Remixes got you down? Tired of mash-ups? Been making your own crap remixes with Garage Band and the latest Postal Service track to strike your fancy? Ready to end it all and take a blowtorch to your hard drive, dip your iPod in salt water, and take a tack hammer to your CD collection? Don’t worry we have the answer for you. Take a few deep breaths. Remember that there are really some good remixes out there. Remember Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds was great and restored your faith in remixes (not to mention remix to Ignition). Speaking of remixes, we have all be waiting for more Architecture in Helsinki right? Oh yes they have been tribute’d/remix’d and it already has its own Wikipedia Page. You know you want it and you knew that it would be done well. The Architecture tracks are treated carefully and nothing is too cobbled together or butchered. It is all quite well done with an interesting range of styles. It makes me almost wish I knew a thing or two more about electronic artists. Take a listen to Wishbone done by Frac Tetaz in full robotic voice synth glory. Enjoy and hold your breath waiting for the new Architecture album to drop. With this kind of hype how could it not?!?

Dan Sartain hails from the southern burg of Birmingham, Alabama. He apparently is completely unrepentant about his decidedly un-indie musical style. He channels Nick Cave and courts a sound reminiscent of Elvis Costello. Sartain seems almost a shoe in for a cult following. I believe that he will be a huge hit live and have the chance to see for myself come December 15th. Sartain is full of energy and his music is energetic and dark. It is equal parts 1950’s and 2000’s allowing full on posturing without sounding shallow. A big part of the depth of the sound is the epic guitar in the tradition of Dick Dale with the bounding and serious parts of the surf rock genre. Sartain works all the right angles and does so without coming off as cheesy or trite, not something easily done in the era of snap condemnation.

For your aural and visual pleasure I bring you Sartain’s two step swing from south of the border. The video gives a great slice of the man and the song’s incongruous mariachi becomes quite congruous. The album’s cover art is also worthy of praise giving Sartain the stark iconic swath he so richly deserves. I hope you all enjoy.

The Shins are at it again this time sans Zach Braff’s machinations. The new album is decidedly soft and dreamy. It gives up on some of the whimsical stylings in Chutes Too Narrow and goes back to their homestead with moving but water thin streams of sound. There are certainly a few punctuations of accelerated beats per minute but blessedly few for it is not really their forte now is it. Inasmuch as it is currently a faux pas to remind anyone that Garden State I will make up for it by pointing you here no here oops one more time here. I think the value of the new album will have plenty of debate. I am eager to see the indie community delve into this one after the adulation heaped on Chutes. Will they show mercy? Or is it no holds barred in declaring the Shins kaput once and for all? I haven’t heard enough to say where I stand but based on a couple tracks it seems as worthy as the next sub pop release this year. (more…)

I have been trying to think of vdov.net articles that can put a shot of juice in the arm of this website. They need to be something that can lead to frequent updates but are short enough to capture the fickle readership here. This does not mean that when the spirit moves me I will not write a 3000 word review of some crappy emo band posturing on their own lame internal conflicts. It does mean that I am going to throw some gems (both old and recent) your way. I am hoping to keep this up as a multi-weekly post. I will try very hard not to just post a bunch of Misfits tracks along with Billy Joel. I would like to make this a fairly wide ranging endeavor, which could lead to me being exposed as the charlatan that I am. I will try to avoid obvious “singles” and give something a little more fun and perhaps as of yet un-listened-to. (more…)

In the grand spirit of web 2.0 everything gets wikified. Whatever website you used to like there is a new one that anyone can edit. Like a most of web 2.0 a lot of these sites fall on their faces. Sometimes adding AJAX just makes a crappy site with AJAX, but sometimes web 2.0 is exactly what you need. Thus enter LyricWiki.org! If ever their was an idea just waiting to happen this is it and it’s fantastic. Most lyrics websites are awful and mostly exist for the sole purpose of ad revenue from the unholy amount of animated banners (thank heavens for AdBlock). In fact, the web seems to be pretty much a wasteland in the realm of lyrics. Usually in any endeavor there is at least one fantastic site and then a whole bunch of crappy clones of some bootleg version. With lyrics there are just the clones and there is nothing in the way of “indie” lyrics either. You will find Decemberists lyrics but God help you if you want to find even a single stanza of Wooden Wand anything. So when you stumble across something this excellent its time to write a review/hype it. (more…)

Vdov.net has rarely waded into the turgid waters of politics. The political landscape made by the contributors here is non-canonical, defying normal political affiliations. We find ourselves in the “libertarian” position of wanting both social and economic freedom. The issues we value are strong on tech and science initiatives (rather obviously). Perhaps our biggest gripe is that there is a certain inherent lack of pragmatism that goes along with political life. Political life seems to easily become too dogmatic which is why we have shied away from political posts to keep this from becoming too blog-like and avoid the reactionary “BoingBoing” tech politics. (more…)

I wrote this incredibly long comment to shollen’s article when I woke up this morning but decided that instead I would publish it as its own entity. I like where this particular discussion is going, and if I could group them all together I would. Regardless, before you read this article you definitely need to read shollen’s below. (more…)

Continuing in the vein of a variational theory– but presented in a completely different and universally accessible context with no relation to the actual variational principle at all–I propose a way to vary your experience with a bulging collection of music. Many of us have very large and expanding iTunes libraries. This is great, and if you’re up on your ratings you can even put on a decent setting to get a good variety of music playing. However, chances are that you don’t listen to more than 10% of your music on a regular basis. On this note, I’d like to introduce a filtering technique for hearing new music. (more…)

We finished up a few loose ends on perturbation theory today in my quantum class, and spent about 5 minutes proving the variational theorm in quantum mechanics for minimization/optimization. As a nice refresher for my math (which I will need more and more in the coming weeks), and because it’s just a beautifully simple proof, I decided to post it here for all to see. Also, my Wordpress latexrenderer plugin was broken, so this was a nice excuse to fix it. (more…)