Chad Blinman

Wooden Robot – Unless They’re Weird, Your Kids Will Eat It

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Santa Monica, California rockers Wooden Robot have released their debut album Unless They’re Weird, Your Kids Will Eat It. The members of Wooden Robot combine hard rock, alternative and metal influences into their own distinctive sound. I mixed about half of the album (seven tracks) at The Eye Socket.

The album is available now from iTunes and Amazon, with a Kickstarter project underway to fund a CD pressing. Visit the band’s website and sign up for their mailing list to receive two free tracks from the album.

Why I will never see the film ‘Titanic’

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Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio is in it.

It all started quite innocently.

The twentieth century was coming to an end. James Cameron’s insanely expensive 1997 romance/disaster film Titanic was the biggest thing ever, dazzling housewives and teenage girls everywhere and out-grossing every other perfectly respectable highest-grossing-movie-ever by a comfortable margin.

It was the first film ever to earn more than a billion dollars at the box office. It won eleven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and scores of other awards. Celine Dion had a worldwide #1 megahit (and a Grammy, of course) with that wretched song, and the (mostly orchestral) soundtrack album sold over eleven million copies in the U.S. alone. The TV ads were relentless. People wouldn’t shut up about it. The film was #1 for fifteen consecutive weeks in the U.S. (still a record) and stayed in theaters for the better part of a year. It held the record for highest worldwide box office for twelve years — until Cameron’s own Avatar beat it in 2010.

I didn’t see it.

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Listen to my radio show “Laboratory X” on the birn

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Laboratory X
Laboratory X
Laboratory X

My new radio show Laboratory X broadcasts live every Wednesday (now Thursday!) Monday, 9-11pm Eastern Time, on channel birn1 of the Berklee Internet Radio Network. The birn is student-run, musician radio from Berklee College of Music, broadcasting around the clock on five channels. Listen anywhere in the world!

Every week I’ll be playing selections from the darker side of rock and electronic music: modern indie, electronica and post-rock, late seventies/early eighties post-punk and new wave, classic rock, psychedelia and more, all threaded together with bits of film music, exotica, and other unstable ingredients. I’ll be talking about record production, technology, inspiration, invention, and other geekery, with weekly themes, unknown variables and unpredictable outcomes. Tune in every Wednesday Thursday Monday night and be part of an ongoing (and possibly quite dangerous) radio experiment!

Visit the Laboratory X show page for more information.