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Les Michels - New Years’ Eve 1992 at le Cheval Blanc

Rock music might be wearing a long, white beard which occasionaly gets entangled in its guitar strings, but for rock & roll itself it’s quite another story. Because you see, the spirit of rock and roll cannot ever die.

As proof right here, and also for your listening pleasure, we have Les Michels’ newly digitized 1992 “Démo pour le dire” (“The words to demo it”). This was Les Michels’ first recording, done on 4-track tape in the rehearsal studio. This remaster was made from one of the original 126 cassettes, as the masters themselves were last seen rambling and tumbling in the thick fog of a bar on rue St-Denis. Nevermind, cause the tunes sound almost as good as on a CD!

Now the good news is that you can get these tracks for free with Les Michels’ new disc “Tout à fond”. Here’s to the spirit of rock & roll!

Les Michels’ disc “Tout à fond (To the Floor)” is now on the web!

Recorded in 1995, right around the time Kurt Kobain blew his head off, “Tout à fond” was only available up to now if you knew one the band’s members. The guys aren’t marketing geniuses, that’s for sure, but on the rock & roll side, they did put on some shows that just teared the roof off (sucker).

This new old release contains 14 original québécois songs, plus a 16 page booklet, for only $2.99. There’s also a real plastic CD for two more bucks. Like lil Meg sed, it’s never too late to do good! Rock & roll, baby!

Tout à fond - Booklet p12-13

Clique ici pour la version française!

New Season begins hot on Luna’s racy heels

Hi y’all fangbangers! Just when you thought a summer flirting with the 40°C mark was about all the hotness you’d ever need, thank you very much, HBO shows up with the Fourth season of True Blood! Now, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind letting a bit of that Louisiana heat in, would you?

So go ahead and check out my sexy shifter excerpt, featuring Sam & new all-around fantastic chick Luna. Nowhere else than on The Elrico Show.

The Notorious Super Sexe Nightclub

Hi there! Been a while no? I wasn’t watching hockey, I was building yet another WordPress website! I must love doing that…

There’s a bunch of photographs of my beloved city, Montréal. Come and check it out!

Rico

George Clinton, no.1 badass

Once upon a while, people be askin’ me, “Luke, do you got the funk?” To which I answer: Motherfucker, I ain’t posin’ up there! I’m a bass player goddamit! I don’t got the funk, I don’t own the funk, I am the funk!

But, lemme tell you, this was far from a given, at any time. I’ve had to sweat blood and sharp sixteenths to get there! I’ve paid my dues to the Funk, and in many ways, I still do today. But I do what I likes: I play music. And, sometimes, I get to tell stories.

Is the funk a bit like the mojo?

Not at all. The mojo is a magical spell related to voodoo, while “funky” only means stinky. As in, stinky business. Stinky business you can have on the back seat of a car. So that’s how you make funky music: by thinking of your girlfriend, on the backseat of a (seventies) car. None more to it.

Read more on The Elrico Show.

Words have been the word in twenty ten.

From Twitter hashtags to mainstreaming serial killers — we check out the words we think made the bigger bangs.

It’s here: Rico’s Top Words of 2010.

Hard to argue

We as kids used to think that Disco sucked. Riding the bus to school, there were the real men, and those who liked Disco. We wondered how in hell gold lamé pants ever became that popular.

Don’t even think about it!

But now we understand that there are far worse things; we can see that Disco was a working-class movement that was foremost about youth and making noise, about dancing, and also a lot about sex. So it’s no big surprise that the late-seventies good taste arbiters, like catholics and school principals, never wanted us to like it — let alone enjoy it!

Yeah but…

Well OK there also was the castrato-pitched singing of the Bee Gees, and all that dancing… wouldn’t that be very gay?

Dancing, no. James Brown, my friend, the funkmaster, the Sex Machine himself, was anything but gay! Plus, I mean come on, seriously, this is 2010, even inbred rednecks don’t think that way anymore. But yeah, you’re right, the singing was gay ;-).

So it was all just fun and games then!

Sort of. The whole thing was bigger than life, a blow off steam kinda thing, and that can be either good or bad, depending on just how far a person’s going to take it. But it ran a lot deeper than that. Disco brought people together — young and old, black and white, anybody willing to just dance. It probably was the first total “crossover” movement.

