This video is made of 1.486 photos that I shot with my DSLR, spread over two nights. Editing was done on my 17″ Macbook Pro with iMovie 09.
Music: Big Sky City by Lol Hammond.
They say all great things must come to an end, sooner or later, and i guess they’re right.
Yesterday I watched the very last episode of The Sopranos. It was the 86th episode of the 6th season and the ending was nothing less than brilliant. There has been a lot of commotion about it, but personally I think it was a great choice to end like this.
David Chase, who wrote many of the episodes (and also directed the very first episode of season one and the grand final of season six) also wrote for ‘Northern Exposure’, another brilliant show and also one of my all-time favorites.
Chase made us love Tony Soprano during the first five seasons, but in that last dark season, he made us all pay for loving ‘T’ too much.
Nevertheless, it’s a show I watched and loved for years and I will miss it for sure.
Yesterday, we went to the Rock Werchter festival. The sun was hot, the beer was cold and the gigs were simply amazing! I didn’t have my camera with me, so the pictures below are not shot by me. :-)
The first performance I saw, was also one of the biggest surprises for me: Xavier Rudd. Xavier Rudd is basically a one-man-band playing didgeridoos and guitar and several other instruments at the same time on his own. He’s absolutely brilliant and I really plan on digging further into his music!
Arsenal and Absynthe Minded were really good too and I was happy to finally see these two excellent Belgian band s performing live!
Franz Ferdinand, these guys rock, but we all knew that, right?
At last, I got the chance to see Goldfrapp in action and it was outstanding! Even live, Alison Goldfrapp’s voice can be compared to an angel’s voice. And yeah, ok, the background female dancers dressed in bikinis and wolf-masks were brilliant too! :-)
I saw them before at Rock Werchter but i can’t remember which year, but anyway, after all these years, Placebo’s still great on stage and I’ve always loved their music. 
Main act on Saturday (the concert is from Thursday 29/6 until Sunday 2/7) was dEUS, if you don’t know this Belgian band, and you love alternative rock, you need to check them out, and I think you won’t be disapponted!
Last week, I was in Germany for work. The evenings were a bit lonely, but it’s given me an opportunity to catch up on watching some movies I’ve been wanting to see. My two personal favorites were both made by the Coen Brothers: ‘The Ladykillers’ and ‘Intolerable Cruelty’. Guess that makes me a fan, doesn’t it? I just did a quick check on their filmography and there’s only one of the eleven movies they released so far, which I haven’t seen yet. I just love their movies so much. They’re clever and funny, but if you don’t like sarcasm, don’t bother.
If you’re into music don’t stop reading because I’m gonna tell you about the two coolest instruments on the net to … uhm … “enhance your listening experience”.
The first one is Last.fm. This site contains a few really great tools. First of all there’s a fantastic search tool to look for similar artists. Let’s say you like Air, then you type ‘Air’ and the result will be a list of all artists played by the 100.000 Last.fm users who often play Air. How does it work? Simple, you download a plugin for Winamp and when you’re playing music, the info is uploaded to Last.fm. I must say that it really works cause i’ve discovered some really great music lately. And there’s more, just check it out.
The second instrument is even more spectacular! Jesus, what would I do without it?! So … you’ve got yourself a really nice collection of music. Come on, admit it… you’re the proud owner of thousands and thousands of mp3 tracks (or other formats). But it’s getting a bit out of hand. When you’re looking to play a few tunes, it doesn’t take long before you start feeling a headache. Too much choice? Don’t know where to begin? Or just feeling lazy? Then you have to try ‘MusicMagic Mixer’ from Predixis. It will create a playlist for you based upon one or more songs you select. After the first installation, MusicMagic Mixer (MMM) will analyze all your music. This means that MMM will scan the sound wave of all your music tracks, one by one, and create a fingerprint database. The first time this will probably take a long time depending on the size of your music collection. And then what? Let’s say I have to drive for a couple of hours or a few people are coming for dinner. What to do? Run MMM, choose a few songs you’re in the mood for, tell MMM you want a playlist of uhm …4 hours or 20 hours … whatever! Load the playlist on your MP3 Player or put them on a cd or dvd and that’s it. The playlists are amazing. I remember making a list based upon a few downtempo chill tracks from the last couple of years but MMM threw an old Roxy Music song in the mix. At first it didn’t seem to fit until I listened … it was a perfect match! Try it out, you’ll love it.
