Category Archives: video

To make better use of YouTube

My use of YouTube has been pretty spineless: I sometimes check Viral Video Chart (mostly for outrage or Zeitgeist, which seems the same thing all too often… ), I use YouTube’s keyword search for obscure people and instruments and musical genres, and I grab the occasional clip and save it to the Hoard (where it basically sits around, untagged and unlinked), and sometimes I Embed a video in a page or a blog posting. I’ve scarcely used the ‘Favorite’ button, and until today I confess that I wasn’t inspired to even think about social uses… but (via The Programmable Web) I stumbled upon Walter Rafelsberger’s Metaportal der Medienpolemik, which mashes Dapper and YouTube to construct an RSS feed from one’s YouTube Favorites. Here’s mine, for anybody who might be interested… and I vow to use the Favorite button more systematically.

Today’s musical excesses

I’ve been rolling like a spaniel in dead fish in PLAYLISTS and REAL AUDIO ARCHIVES from WFMU’s Transpacific Sound Paradise: Popular and unpopular music from around the world with Rob Weisburg

…and I hardly know where to begin with YouTube stuff I’ve run into in the last day, but try these:

Annabouboula on Night Music (and catch the instrument at 2:05)

early 60s -late 50s Greek nightclub: Xiotis bouzouki performance

…and for extremes of kitsch, consider Alexandriani Felaha, with Audience Participation (the Levis company has a lot to answer for…)

Today’s musical overload

If I wish I had somebody’s Powers, it’s Ross Daly’s. Plenty more via the ‘Related’, and he has quite a few CDs out there, though they’re not easily found.

Pervane (“an Irish tune”, though it doesn’t become recognizable until 4:10 or so –usually known as “The Butterfly”)

Iocasti’s dream (Ross plays laouto here)

continued

Musical adventuring

Musical projects have dined on my time for the last couple of months, mostly in forms that aren’t Web-distributable (for reasons of copyright, not to mention server space). Along the way I’ve been working with literal mountains of vinyl, tape, mp3s, CDs collected over the years, and YouTube has raised its little head repeatedly. Dunno just why I haven’t thought to make more use of blogspace to track what I’ve been finding, so maybe I’ll try that for a bit. I note that the leaps from one genre to another are sometimes pretty canyonical: what, after all, unites Old Timey American with off-the-wall Klezmer? Tubist Mark Rubin for one. Here he underpins Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars, plus semi-invited guests:

Any YouTube video is likely to provoke one into watching more of the “related” offerings, and probably a couple of steps down that path will take the wanderer into even hairier territory. Consider Vassilis Saleas vs. Ferus Mustafov:

and a couple of steps further south takes us to the Turkish band Laço Tayfa, with clarinetist Hüsnü Senlendirici: