Todays Tune: Leonard Cohen - Here It Is

Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (born September 21, 1934) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships. Famously reclusive, having once spent several years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, and possessing a persona frequently associated with mystique, he is extremely well-regarded by critics for his literary accomplishments and for producing an output of work of high artistic quality over a five-decade career.

Musically, Cohen's earliest songs (many of which appeared on the 1967 album, Songs of Leonard Cohen) were rooted in European folk music. In the 1970s, his material encompassed pop, cabaret and world music. Since the 1980s, his high baritone voice has evolved into lower registers (bass baritone and bass), with accompaniment from a wide variety of instruments and female backup singers.

Over 2,000 renditions of Cohen's songs have been recorded. Cohen has been inducted into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. While giving the speech at Cohen's induction into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 10, 2008, Lou Reed described Cohen as belonging to the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters."

Todays Dump: Computer Composer Indistinguishable From A Human

Here are two of it's creations.

Emily Howell 1

Emily Howell 2

The software is called Emily Howell and was created by UC Santa Cruz professor David Cope. Check out Triumph Of The Cyborg Composer.

Todays Tune: Louis Armstrong - We Have All The Time In The World

Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence on jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performers. With his distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing, or vocalizing using syllables instead of actual lyrics.

Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and deep, instantly recognizable voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong's influence extends well beyond jazz music, and by the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general.

Todays Tune: DJ Vadim - Oneself

DJ Vadim (aka Vadim Peare) is a prolific DJ and producer, born in Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), raised in London and currently residing in both New York and Port-au-Prince, Haiti,[citation needed] whose music combines hip hop, soul, reggae and electronica. He has been described as "one of the few artists creating genuinely new work in the Hip-Hop field" and an artist who "cannot be ignored".

Todays Tune: Omni Trio - Renegade Snares

Rob Haigh, also known as Omni Trio, is a British electronic, ambient and experimental musician.

In the early eighties he released a series of experimental ambient albums under the names Robert Haigh and Sema - the most notable being ‘Three Seasons Only’ and ‘Notes From Underground’. He also contributed to several Nurse with Wound projects and formed an industrial avant funk band called The Truth Club together with Trefor Goronwy, who would go on to join This Heat, Camberwell Now and become involved with music in the former Soviet Union..

In the nineties Rob developed a unique style of what has become known as ‘ambient Drum and Bass’ and released six acclaimed albums under the name Omni Trio. The Omni Trio sound is notable for its intricate orchestrated production and atmospheric sound palette. Omni Trio was one of the original drum and bass producers, who first released for Moving Shadow as early as 1993. He produced several massive anthems in the period now known as "old skool", including the piano-led "Renegade Snares", "Thru the Vibe", "Feel Good" and the classic "Mainline". Both these featured on his first LP, The Deepest Cut (1995), which is recognised as one of the first jungle albums.

He followed up quickly with Haunted Science in 1996, which included well known tracks like "Trippin' on Broken Beats" and "Nu Birth of Cool". Mainstream trends in dancefloor-oriented drum and bass rapidly diverged from his musical style, and subsequent albums Skeleton Keys (1997), the Detroit techno-influenced Byte Size Life (1999), and Even Angels Cast Shadows (2001) produced no big hits on the scale of his early singles, but they further cemented his reputation as one of the finest album-oriented musicians in drum and bass. Indeed, he was the first artist in the genre to produce six full-length artist albums. The track First Contact made it on the GTA III's MSX FM.

Since 2004 after the release of the sixth and final Omni Trio album ‘Rogue Satellite’, Rob has been working on a solo album of "post Minimalist sonic landscapes" called ‘From the Air’ and is collaborating with experimentalist Hafler Trio.

The Omni Trio song "Renegade Snares" is featured in the video game Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition, "First Contact" (off "Even Angels Cast Shadows") is featured in Grand Theft Auto 3.