Sweet mother of all that is groovy and chill.

If you thought the naked donut runners were the panacea to all finals-related woes, wait until you hear Daft Punk’s new album which is NOW STREAMING FOR FREE. To access it, you have to open iTunes, go to Daft Punk’s artist page, and click the play button next to “Listen Now” on the left side (pictured above). Random Access Memories beautifully showcases Daft Punk’s inimitable synthy essence. Every song is funky as hell (and basically sex incarnate). While you shouldn’t really expect anything of the likes of “One More Time,” your fondest freshman dorm-party jam, you will be pleasantly surprised by how refreshingly sophisticated this album is as a whole. It is a shining star in today’s EDM scene. And don’t even get me started on the collabs. Julian Casablancas is featured in “Instant Crush” and boy, did it get hot in here quickly. Also, Pharrell Williams makes “Get Lucky” the perfect dance party jam for those lonely paper-writing nights in your dorm/SciLi stacks.

P.S. Wait until you hear the ending track. Screw Kabob and Curry in the Blue Room because this is what real happiness feels like.

P.P.S. Oh, and if you’re one of those who thinks Daft Punk is totes overrated and Skrillex is, like, definitely better… you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

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Finals suck, but The Great Gatsby soundtrack doesn’t. In the midst of this stressful time, music is always a great thing to turn to. So instead of flipping the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel for your English final, take a listen to The Great Gatsby album instead.

Our thoughts on this new soundtrack? It’s pretty damn awesome and drenched in pleasurable sounds. Using jazz and instrumentals, each track commingles two different eras, creating unique and modern notes that resonate within the twenties. Did F. Scott Fitzgerald ever imagine this would happen?

Who knows? But it did – and we like it. Check out our breakdown of each track after the jump. [Read more →]

With midterms on midterms on midterms upon us, choosing the right study music is crucial. Sometimes the best music for takin’ care of business, believe it or not, is in a language you might not understand. This way, you can jam to the beats without allowing the lyrics to take you on five-minute daydreams to musings of your yesteryear. Here are some awesome songs in

Afrikaans: Die Antwoord means “the answer” in Afrikaans and is a rave-rap group hailing from South Africa. Apparently, Lady Gaga was interested in collaborating with them, and they responded with a song entitled, “Fatty Boom Boom.” Using basic deductive reasoning skills and this line from the fourth verse which says, “Suddenly you’re interested cause we’re blowing up over seas, making money, money, money yes, yes, yes zef side represent you’re f**ckin’ with the best,” you can guess that they’re weren’t so down to collaborate. The lyrics aren’t so nice, but hey, it’s catchy. This song is mostly in English, with some Afrikaans scattered here and there.

[Read more →]

Have you listened through all your study playlists already? Twice? Clearly, the only thing left is to mash it all up and regurgitate it in a techno-pop hodgepodge (I mean, pop music has been doing it for years).

If you’re too impatient to wait for nostalgia to kick in, or in case you’ve already forgotten “Call Me Maybe,” T-Swift, One Direction, or “Gangnam Style” (literally parodied by everyone), you can jam out to this year’s annual pop music menagerie mashup by DJ Earworm.

Yes, it’s catchy as hell, and yes, I’ll be blasting this for End-of-the-World Parties. Try and judge.

As you look around the reading room or FriSC on a given day/night(/does it matter?) during finals, you’ll realize that many people don’t like studying with music. Yet there seem to be two camps of musicless studiers. For some, any noise is bad noise. But for others, they opt out of musical study sessions solely because the lyrics tend to distract from the words on the page. With pop lyrics these days as sophisticated and poetic as, “my b*** s*** d*** like she s*** d***,” this comes as no surprise. But in all seriousness, even those who can’t bear to fully focus on two separate sources of information deserve some study tunes—that’s why Brian Eno developed modern ambient music.

But we aren’t here to recommend Brian Eno for the distracted studier (in fact we did that in last semester’s post). Instead, we fully recommend the album we had relegated to an afterthought in last year’s Survival Guide: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Vrioon. For those with MUSC200 experience, this album will be familiar—a perfect mix of ambient, glitch and minimalism that makes Todd Winkler excited in its appropriation of musical ideas. For the easily distracted studier, this album will be a welcome mix of beautiful piano lines and synthesized sound that lacks the lyrics and distracting melodies of modern pop music. The nearly 60-minute composition is perfect for putting on repeat for ten times that long, because no matter how many times one listens, it will still sound beautifully empty and surprisingly new. Find the album for only $5.99 on iTunes, find the tracks on YouTube or [insert illegal downloading means here].

On Jan. 24, 1975, pianist Keith Jarrett arrived at the Opera House in Köln, Germany in the early afternoon after an incredibly long and tiring drive from Zurich. The sold-out concert, organized by an 18-year-old concert promoter, was slated to start at 11:30 pm.  Jarrett initially refused to perform owing to the subpar quality of the piano provided, (it was apparently a small, out-of-tune baby grand piano with non-working pedals intended for rehearsals, not concerts) but he eventually appeared onstage.

What was the result of this exhausted pianist performing late at night on a terrible piano?  An hour of beautiful, totally improvised music, the recording of which went on to become not only the best selling solo jazz album of all time, but also fantastic music to study to.

You can listen to the entire concert here.

BlogDailyHerald likes study music, so over the next few days we’ll offer a different album/mixtape/playlist for students of all tastes and attention levels. When the studying gets tough, let the speakers earbuds get bumping.

Ever wondered what happens when the guy who wrote and produced Feist’s hit song “My Moon My Man” decides to record a live piano track to back the vocal track from 50 Cent’s immortal “Many Men?” Chilly Gonzales’s 2010 mixtape Pianist Envy, that’s what. In what might be his most enjoyable piece of work without Leslie Feist’s voice, Gonzales mixes sampled hip hop beats, live acoustic piano tracks, arrogant interview sound bites (Gonzales is a predictably self-obsessed music producer) and, of course, rap verses into a very solid mixtape. At 30 minutes, it’s the perfect length for banging out a round of practice problems before taking an hour to procrastinate on the Internet. For some beautiful, densely dialogic pop music, get access to the free tape via Gonzales’s website by entering any email address here.