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Bird Machine
''Bird Machine'' is the fifth studio album from American indie rock band Sparklehorse, released on September 8, 2023 by Anti-. The album was mostly recorded before the 2010 death of bandleader Mark Linkous, and has received acclaim from critics. Recording and release The music for ''Bird Machine'' was recorded by Sparklehorse prior to Mark Linkous' 2010 suicide. Linkous' brother Matt oversaw unreleased music and found the track "It Will Never Stop" in 2022. In June 2023, the full album was announced, made up of older recordings, with additions made by Matt and Melissa Linkous, based on the kinds of musical contributions they had made to prior Sparklehorse recordings. The initial tracks were recorded with Steve Albini and were intended to be the band's fifth studio album prior to collaborating with Danger Mouse for ''Dark Night of the Soul''. "Scull of Lucia" was previewed on July 11. Reception Editors at AllMusic rated this album 4.5 out of 5 stars, with critic He ...
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Sparklehorse
Sparklehorse was an American indie rock band from Richmond, Virginia, led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Mark Linkous. It was active from 1995 until Linkous's 2010 death. Before forming Sparklehorse, Linkous fronted local bands Johnson Family and Salt Chunk Mary. Only one song, "Someday I Will Treat You Good", survived from these earlier bands to be played by Sparklehorse. Linkous said he chose the name Sparklehorse because the two words sounded good together and could be a loose metaphor for a motorcycle. At its inception, members of Sparklehorse included Paul Watson (banjo, cornet, lap steel and electric guitar), Scott Minor (drums, chord organ, banjo), Johnny Hott (Wurlitzer organ, percussion, backing vocals), and Scot Fitzsimmons (standup bass). History Sparklehorse's first album, '' Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot'' (1995), produced by Cracker frontman David Lowery (credited as "David Charles" on the record), was a modest college radio success. In 1996, while tou ...
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Sputnikmusic
Sputnikmusic (abbreviated as Sputnik) is a music website that publishes music reviews and news entries. The site hosts both professional and amateur content, covering metal, punk, indie, rock, hip-hop, pop and other styles. Its reviews are used by the review aggregate Metacritic. Reception Metacritic incorporates Sputnikmusic's staff reviews into its review aggregate ratings. The site was cited by ''The Guardian'' and Neil Daniels. Michael Miller wrote that "you're likely to fine a wide variety of opinions in the site". A Master's thesis utilized Sputnikmusic's music database for its research, due to its "focus on non-mainstream artists" and its "encompassing database". The ethnomusicologist Jorge Mercado Méndez references Sputnikmusic as an 'acclaimed' review source adjacent to ''Pitchfork'', while musicologist Giuseppe Catani cites Sputnikmusic's Alex Robertson alongside the ''NME''. Stratification and rating systems On Sputnikmusic, there are four levels of reviewer ...
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Electronic Musical Instrument
An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronics, electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener. An electronic instrument might include a user interface for controlling its sound, often by adjusting the pitch (music), pitch, frequency, or duration of each Musical note, note. A common user interface is the musical keyboard, which functions similarly to the keyboard on an acoustic piano where the keys are each linked mechanically to swinging string hammers - whereas with an electronic keyboard, the keyboard interface is linked to a synth module, computer or other electronic or digital sound generator, which then creates a sound. However, it is increasingly common to separate user interface and sound-generating functions int ...
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Pedal Steel
The pedal steel guitar is a console steel guitar with pedals and knee levers that change the pitch of certain strings, enabling more varied and complex music to be played than with other steel guitar designs. Like all steel guitars, it can play unlimited glissandi (sliding notes) and deep vibrati—characteristics it shares with the human voice. Pedal steel is most commonly associated with country music and Hawaiian music. Pedals were added to a lap steel guitar in 1940, allowing the performer to play a major scale without moving the bar and also to push the pedals while striking a chord, making passing notes slur or bend up into harmony with existing notes. The latter creates a unique sound that has been popular in country and western music—a sound not previously possible on steel guitars before pedals were added. From its first use in Hawaii in the 19th century, the steel guitar sound became popular in the United States in the first half of the 20th century and spawned a f ...
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Toy Piano
The toy piano, also known as the ( in German), is a small piano-like musical instrument. Most modern toy pianos use round metal rods, as opposed to strings in a regular piano, to produce sound. The U.S. Library of Congress recognizes the toy piano as a unique instrument with the subject designation, Toy Piano Scores: M175 T69. The most famous example of a dedicated composition for the instrument is the "Suite for Toy Piano" (1948) by John Cage. Characteristics Toy pianos come in many shapes, from scale models of upright or grand pianos to toys which only resemble pianos in that they possess keys. Toy pianos are usually no more than 50 cm in width, and made out of wood or plastic. The first toy pianos were made in the mid-19th century and were typically uprights, although many toy pianos made today are models of grands. Rather than hammers hitting strings as on a standard piano, the toy piano sounds by way of hammers hitting metal bars or rods which are fixed at one end ...
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Stephen McCarthy (musician)
Stephen or Steven McCarthy may refer to: * Stephen A. McCarthy (1908–1990), American librarian *Stephen McCarthy (Australian footballer) (born 1962), Australian footballer *Steve McCarthy (boxer) (1962–2017), British boxer *Steve McCarthy (ice hockey) (born 1981), Canadian hockey player * Stephen McCarthy (musician), guitarist with The Long Ryders * Stephen McCarthy (soccer) (born 1988), American soccer player *Steven McCarthy (actor) Steven McCarthy is a Canadian actor and filmmaker from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He is most noted for his three-time guest role as Morgan in the television series ''Mary Kills People'', for which he won the Canadian Scre ...
