Listening to Loaded and reading about Doug Yule, I came across a neat mini-documentary that sheds some light on his Velvets involvement while focusing on his more recent violin pursuits.

You can read Yule’s own comments on the recording of Loaded here, including a perceptive take on Lou Reed:

Sterl and Lou had no set roles. Lou always played basic rhythm when he was singing and Sterl alternated between rhythm and parts. When it was solo time, they divided the songs up by some method known only to themselves. Sterling always wound up with the more organized breaks while Lou favored the longer, louder, raunchier ones. He had a brilliant sense of melody but an imperfect instrument. Sterling seemed to be just the opposite, more a process of technique that lacked a soaring vision and relied on the acquired skill of filling in the final pieces of a puzzle without overdoing it.

I have a vision of Lou’s mind as filled with beautiful, transcendent melodies that are trapped inside and every time he tries to push one of them out through his fingers or his throat it gets distorted by the imperfection of the vehicle. When it does finally arrive in the world, it is cloaked in the struggle which gave it birth and its beauty only partly visible to the casual observer. Lou’s best work takes some effort to get to.

This is on display in the unreleased tracks from the special edition, like this early take of Satellite of Love, which would eventually become a Lou Reed solo track.

• The Michelin Guide published its second year of Chicago restaurant reviews, and only Alinea received the three-star top award. Their more budget-minded Bib Gourmand award went to 56 area restaurants, including such slouches as Frontera and Avec.
• Jeff Mangum is going on tour for first time in at least a decade. While ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’ has rightfully been canonized, things were not always that way. Take a look back at Rolling Stone or Pitchfork’s modest review of the album (with vintage site design). Also worth checking out: the title track slowed to a 13-minute glacial pace.
• Wikipedia’s list of sandwiches, complete with pictures. Most are legitimate and appetizing, but it looks like a few came together very late at night.

Diego Stocco:

Almost everyday, on my way to a local bakery, I walk in front of a dry cleaners. When they have the front door open, I hear a lot of interesting sounds coming from their work equipment. Eventually, the different mechanical and steam sounds sparked something in my mind, so one day I asked the owners if I could record a piece of music by using their machines as musical instruments.

I used a puff iron, press and dry cleaning machines, a washer, clothes hangers, and a bucket full of soap. The bass and lead sounds were created from the buzzing tones coming from the conduits and engines. There are no additional sounds from any traditional or electronic instruments.

This automated guitar can play in ways impossible for a two-handed, ten-fingered human. The folks at RagtimeWest build automated instruments and even entire automated bands. The results are fascinating and eerily soulless. A couple more guitar tracks:

• Hey Jude
• Brown Eyed Girl
• Dust in the Wind
• Billie Jean (a duet)

The same group built some musicbots for Pat Metheny’s project Orchestrion.

• This American Life has been on a roll lately, and their recent episode with the Plant Money folks covering patents may be the best of the bunch. It focuses on warchests of software patents and subsequent litigation.
• F1 race car driver Karun Chandhok shares his steering wheel and explains what all the buttons do. I can’t believe they are expected to do all this at 200mph, but I suppose there are rules about not giving the driver assistance and turning the cars into giant remote-controlled vehicles.
• Music news: You can watch Radiohead remix/refine their last album on Nigel Godrich’s own From the Basement series. Also, The Weeknd released a new mixtape, which is up for grabs here.
• Music not-so-news: Karlheinz Stockausen, composer and electronic music pioneer, gave a lecture in 1972 on (among other things) sound synthesis. It came at an interesting time, as electronic synthesizers were making the jump from laboratories to recording studios.

I’ve been working through NPR’s excellent Tiny Desk concert series. Each is a self-contained 15-minute intimate studio show, and the videos are produced with quality sound and minimal editing (they keep rolling between songs). There are performances by Steve Earle, Bill Callahan, Thao Nguyen, The Tallest Man on Earth, and many other artists right in NPR’s wheelhouse.

Tom Waits describes twenty albums of particular importance to him. On the Captain Beefheart album Trout Mask Replica:

The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the center of the earth, this is the high jump record that’ll never be beat, it’s a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.

Chasing a heavier sound, Lou Reed tuned all six of his guitar strings to D for a pre-Velvets party song called The Ostrich. The Ostrich guitar was born and its peculiar drone was later used to great effect on tracks like Venus in Furs.