Day and Night Digital | Irish Independent

Day and Night is giving away five pairs of tickets to Jack L live at Vicar St. on Friday March 19th and Comedian Dermot Whelan live at Vicar St. on Friday March 26th.

Find the answer to the question below in the magazine today and then turn to page 17 for details on how to enter.

Q; Who describes her perfect weekend in this week’s Day & Night?

You might not be heading to Austin, Texas for the big music industry fest that is South By Southwest yourself (watch out for coverage in Day and Night in two weeks) but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the fact that 1,500 bands are looking for global attention. The official site SXSW.com contains artist pages with MP3s for many of the acts playing including Broken Bells, She & Him, Fanfarlo, The XX and many, many more. If you prefer to grab them all in go, there are two torrents available with over 1,000 MP3s. If passive selective listening is more your thing, NPR have a streaming radio show on their site with takes 100 MP3s of the best bands playing and repeats it ad infinitum.

Following on from OK Go’s recent Youtube/label music video problems which were documented here two weeks ago, the Chicago band have found a way to resolve the issue of non-embeddable Youtube videos for their fans.

The band released a new version of the video for This Too Shall Pass and chances are you’ve already seen it. After a week, this new video had 6.6 million views (compared to 1.1 for the marching band version). The video shows the domino effect in action via a Rube Goldberg machine: an elaborate warehouse setup where marbles, globes, cards, blocks, household objects, cars, pulleys, slides and levers combine to make a thrilling four minutes of viewing.

Crucially, the video can now be placed on any other site other than Youtube thanks to an insurance company from Chicago called State Farm. In a first for music videos, State Farm paid an undisclosed sum to allow embedding of the video on every other site on the internet, as well as a credit at the end of the clip and their logo on two of the domino objects in the video. Everyone wins here. OK Go get mad viral hits and more buzz. Their label EMI get paid by State Farm who get global advertising and fans can do what they want with the video.

Speaking of innovative initiatives in music videos, check out French band Uniform Motion’s unique approach to theirs. They produced an interactive animation that can be customised and sent to friends. You can pick any track from their second album to soundtrack it, you can type a message to appear in the video and the result is an animated performance of the song you chose with the customisation intact. View an example.

How to fold a t-shirt in two seconds
Sometimes, the internet can be useful you know.
Watch at Urlesque

R&B’s smoothest voice
A list of deep-voiced, spoken word monologues as recorded by Boyz II Men’s Michael McCary.
Read / Listen at 11 Points

Plan B magazine archives
Download all 46 back issues in PDF format of the much-loved independent UK music magazine which ceased publication last year.
http://www.planbmag.com

Foals’ Spanish Sahara
With their new album Total Life Forever due in May, Foals have returned with a slow-burning number with no discernible comparison to the freneticism of their debut album Antidotes. It’s a grower however.
Watch/ listen at East LA

Owensie
Formerly of Dublin rock bands Puget Sound and Terrordactyl, Owensie’s new solo project is a much gentler affair akin to Jose Gonzales’ finger-picking folk with great tunes to boot.
http://owensie.bandcamp.com

The Very Best’s You’ve Got The Love
Remixing a remix should feel like spreading things a little thin, but The Very Best have successfully taken The XX’s remix of Florence And The Machine and added some light to the shade thanks to the warm vocal tones of Esau Mwamwaya.
Listen at the Hype Machine

Cults
Not much is known about Cults apart from the fact that they are a boy/girl duo from New York and their playful happy-pop has been debuting on a lot of music blogs this week. Download their free digital release.
http://cults.bandcamp.com

Hunted radio
From the team behind We Are Hunted comes this online radio station which analyses Myspace plays and queues the most popular song streams on the social network right now.
http://myspace.hunted.fm

Ripfork
Matt Wendus really dislikes music critics. Reading some of the reviews he dissects, you can see why.
http://ripfork.com

Doids
A blog filled with photos and videos of dogs driving cars. Sure, it’s a specific niche but it works.
http://doids.com

Possibly the most uplifting gibberish-filled robot crooning song from Russia you’ll ever see.

Taking movie clichés like humble downtrodden man, a topical disability, a Latin American teenager, a sprinkle of inspiring statements and you’ve got this highly entertaining trailer for a made-up movie.

The Limerick comedy rappers meet the former Minister of Defence who has fallen on hard times and tries to sell them “decent hash”.

http://therubberbandits.com/

69 year-old British granny Ruth Flowers is apparently massive in French electro clubs where they call her “Mamy Rock”. The video introducing her feels like a viral campaign but it might just be true.