Todays Tune: Moby - Extreme Ways

Richard Melville Hall (born September 11, 1965), better known by his stage name Moby, is an American DJ, singer-songwriter, and musician.

He sings and plays keyboard, guitar, bass guitar and drums. Moby became a successful artist on the ambient electronica scene, and achieved eight top 40 singles in the UK during the 1990s. In 1999 he released the album Play, a mix of melancholic chill-out, ambient music, and upbeat electronica, that was critically acclaimed and produced an impressive eight hit singles (including his most popular songs "Porcelain", "Natural Blues" and "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?"). Play became a commercial and cultural phenomenon, selling over 10 million copies worldwide(the biggest-selling electronica album ever) and with its eighteen songs receiving an unprecedented licensing in films, television and commercial advertisements.

His follow-up album, 18 (2002) was also successful, receiving positive to mixed response. His next offer, the mostly upbeat Hotel (2005) received lukewarm reviews and poor sales in general. Moby released his most recent albums, Last Night (2008) and Wait for Me (2009), finding good reviews and moderate sales. AllMusic considers Moby "one of the most important dance music figures of the early '90s, helping bring the music to a mainstream audience both in the UK and in America.

Todays Tune: Muffler - Mermaids

DJ Muffler is Konsta Mikkonen, Finnish born drum and bass DJ and producer, who currently also lives in London and Tallinn. He has released approximately 50 vinyl releases, two CD albums and made DJ mixes for various magazine cover CDs, including Knowledge in 2004 which consisted exclusively of his own music.

Muffler is one of the few artists who has recorded for almost all known high profile drum and bass labels such as Moving Shadow, Hospital Records, DSCI4, Formation Records, Commercial Suicide, Frequency Records, Outbreak Records, Urban Takeover, Trouble On Vinyl and recently on his own SighCo Recordings.

Other artist names used in the past are Konsta, Constant, Unknown Soldier, Axis Of Evil and Alloy.

Todays Tune/Dump: Hatten är din!

Does anyone remember this? Is one of the first internet memes I remember...

I think the language is Swedish - someone please correct me if i'm wrong.

Update: I think the song is in Arabic - subtitles are Swedish.

Todays Dump: Karl Pilkington's girlfriend Suzanne... (for real this time?)

Is this Suzanne???

Todays Dump: Dust-Me Selectors

I have just stumble across this great plugin for firefox: http://www.sitepoint.com/dustmeselectors/

It finds all the unused css styles on a page you are visiting - useful for developers wanting to strip out any old ones that got removed and forgotten about.

Todays Tune: RSD - Naked Mario Kart

RSD (three capitals) is the alias of Rob Smith under which he releases dubstep records. Rob Smith is a dub producer from Bristol with critical acclaim. He has released music as (a.o.) Smith & Mighty, More Rockers, blue & red and RsD.

Todays Tune: Burial & Four Tet - Moth

Burial (born William Bevan) is a musician located in London who produces electronic music containing elements of dubstep, 2-step garage, and house music. His eponymous debut album was released in 2006 to critical acclaim. The Wire magazine named it their album of the year, along with achieving fifth place in the Mixmag 2006 Album of the Year list, and eighteenth in the best of the year list of The Observer Music Monthly supplement. Burial's second album, Untrue, was also released to critical acclaim and was the second-highest rated album of 2007, according to the review-collating website, Metacritic.

Kieran Hebden (born 1977 in Putney, London, England, United Kingdom) is a post-rock and electronic musician. Hebden first came to prominence as a member of the band Fridge before establishing himself as a solo artist under the moniker of Four Tet.

Hebden's music typically eschews the traditional pop song format in favour of a more abstract approach—his sound and melodies incorporate elements of hip hop, electronica, techno, jazz, and folk music with live instrumentation.

Alongside recording his own material, Hebden has also performed remixes for a number of artists including Aphex Twin, Anti-Pop Consortium, Bonobo, Beth Orton, Explosions in the Sky, Super Furry Animals, Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, Matthew Dear, Sia, Nathan Fake, Bloc Party, Andrew Bird, Kings of Convenience, Battles, Madvillain, and Black Sabbath. Hebden's recent output includes a number of improvisational works with veteran jazz drummer Steve Reid, and a collaboration with Burial.

Todays Tune: Buju Banton - Hills & Valleys

Buju Banton (born Mark Anthony Myrie, 1973, Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican dancehall, ragga, & reggae musician. They has also recorded Pop & Dance songs, as well as songs dealing with political topics. Banton is politically outspoken & influenced by Marcus Garvey.

