco.

There will be performances for three weekends only (the last weekend was just added due to high demand). Ticket details are on the Teatro ZinZanni website.

Delivering the outrageous and transformative culture of Burning Man to wider audiences, “How to Survive the Apocalypse” is a freak fable that combines rock opera, vaudeville, and a Dionysian revival show as it follows three people, each with their own baggage of fears and expectations, through their first experience of the erotic, psychological, and apocalyptic minefield of this temporary city in the desert. A kind of “Hair” for the new millennium, the show explores the conflicts and paradoxes of the Burning Man event, while inviting the audience to tap into the festival’s spirit of collaborative culture-making at a time of immense world changes.

The official Burning Man blog has a writeup about the show with lots of great photos. The fantastic cast photos shown here are by photographer Michael Rauner and there are many more on his site.

photo by Michael Rauner

Back in January, I wrote about the debut run of this show at Stage Werx Theater in San Francisco. It was a very short, very sold out run in a 49-seat theater, with the workshop feel of a collaborative piece that was evolving in real time.

People involved in those initial shows, in both the cast and audience, had diverse levels of Burning Man experience: from some of the earliest participants to current BM staff; from those who have just discovered the event to many who stopped attending long ago. The take on Burning Man and its history is as varied as that mix of viewpoints would suggest.

Candy ravers mingle with art freaks, manic minigolf, bull-horned rabbits, and the abstract caricatures Moustachio and The Stetson. Happily the event and its history is not romanticized, but neither are the profound aspects of experiencing Burning Man (especially for the first time) under stated or estimated.

Clearly a fun, freaky art experiment, at its best the show has a “vibe” to it that resonates with all in attendance; an infrequent but not quite rare occurrence like the best moments at parties, events, or temporary desert municipalities. It is something from which you can almost literally catch a buzz, and maybe a flashback or two.

photo by Michael Rauner

The text was written by Erik Davis (star of the penultimate instance of Laughing Squid’s Tentacle Sessions series). Erik is a journalist and culture critic, and a long-time Burning Man attendee who covered Burning Man for Wired more than a decade ago. His most recent book is The Visionary State about “California’s spiritual landscape” is a good example of his style: thinking deeply about the weird and freaky.

The music is composed by Mark Nichols, originally from the Seattle area, who first attended Burning Man more recently, which is where the idea for this rock opera began to evolve from a chance meeting at the porta-pottys one night.

photo by Michael Rauner

After its short successful run in January, the show went off the grid, preparing for a bigger, more polished return. The ultimate plan includes a tour at some point after this second San Francisco run.

The ensuing months have included lots of work on the show, the inevitable fund-raising of an independent production, and expansion of the cast and crew and the overall scale of the opera.

The new set was designed by Shannon O’Hare, one of the mad anachronistic geniuses behind “Neverwas Haul”, the steam-powered mobile Victorian house which has travelled to Burning Man the last few years.

photo by Michael Rauner

The cast now includes Phat Mandee (another Tentacle Session star) who has come all the way from Pittsburgh, PA for extended rehearsals prior to the opening. See her blog post about the show and her history with Burning Man (plus rehearsal pix).

The list of incredible collaborators goes on. You can see them all here. They include Burning Man founder Michael Mikel and long-time BM staffers Harley DuBois and Andie Grace.

photo by Michael Rauner

You can follow the show on twitter (@burningopera) and also find them on Facebook.

And remember that if you want to go you should get tickets soon. While this theater fits closer to 300 per show, tickets are going fast.

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The Brazillian band Gameboys doing an awesome cover of the Super Mario Bros. theme song.

via Waxy

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“A Glorious Dawn” by Carl Sagan, featuring Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed), a loving tribute to two great men produced by Colorpulse. Download the mp3.

via Nerdist

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photos by Steve Rhodes

Yesterday Zoe Keating and Peter Gregson organized the first ever Cello Tweetup in San Francisco featuring 6 cellists who all met up in Union Square for a impromptu performance. Mark Growden heard about the Tweetup and ran home to grab his cello, becoming the 7th cellist. Steve Rhodes shot a bunch of photos of this unique cello convergence. Here are more photos by Finch Linden

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