I have to share this new band I’m into. First watch the best new video I’ve seen in dog years.
I KNOW. Shows you that Memento could have been a hell of a lot shorter.
But that’s not my favorite song. Here’s the one that Chris and Sheep Robby have both picked up on:
Here’s a quieter one, but still great.
So this is just a post to let you know that I am now subscribed to the alt-j channel on youtube and http://soundcloud.com/alt-j/. And I’ll be seeing them live next time they are in town. I have it on excellent authority that they know how to play instruments in front of a crowd. Go ye forth and listen and share!
The Mercy Seat is a changeable beast. The song is very simple. A man is waiting to die in the electric chair, he is not afraid, he says he is innocent. He is executed and goes to his reward. The song is complex. The man may or may not be innocent, he is unreliable and crazy, he is not unafraid. He calls on the mercy seat that God sits on and is not heard.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play this song at every concert, changing the performance and the lyrics. Sometimes it curls up sweet and sad and slow.
Sometimes it roars like a lion and shakes the earth.
I like it loud like that. I feel the madness and bombast – it blows me away every time. One day I went on a mercy seat binge, listened to tons of versions and covers on youtube.
The covers flowed and changed like the versions the Bad Seeds played live. Some were intimate and pushed against the base of your gut.
This Dresden Dolls cover is like a hammer banging onto a hammer banging onto a skull. Those DRUMS are so huge!
Shouldn’t ALL drum solos just be part of the song?
I found out there is a gospel song of the same name by an artist named Vicki Yohe. I love this version of it – the passion, the build, the weird guy clapping in the background! It really starts kicking at 3:10…
It has that same structure – the slow build and the giant pounding crescendo. They both deal with the Mercy Seat and I’d love to hear a mashup that builds them off of each other, trading despair and hope. Hell, let’s see what happens when we play them right over each other. IF I knew anyone who made mashups I’d totally log time helping or pay them to create this. Then I would listen to it until my ears fell off.
This is an awesome time to be alive. Everything keeps changing. I remember when it was common knowledge that you had to cripple the movies and games you sold to keep people from copying them.
These days, that old myth is falling apart and people are realizing that alot of that was a pricing issue. Louis C.K. took a chance on his fans and sold them 100% DRM free comedy at $5 a pop. His fans made him a million in 12 days, because he is genuine and treated them like people.
Can we reasonably expect a protopia from the system of people, laws, and technology? Or should we expect darker things from Industrial Society and Its Future?
My favorite theory of consciousness is that it doesn’t exist – it is an illusion that a system creates to handle all the conflicting demands of subsystems. The internet doesn’t seem conscious yet – but it seems close. Perhaps we are putting our pareidoliac predilections on processes that have no analogue to our lives, seeing faces in clouds of networks and switches.
Doesn’t it seem that a system that spends so much time looking at itself will begin to have a working model of itself, that it will eventually build feedback mechanisms that reshape it in even more interesting ways?
Will it be a community or an entity or are both the same?
![[Electric chairs.] Digital ID: 814385. New York Public Library](http://www.morelightmorelight.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/mercy_seat.jpg "[Electric chairs.] Digital ID: 814385. New York Public Library")