Musically speaking, Disco was built right on top of the Philadelphia Soul sound, which had brought these huge string and brass arrangements to pop music. In turn, Disco introduced the machine to the music world, blending in sequencer-played synth melodies, although the bands remained essentially man-played. Listen to “I feel love”, recorded as far back as 1977, you’ll find that the synth thang is essentially the same as what techno does today!

Night fever, night fever…

Well yeah. Things change while remaining pretty much the same! Today in music, it’s all about virtual instruments. But the funny thing is, however digitized stuffs become, they’re most always just a more practical version of another stuff you can actually lay your hands on. And, well, as far as I’m concerned, music’ll always be about feeling, nothing else.

see the Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever and Studio 54 on YouTube

by dePlayer @deplayerman
originally published on The Elrico Show
also check out my insanely vibey stuff on Mastervibe Inc.

Strong, sexy, sublime

Here are some strong, sexy, sublime scenes from HBO’s True Blood series. In my mind these are easily on par with anything the great cinema classics ever had to offer. Has TV really beaten the movies?

Read it and see the scenes here: Just like the movies, but better.

Taken with an iPhone 3G and processed in Adobe’s new Lightroom 3

To snap or not to snap

We’ll agree right off the bat, photos made with an iPhone won’t ever qualify for anything above the snapshot moniker. But, firstly there’s nothing wrong with snapshots, and secondly, there’s no reason why an image you caught on the spur of the moment shouldn’t look as good as possible.

Photography is an eminently technical activity — and very quickly people lose sight of what makes a good photograph, to begin obsessing over pixel count and ISO sensitivity, to admire the perfect sound a reflex shutter makes, or to find themselves actually thinking a titanium body looks very sexy. I know, it’s true, I do it all the time. But let’s try and remember that photography is about the feeling a person gets from seeing a photo — it’s about the subject, and about light and composition. All things you can get from an iPhone snapshot.

I’ll tell you, I’m an amateur photographer, I’m not even getting paid for all this. But I love taking photos. I wasn’t sure I was going to like digital photography, but one day I bought a compact and plunged my hands into the digital darkroom.

Adobe’s Lightroom 3

A couple of days ago I downloaded the free Adobe Lighroom 3 trial and found out it has a nifty Lens Correction module, which includes a ready-made profile for the iPhone’s camera! Oh happiness! And it works pretty damn well. It straightens the corners of the photos so there’s less wide-angle distortion, plus it makes the iPhone’s weird color unevenness a little less apparent (images have too much green around the edges).

The color noise filter gets rid of your sensor’s color hesitations

Then there’s Lightroom 3’s rightfully advertised color noise filter. Color noise (a.k.a. Chroma noise) has been a big problem in JPEG photos from compact cameras, and it gets even worse with cellphone photos, because of their low pixel-count. If you take the magnifying glass to a color area that’s supposed to be uniform, you’ll see these ugly color specks I’m talking about, like the camera sensor didn’t know exactly which color to put there. This problem is especially visible in low-light areas.

The new Lightroom arrives with this great color noise filter that takes care of the sensor’s not knowing exactly which, and restores a beautiful uniformity to the color. What’s even best is that this filter doesn’t just blur the area; it preserves all the detail in the grain of the photograph. I finds it does a very nice job. Of course if you don’t want any grain you can do that too, with the noise reduction filter.

There are many other functions in Lightroom 3, like the sharpening, color balance, exposure controls and zone-specific contrast adjustments that can make your photos look much better. Maybe one day I’ll write some more about the digital darkroom, if you’re good.

There you go

So! You may not be prepared to pluck your wallet of 300 nice dollars just to get your snapshots to look right; that’s totally understandable. But if you’re a photo amateur with a good eye, you may at least want to give your hard drive a spin an try out Lightroom 3, and you’ll be able to make best-looking shots, snap or not.

Rico

PS: Btw, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has nothing to do with Photoshop, Adobe’s great image processing and retouching software. They’re both totally separate applications. Lightroom is also a great app but is meant for processing, tagging and exporting digital photographs.
Also note that Photoshop CS5 does have a similar color noise filter and lens correction module as Lightroom.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
US$ 299, upgrade US$ 99
Adobe’s Lightroom 3 page

Download the Lightroom 3 trial (all versions)
(Windows 160 Mb, Mac OS 80 Mb)