Moby produced a nice song together with Damien Jurado, it’s called “Almost Home”.
In contrast to the slow atmosphere of the original, Sebastien (http://www.sebastien-music.com) produced a great deep house remix of this song.
Soundcloud:
“Alexa” talks German
Amazon’s Echo device is now launched on the German market. It is a device with 7 microphones that permanently listens to its surroundings and sends your voice commands to Amazon servers in the cloud. A voice command always has to start with “Alexa”. Alexa will search for answers to your questions, order a taxi or buy something from Amazon, just as an example. German Telekom has also integrated “Alexa” into its SmartHome system (http://www.telekom.com/322528).
This is a funny parody of Amazon Echo.
These are some real questions to “Alexa”.
“Alexa” is another piece on the way to the visions of “Back to the Future”.
Bridget Jones’s Rihanna
The movie “Bridgit Jones’s Baby” has re-vitalized Rihanna’s great song “Stay” which was released in 2012. “Stay” is played at a main scene in the movie and underlines the dilemma that Bridgit is in. Because of the wonderful melancholic atmosphere and the text this song fits perfectly. This is the original music video of Rihanna.
This is the live version.
My first track on Soundcloud
I’m happy to announce that my first track is now up on Soundcloud! First I thought of sitting weeks in front of my Logic Pro in order to produce a nice dance track but then I decided to take it easy and just produce what came to my mind spontaneously. As a result, it took me just 30 minutes to produce and bounce this atmospheric track. It’s not perfect – but it’s me. Why it is called “wet summer”? Because the sounds are pretty “wet” (full of delay effects) and “summer” relates to the synonym Zweimal Sommer. Enjoy it!
Update Nov. 5:
I decided to make a little video for this track and put it on Youtube. Enjoy the atmosphere!
Zweimal Sommer
Just heard the new song of Philipp Poisel in the radio and immediately loved it. A wonderful song with great melancholic atmosphere. The following lines especially touched me:
Wann kommst du mich holen,
im heißen Julischnee?
Zweimal Sommer und zurück.
“Zweimal Sommer” is part of the song text at 2:57 minutes. Thank you Philipp! Wonderful song!
In this wonderful live version “Zweimal Sommer” is mentioned even two times at 1:53 min and 3:07 min.
Simply tilted
Christine and the Queens demonstrates the power of simplicity: For her song “Tilted” she made two amazing videos with great light effects.
Even more simple but still amazing is the lyric video.
Falling for you
The third part of Bridget Jones “Bridget Jones’s Baby” (https://youtu.be/mJsvmscPY9w) will be released soon in Germany but the title song “Falling for you”, performed by Ellie Goulding, is already shooting up the German charts.
The Youtube community has already created several nice cover songs, like this female & male voice version by Sara Farell & Simon Samaeng…
…or this electric violin version by Robert Mendoza.
A nice contrast is this rock version by Iacovos.
Look up
This video is for all Facebook-farmers. It reminds to look up:
Bed of roses
Roland Kaiser is a singer and songwriter from Berlin and prefers ambivalent song texts about relationship. In this one he harmonizes well with Maite Kelly. The video was shot in Berlin.
Coldplay wristband “Xyloband” – a look inside
The Coldplay concert at Rose Bowl was a big show (see http://www.zweimalsommer.com/2016/08/a-rose-bowl-full-of-leds.html). The major element of the show was a wristband which everybody got at the entrance. This wristband is called “Xyloband”. Their homepage shows some other great shows, in which the Xyloband was used: http://xylobands.com/gallery/.
Let’s take a look inside: The main PCB has three ZIF-connectors. A flexible PCB with 4 LEDs is connected to the middle connector.
Another LED-stripe is connected between the two remaining ZIF-connectors. This LED-stripe is the actual wristband.
The Xyloband gets its power from three batteries on the back side of the PCB.
The main components of the PCB are:
- Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller ATmega 88PA, datasheet: http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-42734-8-bit-AVR-Microcontroller-ATmega48PA-88PA-168PA_datasheet.pdf
- Silicon Labs Si4362 RF receiver, datasheet: https://www.silabs.com/Support%20Documents/TechnicalDocs/Si4362.pdf
It is amazing, which light effects can be achieved with this little circuit.
There is an interesting interview with Jason Regler, the inventor of the Xyloband, where he explains that he got the idea for the Xyloband in 2005 during the song “Fix You”, which Coldplay played at the Glastonbury Festival: http://www.coldplay.com/newsdetail.php?id=906. The song text “…lights will guide you home…” was his inspiration.