music

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There’s just nineteen days left before the CD of Steve Jablonsky’s Transformers score comes out, which a lot of us have been looking forward to since the movie came out. Well, Marco van Bergen has discovered something about the soundtrack. Remember the unearthly chanting that’s in a lot of the music for the Decepticons, like when Frenzy is hacking the computer and during the “roll call” scene? Marco and I talked about it and comparisons to John Williams’s “Duel of the Fates” from the Star Wars Episode I soundtrack came up. The chorals in “Duel of the Fates” were a Sanskrit translation of an ancient Welsh poem called “Battle of the Trees”. So might Jablonsky have done something similar with the Decepticons music?

Well, Marco did some asking-around in the right places and here’s what he found out:

I was wondering for a longer time now what the great

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So help me, I have cried something furious in the past few days since his passing.

A lot of people really didn’t know that about me: that I was a big fan of Luciano Pavarotti. And I’d always dreamed of hearing him live in concert someday. That’ll never happen now.

Pavarotti is one of the best reasons why God in His graciousness has allowed us to have things like compact discs. I really believe that. If He let the printing press come about so that His word could be shared with the world, then God let sound recording and other technology happen so that the world could enjoy and stand in awe at the magnificent things He has created. Like Pavarotti’s voice.

We’ll be lucky if the next hundred years gives us a voice so magnificent. Heck, we’ll be lucky if we get a voice so magnificent as Pavarotti’s at ...

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When good stuff like this has been out for a few months, and I’m only now finding out about it… that’s when I know that I’ve been too absorbed in the serious and need to slow down and enjoy things more.

I love this song! It’s catchy and fun and it’s quite obvious that Tay is really enjoying his work. Dude’s got talent.

This blog is used to post stuff that I think is cool and this is definitely up there. So here he is: Tay Zonday singing “Chocolate Rain”!

(BTW, if you like “Chocolate Rain” then right-click here and save it in MP3!)...

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Why does it seem lately that we are losing so many legends?

It was in 1985 when I first heard Luciano Pavarotti sing. It was a concert on television and even as an 11-year old kid, I though there was something magnificent about Pavarotti’s voice. Over the years I made sure to watch Pavarotti whenever he was on.

Probably my best memory of Pavarotti was when he did the 3 Tenors concert at the 1994 World Cup in Los Angeles, where Pavarotti performed alongside Placido Domingo and José Carreras. I watched the whole thing live and bought the concert CD the day it came out a few weeks later. Before the show they were running footage of Pavarotti in the days leading up to the concert, laughing and playing with a soccer ball.

Here’s the story from ABC News about his passing.

I don’t know of what else that could ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Here is the e-mail that arrived earlier this afternoon from Steve Jablonsky, the composer of the orchestral score for the movie Transformers.

Hey Chris,

My assistant forwarded your email to me a while back. I checked out your petition, and I wanted to personally thank you and everyone that signed. Support from fans like you really means a lot to me, and it makes me very happy that so many people enjoyed the Transformers score. Sorry it has taken so long to get it released. A score release was always in the works, it just took a while to pull everything together. But I’m glad it’s finally coming out.

So thank you again, and a big thanks to the thousands who signed. Feel free to post this on your site or blog or wherever you like, so I can pass along thanks to everyone.

Steve

Thanks Steve! And on ...

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The irony didn’t sink in until a short while ago: all summer I’ve been championing the release of Steve Jablonsky’s orchestral soundtrack from the movie Transformers. And Transformers was a Paramount production. Well, Paramount is owned by Viacom…

…and now Viacom is claiming that I infringed on its copyright because I uploaded onto YouTube a video that Viacom made by violating MY copyright!

No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

Okay, just had to get that out of the way for sake of the irony, ‘cuz I do appreciate irony (even when it’s not going my way). Anyhoo, I found this on Amazon.com’s page for what is apparently now being called Transformers: The Score:

Looks beautiful! I soooo can’t wait to have this in my CD collection....

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Chris Knight's avatar

Since news broke here on Sunday night that the soundtrack CD of Steve Jablonsky’s score for Transformers would be coming out on October 9th from Warner Bros. Records, I’ve watched the album’s product page on Amazon reflect considerable demand for this CD. When it first listed on Sunday night it was somewhere in the 40,000-ish area so far as sales ranks go. Yesterday morning around 10:30 EST it was #1,618. Currently it’s at #217 and some are saying it might be in double-digits within the next few days. The Transformers score CD has also jumped significantly at the Barnes & Noble site (currently at #669).

All of those are just from presales, for an album that word is only now really getting around that it’s coming out.

Every indication right now is that this is set to become a major selling CD. And sales are probably going to soar even ...

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Well folks, it’s now looking like we have a release date for the album containing Steve Jablonsky’s awesome score from the movie Transformers: it’s apparently rolling out on October 9th, 2007!

It must have just listed in the last little while ‘cuz I checked Amazon at around 8 p.m. on Sunday night and it wasn’t there. But sharp-eyed Transformers fan Chris Barry in the past hour found it here on Amazon and then spotted it here at Barnes & Noble and then again here at Best Buy. It’s street price is listing at $18.98 but there is some retail price difference depending on which site you look at. And as previously reported here, it will be coming to us courtesy of Warner Bros. Records.

So ummmm… yay!!! We’ll soon have this awesome score in our CD collections! At least I hope that we will all go ...

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Warner Bros. Records will “shortly” be releasing the album of Steve Jablonsky’s orchestral score from the movie Transformers, according to a Senior Vice President in the Music Department at Paramount Pictures.

The Knight Shift blog received this confirmation a short while ago. And you’ve no idea how happy I am about being able to report this!

The word comes from a source wishing to identifying himself as “Sam Witwicky all the way from New Zealand” (and in case you’re wondering, I already asked if his eBay username was “ladiesman217” and he said that it’s not :-). “Sam Witwicky” was able to correspond directly with the good people at Paramount Pictures: the studio which along with DreamWorks was responsible for producing Transformers. Our man Sam told them about the interest there’s been in a CD release of Jablonsky’s score and he mentioned the online petition (which may hit 5,000 ...

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Let’s get what I’m obviously going to say out of the way. The thing that I always mention whenever the subject of They Might Be Giants comes up. Namely, that Flood from 1990 is the greatest musical album ever produced.

I dare anyone to try and tell me otherwise. Not when every single song on this album is nothing less than a work of freakin’ genius.

I’ve owned a copy of Flood in one form or another since 1992. It’s easily the most-played album on my MP3 player. So many good memories associated with this album. I sorta feel a duty to shamelessly pitch for it 🙂

Anyway, yeah I’m a huge fan of “the two Johns”, Linnel and Flansburgh. These guys have always been on the cutting edge not just of music but of technology. And now Gearlog has an awesome interview with John Flansburgh in two parts ...

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