Todays Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Philadelphia

Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss", is an American singer-songwriter. They records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock infused with pop hooks, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.

Springsteen's recordings have tended to alternate between commercially obtainable rock albums and somber folk-oriented works. Much of his status stems from the concerts and marathon shows in which they and the E Street Band perform intense ballads, rousing anthems, and party rock and roll songs, amongst which they intersperses whimsical or deeply emotional stories.

His most successful studio albums, Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A., epitomize his penchant for finding grandeur in the struggles of every day life in The united states, and the latter album made him one of the most recognized artists of the 1980s within the United States. Because of his support for the presidential campaigns of Senator John Kerry and President Barack Obama, Springsteen has gradually become identified with liberal politics. They is also noted for his support of various relief and rebuilding efforts in New Jersey and elsewhere, and for his response to the September 11 attacks, on which his album The Rising reflects.

They has earned numerous awards for his work, including twenty Grammy Awards, four Golden Globes and an Academy Award, and continues to have a strong global fan base. They has sold over 65 million albums in the United States and 120 million worldwide. They was a 2009 recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Todays Tune: DTH - Guns Of Brixton

An interesting cover of The Clash song - Guns Of Brixton from German band Die Toten Hosen.

Die Toten Hosen is a German punk band from Düsseldorf. They have enjoyed decades-long mass appeal in Germany.

The band's name literally means "The Dead Trousers" in English, although the phrase "tote Hose" is a German expression meaning "nothing going on" or "boring". Their name is figuratively best translated as "The Deadbeats".

Todays Tune: Bob Dylan - Mr Tambourine Man

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman; May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, painter and poet. They has been a major figure in popular music for two decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when they was at first an informal chronicler, and later an apparently reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of his songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" became anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements. His early lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social and philosophical, as well as literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres, exploring numerous distinct traditions in American song – from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly, to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.

Dylan performs with guitar, piano and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, they has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but his greatest contribution is generally thought about to be his songwriting.

They has received numerous awards over the years including Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards; they has been inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2008 a Bob Dylan Pathway was opened in the singer's honor in his birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a special citation for what they called his profound impact on popular music and American culture, "marked by lyrical compositions of odd poetic power."

Dylan released his most recent studio album, Christmas in the Heart, on October 13, 2009. It comprised traditional Christmas songs, including "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing". All Dylan's royalties from the sale of this album will benefit the charities Feeding America in the USA, Crisis in the UK, and the World Food Programme.

Todays Dump: Youtube Disco

Youtube recently released http://www.youtube.com/disco. It is a music discoverery application that creates an appropriate playlist based on a song title or artist name. It actually works pretty well in my opinion.

Todays Dump: 10 YouTube URL Tricks

1. View high quality videos
Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2. Embed Higher Quality Videos
While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part - [ most useful in my opinion ]
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4. Hide the search box
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5. Embed only a part of Video
Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6. Autoplay an embedded video
Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.

7. Loop an embedded video
Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the vdeo start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

8. Disable Related Videos
Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering
Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= to http://www.youtube.com/v/ - [ this trick no longer works - instead enter the url into google translate and use it as a proxy ]

10. Download Video
Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching.

Todays Tune: The Clash - Guns Of Brixton

The Clash were an English rock band that formed in 1976 as part of the original wave of British punk rock. Along with punk, they experimented with reggae, ska, dub, funk, rap, dance & rockabilly. For most of their recording career, The Clash consisted of Joe Strummer (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Mick Jones (lead guitar, vocals), Paul Simonon (bass, backing vocals, occasional lead vocals) & Nicky "Topper" Headon (drums, percussion). Headon left the group in 1982, & internal friction led to Jones's departure the following year. The group continued with new members, but finally disbanded in early 1986.

The Clash were a major success in the UK from the release of their debut album, The Clash, in 1977. Their third album, London Calling, released in the UK in December 1979, brought them popularity in the United States when it came out there the following month. Critically acclaimed, it was declared the best album of the 1980s a decade later by Rolling Stone magazine.

