tunequest

The other day, I was perusing the ol' server logs, doing my periodic behind-the-scenes examination of this site. Mostly it was the usual stuff: popular URLs, a couple image hot-linkers and an ungodly amount of Googlebot crawls. But then something caught my eye: a new and intriguing referring site. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Empire_(soundtrack) I checked it out, trying to find the connection to here, and discovered a lengthy and detailed encyclopedia article on the ...

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Yeah, What They Said, pointers to interesting stories. Some people call it "link sharing." Webomatica chronicles the hoopla as the launch of the iPhone approaches. Antics include people paying other people to stand in line, christening June 29 as "iDay," and links to major newspaper reviews. T-minus 5, 4, 3, 2... A number of audiobooks were sold at the iTunes Store recently that didn't work on the iPod. That problem has ...

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What can I say? This is brilliant. It's a bit long (11 minutes), so block out some time to watch the whole thing. It also helps to be familiar with Trapped in the Closet, R. Kelly's hip-hop opera in multiple parts which tells a complex story (with several interwoven plots) of increasingly bizarre cases of infidelity and sexual hang-ups. Here's a Google Video if you need to brush up. Sometimes ...

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I can assure you that you know every single piece of music featured at KickAssClassical.com, but you'd probably strain a muscle trying to figure out when and where you've heard them. Hopefully it won't come to that, because Mike Nelson no, not of mst3k fame has compiled 100 of the most popular pieces in the "serious music," aka classical music repertoire, pieces made famous by their use (or perhaps ...

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Interpretations of John Williams' Star Wars music is a veritable cottage industry. A portion of it is sure to turn up at any concert performance featuring "movie music" as well as concert recordings featuring the same. Then, there's Meco's disco versions, The Evil Genius Orchestra's excellent cocktail versions as well as countless techno/trance/club versions. So it should come as no surprise that there is at least one jazz variation. The ...

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Update: The revised sorting feature/problem in iTunes 7.3 and later renders this advice useless. If you're using a version prior to 7.3, feel free to use this scheme In striving for zen-like simplicity while maintaining and extending the usability of iTunes, please follow me as I introduce you to the technique I use to keep my Composer tags orderly and navigable particularly when using an iPod. The idea is to ...

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In 1996, LucasFilm embarked on a multi-channel marketing project in an effort to make more money off the aging Star Wars franchise. The result was Shadows of the Empire, a venture that involved all the machinations of a movie marketing and tie-in campaign, without the production of an actual movie. In total, the endeavor included a novel, comic books, video games, trading cards, toys (of course) and, most ...

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Since the mid-1970s, John Williams has never been lacking in notoriety. Jaws, Towering Inferno, Close Encounters, Superman, Star Wars... these film scores made him a household name, gaining fame and respect for work that is generally restricted to devotees and cultists only. The Star Wars album even managed to break into the public's consciousness, becoming best-seller on the Billboard charts for 1977 and inspiring an awful disco/dance version of ...

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So I recently listened to Louis and Bebe Barron's avant garde and experimental score to the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. This soundtrack was one of the handful of Records That Time Forgot columns that I wrote in a previous life. I reprint it here for your reading enjoyment. In 1956, science fiction as we know it scarcely existed as a genre. Adventures in space were mostly centered around action ...

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