Jan Turkenburg of 52 Weeks was the first to create a theme for the new site. It is quite a piece with lots of instrumentation and recorded sounds. Please click here to see the instruments and find out about all those layers of sound.
Our friend Chenard Walcker in France liked the idea of creating an Oddio Overplay theme so well that he made an entire EP of them! Chenard invites you to hear his entire beautiful Oddio EP. While you are there, you will want to be sure to check out the rest of his site. He has packed it tightly with lovely recordings and artwork.
click for enlarged images
title: Oddio Promo#21-3 (beef mix)
artist: The Apartment
---info---
This song was written by myself, The Apartment and my imaginary friend Gorge Constiago for our good friends down at Oddio Overplay. We have included lyrics down below so that you may sing along with it in all the hip dance clubs and karioke bars.
---lyrics---
oddio...
if you want to learn
you've got to listen
beef
cooked cereal
vegetables and salads
this is bill palmer
and this is bill hughes
we are very glad that you are listening to
oddio overplay
and we would like you to come into my studio
so I can show you tunes
that only use only suggestions
that have been given to us by
teachers from
outer space
and so we will start right at the very beginning
one..two..three..four..
one..hold it..three..hold it..
one..hold it..three..hold it..
oddio...
one..hold it..three..hold it..
if you want to learn
you've got to listen
overplay
down..load
and
listen
you've got to listen
you've got to listen
we usually write the word magic on this page in large wiggly letters
stewed prunes
one..hold it..three..hold it..
low down
down..load
overplay
overplay
overplay
oddio
overplay
oddio...
overplay...
There were a whole bunch of tracks and ideas for tracks that didn't make the release. If you would like to share your piece, drop a line.
1. Mark Harp - John Leslie
Had to share this hilarious silliness! Thank you, Mr. Leslie!
2. the Jingojango - Oddio Twist
"an idea that went nowhere. what a mess."
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Here's the way I remember my father telling the story: when he was very young, he bought his first set of Chuck Berry 45's and played them until the grooves were deep like riverbeds. One night, he had the album spinning and while nodding off, he saw a spirit over the stereo. It was Chuck, or someone like Chuck, telling him that he was meant to spend his life with music. He would learn and teach and feel and connect with the sound and tell stories and set the record straight. It was a mission and he was chosen for it. It set him on a path that led to him spending the rest of his life studying the history and influence of music and calling this interest something less than an obsession would be gravely understating the facts of the matter.
Growing up, there was always music in the house, always song. There was considerable rarity, exceptional quality and reasonable variety; gospel, jazz, ragtime, blues, worldpop (with an emphasis on African), country and western, some rnb. Never classical or electronic. No popular music of any kind past 1969.
Traditional geek/outsider status in school predictably followed. In fifth grade, teacher asked all the kids who their favorite music group was. Round the class: Motley Crue, AC/DC, Bon Jovi. I said The Golden Gate Quartet and when they finished laughing, everybody knew something was wrong. I thought so too, but for obviously different reasons. It was a shame that they couldn't hear my music and (though it took me decades to realize this) a shame that I couldn't hear their music. There were all sorts of lines that divided my classmates and I, but the differences in our access to music struck me as particularly unfair.
By seventh grade, I had been loaned enough tapes to dub and spent enough time with the hesher/thrasher squads that I had begun to amass a few tapes worth of interest. Now was Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Ozzy, Megadeth, Metallica. I remember going to the mall and buying the "5.98 EP" and getting yelled at by my parents when I sang the "raped your mother today" lyric that Hetfield had cribbed from the Misfits. At the same time my father began making me a series of mixtapes: pre-war Blues, be-bop, bluegrass, building blocks of rock. Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker and Sly shared shelf space with Skid Row, Poison and Faster Pussycat.
High school was the MTV years of big media: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Faith No More; but also Ice-T, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre. Violent spastic energy was the order of the day and blues and jazz had to take a backseat to uproarious hormones.
