Logging the Switch

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  • Mar 11, 2005

    Spacelabs movie night

    Like every Thursday, it was Spacelabs movie night. Rico joined the movie watchers club, so we had to have a re-run on a previous movie. Tonight we watched Shrek 2 (second time) and Napoleon Dynamite (third time now).

    The absolute stupidity of the things that happen in Napoleon Dynamite astound me time and time again. It’s just brilliant how someone can make a movie that must have a storyline of about one A4 paper, yet make it a full one and a half hour feature film. The humor consists mainly of painfully recognizable embarrassing moments on the part of Napoleon and the absolute idiocy of his brother and uncle.

    Well, I’ve had enough Napoleon for a while now. Next time we’ll really need a little more intelligent movie. Oh, and thanks Rico for the beer and baguette, that’ll have to be made up to you somehow.

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  • Feb 22, 2005

    Björk - Debut

    Just wanted to say, I bought a CD today… Wow!

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  • Feb 16, 2005

    Godspeed you! Black emperor

    And then, just when you think that there can be nothing like Sigur Rós, you bump into Godspeed you! Black emperor… Strange, very strange. The music is a little bit different, the texts are different, but the sound as a whole is the same.

    Funny…

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  • Feb 12, 2005

    Sigur Rós

    I already mentioned Sigur Rós (Victory rose) in my iPod shuffle entry, but I think they deserve an entry of their own.

    Two weeks ago, I heard the first sounds from this Icelandic group. It was the album Ágætis Byrjun, which is Icelandic for `an alright start’. Their music is really beautiful, much softer than for instance Björk. At first it made me think about The Gathering. But now it reminds me most of a giant evolution of the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd.

    Their debute album, called Von (Hope) begins with a very intriguing introduction of two tracks Intro and Dögun (Dawn), followed by the beautiful Hún Jörð (Mother Earth). It is a pagan version of the `Our Father’.

    Móðir vor sem ert á jörðu
    heilagt veri nafn þitt
    komi ríki þitt

    Our mother, who areth in earth
    Hallowed be thy name
    Thy kingdom come.

    Nice, nothing more to add…

    This really must be the most strange debute I have ever heard; but it sounds great, almost like it is a record that you can use to test and adjust your stereo equipment to get the most out of their music. Every possible sound is contained in this one, low noises, high shrieks and everything in between.

    Since their texts are all either in Icelandic or in their own pseudo-language Vonlenska (Hopelandic), I decided to do some language study on the first. The first step with every foreign text I get, is trying to read some text without any help of dictionaries or other documents. This might seem very hard, but since it is mainly a North-German language, it looks very much like Dutch and even more like Frisian. However, there are many gaps to fill still, so a dictionary is fairly obligatory. Luckily, there are translations available.

    One of my housemates has seen Sigur Rós perform live and she said they’re even better then. So when they are around, I’ll try to catch a gig.

    There is so much more to tell about the sound, but as always, it is better to hear it for yourself. So, my tip for this week: Sigur Rós.

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  • Feb 12, 2005

    iPod shuffle

    I completely forgot I promised to write something about my iPod shuffle. So here you have it:

    Many words have been said now about the shuffle by many users and I just can’t add much to that. It sounds all right, the electronic sounds of Sigur Rós tend to clip (can also be an encoding problem, but I don’t hear them that clear on my stereo) and switches slow between songs (about a second silence between each track which really is too ong). It might also give some audible feedback when pushing the buttons. Here are some interesting links about iPod shuffle.

    Okay, so that is what they say and do with it. I had my own personal iPod experience. About a week after I had activated it, the left headphone started to make a cracking noise. That was a bit disappointing, but since I of course have warranty, I called Apple and they sent me a new pair without any question. Way to go, Apple! Excellent!

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