got a minute?

[kip_w]

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We're busy people, am I right? We don't have time to mess around. Finding good music just takes too much time, and most of us just give up. Well, WFMU's "Station Manager Ken" had a contest for remixes, 60 seconds and under, of known songs. Here are 161 of them.

I already have a set of 45s that came out years ago, called the RCA Victor Listener's Digest -- versions of the great classics that take up, at most, two sides (for a total of eight or ten minutes). This version seems better than that one. (I loaned my Listener's Digest to WHRO once, so that I could request the mini-Scheherazade from them. They didn't have a 45 spindle, though, and Dwight placed the platter on the turntable as well as he could. The result was not what I'd set out to achieve.)

Anyway, WFMU does it again, with the aid of listeners. It's terrific. Start off with In-a-gadda-da-vida and see where that leads you. Maybe to Paradise by the Dashboard Light, or Take Five, or Stagger Lee, or Ring Of Fire. I could go on.

For you specialty lovers, here's Who's On First, almost short enough, War of the Worlds, Shatner's Lucy in the Sky, a Bach Prelude by Glenn Gould, Ravel's Bolero (that's two versions), or 20 years of anti-drug PSAs.

Try and fit these into your schedule. I know I will. Gotta go.
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Comments

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

Curse me kilts! I wish I'd known about this thirty years ago -- one of my class assignments for Professor Herb Bielawa's Electronic Music course was to take a pre-existing piece of music and edit it. I took Toscanini's 1952 recording of Verdi's La forza del destino Overture and snipped it into a condensed version which I called "The Force of Shiksas," full of 4/4 phrases permuting to 3/4 or 5/4 every now and then, upward runs in the strings ending nowhere and answered with unexpected brass blats, etc.

Shoot, I'll bet I could slap the CD into my laptop, rip it to a .WAV file, and recreate the whole thing (or at least a one-minute version of it) more of less from memory in Audacity whilst sipping a raspberry tea at some Internet café, then upload it to this site, if the guy is still collecting them.

Anybody know of an Internet café in Valley Village/North Hollywood/Toluca Lake?

[meggins.livejournal.com]

These are surprisingly addictive--and many of them surprisingly good. The condensed version of "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" managed to get all the key elements of the narrative in. Also liked the dueling Who/Sex Pistols of "Anarchy in the Generation."

However, going from a "60 Minute Man" to a "60 Seconds Man" must have ruined someone's party.