Sheet

From McSweeney's website:

Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form—twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded. Complete with full-color, heyday-of-home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case (and, when necessary, ukelele notation), Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012—an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together. The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.

Dave/Jay will you favor us with any DIY Beck tunes?

Merry Beckmus?

The latest celebrity couple is Beck + Malkmus, collaborating on the new Jicks album Mirror Traffic. Tour to include Nashville in Rocktober.

Jay, Eric, and I may have music careers yet....

Gather round, young Bastards, for the tale of Le Petomane, at one time an in demand artist with a 'special' gift.

Beck's Record Club

From Wired.com:

When Beck Hansen’s website relaunches in July, one of the new features will be a Record Club wherein the plugged-in sonic chameleon gathers musical pals, covers a classic album in one day, then offers tracks for download.

Which is, well, pretty cool.

“An album will be chosen to be reinterpreted and used as a framework,” says a statement on Beck.com. “Nothing rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track will be uploaded once a week on beck.com as well as through the web sites of those involved in the project.”

Musical cohorts will include folks like Devendra Banhart, Jamie Lidell, Nigel Godrich and MGMT. The once-named Bek David Campbell and his posse will tackle The Velvet Underground & Nico first. One can only imagine what the surreal “Sunday Morning” or destabilizing “Heroin” will sound like after this crew gets done with them.

Andy Warhol, a repurposing icon, would be proud. Now all this thing needs is an iPhone app and a Twitter feed and it’s mellow gold, baby.