College was what college is: a blend of influences and exposure. Tom Waits and Tori Amos and Tupac and They Might Be Giants and Timbaland and TLC and Tchaikovski and that's just the T's.
I got my first computer right after the September 11th tragedies; I had been thinking about looking into it beforehand and hoped afterward that it might prove to be something that could brighten me up. Like everyone else in the City, I felt a little dull and had heard a lot about how much music and conversation could be found on these things. Napster had already come and gone, but I heard rumours that there were other services filling the space it had left. I got a cable connection and a Dell and spent something like thirty percent of my time stuck in front of this little monitor and calling it something less than an obsession would be gravely understating the facts of the matter.
For the past three years, I've been taken with the potential of the internet's ability to revolutionize the way people listen to and access music. Hailing from a family where music was ALWAYS on and every moment was soundtracked, music is roughly as important to me as food. At the moment, musicblogging strikes me as a brandnew, proletariat owned and operated method to distribute music internationally to anyone regardless of social or economic status with access to their library/internetpub/schoolcomputer/whatever.
With music comes culture, new ideas, new ways of appreciating and seeing the world. "Dark was the night, cold was the ground" looks like the heart of a man; "smells like teen" is ALWAYS gonna tap into an interior fifteen year old; "naima" sounds like love. Songs are art, but they're also shared communication; virals that can facilitate understanding and connection between people in a way that few other things can. Music is at least as important to mankind as politics, if not more. If a kid in Utah hears "Strange Fruit" for the first time and it causes him to question his concepts of race; if a suicidal woman in Portugal stumbles onto; a Susana Baca track that speaks to her; if a young Bronx thug unearths a Marvin Gaye track that sets him on the path to learning the flute; if a Williamsburg hipster becomes so enamored of a 1930's era Japanese swing band that he gives better service at his coffee bar: these things make musicblogging worthwhile and are a hundred times more unlikely to occur without it.
At no other time in history has so much information and art been available to so many people. We've finally remade The Library of Alexandria but instead of glorifying, exploiting and maximizing its potential; we get frightened that it's gonna cause an artistic economic collapse. I simply don't believe that posting music online is damaging record sales. Some people WANT the concrete item, the liners, the disc, the album art and they're GOING to buy it regardless. Old arguments RE: bottled water, genie's out of the lamp, artists make most of their profit performing live anyway, etc still apply; but add to that this old chestnut lifted from a former cop: "a locked door only keeps an honest man out". People who rely exclusively on mp3s for music, AREN'T going to buy CD's regardless, they'll dub copies of their friends mixes. Most of my friends did that; didn't yours?
If anything, it's a numbers game. You host two songs by your hot new artist and 1,000 people download it who never would've heard of the guy otherwise and three buy the music. Well, there's three who just bought the music. Hosting costs are virtually insignificant, so I only see benefit and not harm. If I tape the song off the radio, do I own the music? If I dub it from a friend (and incidentally, where was all this outrage when the mixtape went aboveground)? If I tape it off MTV (they do broadcast music don't they)? "Owning" music is like owning an idea; the real issue is profit, as in "does my listening to this music profit or detriment the artist"? I'd argue it always profits and never causes detriment.
There are those who hope to send us down a rosier path where we have access to ANY skilled individual voice, regardless of their affiliation with a label. A few of the better musicblogs have taken to posting massive potpourris of genre-blind material, inviting anyone with the slightest bit of musical curiosity to explore and discover whole new worlds. That's where Oddio Overplay comes in. Right now, no one on the net has come anywhere close to the level of savvy, taste, knowledge and design smarts that O.O. has showcased remarkable site. Sidestepping legal issues entirely by engaging small labels and smaller artists directly, Oddio provides some order to the chaos of musicblogging and puts a friendly, enthusiastic face on the whole movement. No sneering "High Fidelity" uber-geek ego here, just an exciting enthralling collection of musical worlds and tastes that could take a whole lifetime to explore.
This is the future and the future looks pretty damn good. |