Fat Mike has announced the Punk Rock Museum.
It’s been 45+ years since punk rock pogo’d its way into music, fashion, film, and popular culture. January 13th 2023, The Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas opens its doors and proudly shoves in your face the history, culture, and absurdity of rock n’ roll’s bastard step-child. This museum invites lifelong fans and curious looky-loos of all ages to experience a hands-on, uniquely punk rock experience.
TechCrunch looks at Dance Diffusion, an AI music generator:
The emergence of Dance Diffusion comes several years after OpenAI, the San Francisco-based lab behind DALL-E 2, detailed its grand experiment with music generation, dubbed Jukebox. Given a genre, artist and a snippet of lyrics, Jukebox could generate relatively coherent music complete with vocals. But the songs Jukebox produced lacked larger musical structures like choruses that repeat and often contained nonsense lyrics.
Google’s AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows more promise, with an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn’t been open sourced.
Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what’s known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it’s fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works.
“I started writing a book, actually, earlier this year,” he revealed. “I’m not that far into it yet but I’m writing a book about my life and experience in Blink and what I’ve gone through over the past year or so.”
He describes the forthcoming tome as a combo of music memoir meets medical journey. Though he’s working with an editor and has a publisher, Hoppus is keeping mum on the specifics until the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.
“We’re finalizing the deal and I’m really happy with the way that’s coming together. I’m excited to tell my story,” Hoppus said, admitting that it’s a 180 from how he felt last year prior to the accidental social media post. “I didn’t say anything about being sick for the longest time because I was so scared and overwhelmed by the whole thing.”
Daryl Worthington, writing for the Quietus:
“The thing I find most interesting about the whole thing regarding format and materiality is that even though a large proportion of people may listen almost exclusively digitally to music, there is still a sense that if something doesn’t have a physical release it is a less substantial album. Even people who would never listen to CD, tape or vinyl I think still assign value to an album existing in a physical format. That physicality kind of haunts the release, giving it a substance even in its digitality. For me, given this, CD offers a really easy and practical way of providing this physical option.”
Paramore sat down with The Guardian:
Much of the new album draws from the trio’s conversations from that period to look back at the environments they came from. They discussed growing up in the Bible belt. Williams moved from Mississippi to Tennessee when her mum fled her second husband. She met Farro through a homeschool programme, and he knew York. Early on, Paramore talked openly about being a Christian band, but now they are all at different stages of unravelling their relationship to faith, says Williams. “You’re brought up being told something is ultimate, you unpack that and then find out that it’s tangled up with some other random shit over here.” She sighs: “Zac and Taylor are the most gentle and kind about it, whereas I feel like my teeth are knives and I’m spewing fire, trying to throw all of it over the side of a cliff. It’s good to be challenged – like Taylor reminds me all the time, you can’t generalise. I can be very dualistic when it comes to good people and bad people, and a lot of the record talks about what it means that people aren’t just that.”
Amber Pacific’s The Turn has been pressed on a new limited edition vinyl.
Apple Music will be the sponsor of the next Super Bowl halftime show.
Apple Music’s first Super Bowl halftime show will take place Feb. 12, 2023 in Arizona, with performers TBD. The tech giant says that it will roll out details and sneak peeks of the event on its @AppleMusic social channels ahead of the Super Bowl.
Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years talked with BrooklynVegan about their new album:
Dan also, as many bands who have been at it this long probably do, has been thinking about the day The Wonder Years just don’t get to do this anymore, and he addresses that on “Lost It In The Lights,” where he muses, “What if the magic’s gone? I guess I should be glad that there was any at all.” “I was thinking about career arcs,” Dan tells us. “It can be very easy to, and I have seen other artists almost get angry towards the end, or like bitter, as they realize their career is like winding down. And I was thinking about how I can’t be anything but grateful, because there’s just like, logically no reason this should’ve happened. There’s a lot of times where I’m like, ‘Is this real?’ Like is my fucking life real that I get to do this thing for a living, for all these people, to commiserate with all these people. So I wanted to make sure that I expressed that like, when the day comes that we don’t get to do that anymore, the only thing that I will feel towards those people is gratitude.”
A new pressing of Relient K’s Air for Free is now available.
No Sleep Records has launched a Kickstarter to try and save the label:
On September 10th, as I was making preparations to receive inventory, I learned that Awesome Merch had been locked out of their commercial space, and that the landlord has taken possession of everything inside.
Every piece of inventory No Sleep has is in that warehouse. From apparel, records, CD’s, even test presses. My heart sank. I’m in shock. I’m devastated.
I immediately got in touch with my lawyer, and am in the process of seeing what we can do to rectify this nightmare situation and to see if we can recover from these damages. As of now I have no real answer on if we will get our inventory back, what will have to be done to try and rectify the situation or what the outcome will be.
This is a big loss for No Sleep. After an already tough couple of years due to COVID-19.
Kris Roe of The Ataris is on the latest episode of the Between Awesome and Disaster podcast.
Modest Mouse are selling some of their old gear on Reverb.
Joe Trohman of Fall Out Boy is on the latest Rolling Stone podcast talking about his upcoming book.
“We were working on some stuff that was guitar-based,” he says. “I don’t know know what’s happening with it. I think it unfortunately went to the back burner. It would be nice to make a record where the guitar is a little more upfront. We did start that way, as a guitar-based rock band, and it’d be cool to go back to those roots. We’d have to find a way to do it that doesn’t sound like Fall Out Boy from 2005. It might be cool for somebody else to do that, but it wouldn’t be cool for us to do it.”
Topshelf Records have launched a Kickstarter to help save the label’s inventory:
while making plans to book last second flights down to Austin to rent trucks and load up our inventory in order to drive it up to Portland and try and figure out what we would do with it all, we learned that Awesome’s US business is in the process of being sold to an acquisitions company and everything that they had within their facility—all equipment, machinery, supplies, and client inventory—is being treated as property of the property management company, sold AS-IS to this new acquisition company. subsequently, access to our own inventory is now being denied to us. we’re being told we don’t have legal grounds to enter the building nor do we have legal grounds to lay claim to anything in the building. we expect we have several costly legal battles in front of us if this logic prevails.
Songwriter Sam Hollander (for a lot of the bands you probably like) has written a book. Pre-orders are now up.
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