, Canadian actor and filmmaker {{hndis, Mccarthy, Stephen ...
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Jason Lytle
Jason Lytle ( ; born March 26, 1969) is an American musician best known for his work in the indie rock group Grandaddy. The group split in 2005, and Lytle continued to release music as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians. Grandaddy reformed in 2012, but ultimately ceased recording and touring in 2017 following the sudden death of co-founder and bassist, Kevin Garcia. Biography Early life and Grandaddy Lytle was born in Modesto, California and has an older sister, one older brother, a sister (deceased) and a stepsister. His father was in the grocery business, and his mother a housewife; they divorced when Lytle was aged seven. A fan of music at an early age, he played drums as a child. Skateboarding captured his interest in his teens, and by his late teens Lytle was a sponsored amateur. While laid up with a career-ending ACL injury, he started to play music again, writing songs and eventually setting up a home studio. Grandaddy came together gradually, si ...
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Drum Machine
A drum machine is an electronic musical instrument that creates percussion sounds, drum beats, and patterns. Drum machines may imitate drum kits or other percussion instruments, or produce unique sounds, such as synthesized electronic tones. A drum machine often has pre-programmed beats and patterns for popular genres and styles, such as pop music, rock music, and dance music. Most modern drum machines made in the 2010s and 2020s also allow users to program their own rhythms and beats. Drum machines may create sounds using Analog synthesizer, analog synthesis or play prerecorded Sampling (music), samples. While a distinction is generally made between drum machines (which can play back pre-programmed or user-programmed beats or patterns) and electronic drums (which have pads that can be struck and played like an acoustic drum kit), there are some drum machines that have buttons or pads that allow the performer to play drum sounds "live", either on top of a programmed drum beat or ...
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Casio SK-1
The Casio SK-1 is a small sampling keyboard made by Casio in 1985. It has 32 small sized piano keys, four-note polyphony, with a sampling bit depth of 8 bit PCM and a sample rate of 9.38 kHz for 1.4 seconds, a built-in microphone and line level and microphone inputs for sampling, and an internal speaker and line out. It also features a small number of four-note polyphonic preset analog and digital instrument voices, and a simple additive voice. All voices may be shaped by 13 preset envelopes, portamento, and vibrato. It also includes a rudimentary sequence recorder, preset rhythms and chord accompaniment. The SK-1 was thus an unusually full-featured synth in the sub-US$100 (equivalent to $ today) home keyboard market of the time. The SK-1 includes one pre-arranged piece of music, the Toy Symphony, which is played when the "Demo" button is pressed. The Radio Shack version of the Casio SK-1 is called the Realistic Concertmate 500. The SK line continued throughout the late 1 ...
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Speak & Spell (toy)
The Speak & Spell line is a series of electronic hand-heldSpeak & Spell'. Computer History Museum. Retrieved 18 December 2008. child computers by Texas Instruments that consisted of a TMC0280 linear predictive coding speech synthesizer, a keyboard, and a receptor slot to receive one of a collection of ROM game"Module Information". Speak & Spell Manual. Texas Instruments. 1980. library modules. The first Speak & Spell was introduced at the summer Consumer Electronics Show in , making it one of the earliest handheld electronic devices with a visual display to use interchangeable game cartridges.Texas Instruments Collection – Learning Aid'. Smithsonian NMAH. Retrieved 18 December 2008. The company Basic Fun brought back a variant of the second-gen classic Speak & Spell in 2019 with a newly recorded voice and other minor changes. The Speak & Spell was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009. Background The Speak & Spell was created by a small team of engineers led by Paul Breedlove, ...
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Robyn Hitchcock
Robyn Rowan Hitchcock (born 3 March 1953) is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. While primarily a vocalist and guitarist, he also plays harmonica, piano, and bass guitar. After leading the Soft Boys in the late 1970s and releasing the influential ''Underwater Moonlight'' with them in June 1980, Hitchcock launched a prolific solo career. Hitchcock's earliest lyrics mined a rich vein of English surrealist comic tradition and tended to depict a particular type of eccentric and sardonic English worldview. His music and performance style was influenced by Bob Dylan, and by the English folk music revival of the 1960s and early 1970s. This was soon filtered through a then-unfashionable psychedelic rock lens during the punk rock and new wave music eras of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This combination of musical styles won Hitchcock's band of the time, The Soft Boys, an enthusiastic if small fanbase. However, the Soft Boys' final album together, ''Underwater Moonlight'', post ...
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Danger Mouse (musician)
Brian Joseph Burton (born July 29, 1977), known professionally as Danger Mouse, is an American musician and record producer. He came to prominence in 2004 when he released '' The Grey Album'', which combined vocal performances from Jay-Z's '' The Black Album'' with instrumentals from the Beatles' ''The Beatles'', also known as ''The White Album''. In 2008, ''Esquire'' named him one of the "75 most influential people of the 21st century". Danger Mouse formed Gnarls Barkley with CeeLo Green in 2006 and produced its albums '' St. Elsewhere'' and '' The Odd Couple''. In 2009, he collaborated with James Mercer of the indie rock band The Shins to form the band Broken Bells; the band released three albums since then, with '' Into the Blue'' (2022) being the most recent one. Burton collaborated with rapper MF Doom as Danger Doom on ''The Mouse and the Mask'' and with emcee Black Thought on '' Cheat Codes''. Danger Mouse produced the second Gorillaz album (2005's ''Demon Days''), ...
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