The Clash's politicised lyrics, musical experimentation & rebellious attitude had a far-reaching influence on rock, alternative rock in particular. They became widely called "The Only Band That Matters", originally a promotional slogan introduced by the group's record label, CBS. In January 2003 the band—including original drummer Terry Chimes—were inducted in to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked The Clash number 30 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Todays Tune: The Pogues - Rainy Night In Soho

The Pogues are a band of mixed Irish and English background, playing traditional Irish music with influences from punk rock and jazz, formed in 1982 and fronted by Shane MacGowan. They reached international prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. MacGowan left the band in 1991 due to drinking problems but the band continued first with Joe Strummer and then with Spider Stacy on vocals before breaking up in 1996. The band performed together again in 2001, though they have yet to record any new music on a major album.

Their politically-tinged music was influenced by The Clash, yet used traditional Irish instruments such as the tin whistle, banjo, cittern, mandolin, accordion, and others. In the later incarnations of the band, after the departure of Shane MacGowan, rock instruments such as the electric guitar would become more prominent. The first of The Pogues' albums, Red Roses for Me, borrows much from the punk tradition of MacGowan's previous band The Nipple Erectors (later dubbed "The Nips").

The Pogues were founded in King's Cross, a district of North London, in 1982 as Pogue Mahone—pogue mahone being the Anglicisation of the Gaelic póg mo thóin, meaning "kiss my arse".

Todays Dump: Human Biological Clock

Just about to start my Melatonin secretion.

Todays Dump: The Virtual Piano

The Virtual Piano is a website I have recently discovered and it's amazing fun. Just select a key and try out different chord sequences. It's a great help for ideas when trying to come up with a new tune.

Todays Dump: Andes Teletransporter

The greatest invention of the 21st century?

Todays Tune: Fanta 4 - Sie Ist Weg

Die Fantastischen Vier, also known as Fanta 4, is a German hip hop group from Stuttgart. The members are Michael Bernd Schmidt alias Smudo, Andreas Rieke alias &.Ypsilon, Thomas Dürr alias Hausmeister (caretaker) Thomas D & Michael 'Michi' Beck alias Dee Jot Hausmarke. They were among the first groups to rap in the German language.

"Sie ist Weg" means "She is gone."

Todays Tune: Bobby Womack - Across 110th Street

Robert Dwayne "Bobby" Womack (born March 4, 1944) is an American singer-songwriter and musician. An active recording artist since the early 1960s where they started his career as the lead singer of his relatives musical group The Valentinos and as Sam Cooke's backing guitarist, Womack's career has spanned over 40 years and has spanned a repertoire in the styles of R&B, soul, rock and roll, doo-wop, gospel, and country.

As a songwriter, Womack is notable for penning and originally recording The Rolling Stones' first UK No. 1 hit, "It's All Over Now" and New Birth's "I Can Understand It" among other songs. As a singer they is most notable for the hits "Lookin' For a Love", "That's The Way I Feel About Cha", "Woman's Gotta Have It", "Harry Hippie","Across 110th Street" and his 1980s hit "If You Think You are Lonely Now".

In the year 2009 Womack was inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Todays Tune: Minnie Riperton - Inside My Love

Minnie Julia Riperton (November 8, 1947 – July 12, 1979) was an American singer-songwriter best known for her vocal range of over four octaves and her 1975 single "Lovin' You". She was married to songwriter and music producer Richard Rudolph (1968 until her death in 1979). She was also the sister of music engineer Marc Rudolph and actress/comedienne Maya Rudolph.

Riperton grew up in poverty on Chicago's southside. As a kid Riperton studied music, drama, and dance at Chicago's Lincoln Center. In her teen years, Riperton sang lead vocals for the Chicago-based girl group, The Gems. Her early affiliation with legendary Chess Records afforded her the chance to sing backup for various established artist such as Etta James, Fontella Bass, Ramsey Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. While at Chess, Riperton also sang lead for the experimental rock/soul group Rotary Connection, from 1967 to 1971. In 1969 Riperton, along with Rotary Connection, played in the first Catholic Rock Mass at the Liturgical Conference National Convention, Milwaukee Arena, Milwaukee, WI. produced by James F. Colaianni. Riperton reached the apex of her short, but esteemed, career with her number-one hit single, "Lovin' You", on April 4, 1975. The single was the last release from her 1974 gold album entitled Perfect Angel.

In 1976 Riperton was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a modified radical mastectomy. Though he was given 6 months to live, she continued recording and touring, and in 1977 she became spokesperson for the American Cancer Society. Riperton was one of the first celebrities to go public with her breast cancer diagnosis, but did not disclose that she was terminally ill. In 1978, Riperton also received the prestigious Society's Bravery Award presented to her at the White House by then-President Jimmy Carter. She died at age 31 on July 12, 1979.