This Week’s Contest: Ghosts

Our incorporeal buddy, the ghost.  Watch as it exists in its natural habitat, scrounging for candy and coming up with rocks.  How will it survive sans candy?  Such questions are irrelevant for the dead.  What is relevant, however, is what awesome music they have spawned.  So bring it, cleffers.

Rob Law is a wannabe songwriter and cult leader.

Sohrob Kazerounian is a feral child currently living and studying in Boston. without access to music in his youth, any attempt to wax poetic on the subject should be taken for what it is – a random assemblage of words which may or may not carry any meaning and (or) significance.

Matt Silver is a Level 23 Mage. He is a tall dark man with a long hoary beard. He is wearing a dusty leather tunic and a hard cracked leather cap. On his feet are a pair of leather boots and his hands are protected by iron gauntlets. He is currently wearing an emerald amulet and twisted root of protection and is wielding an Amber Staff of Illumination.

This Week’s Contest: Theme Song

Theme songs are there to announce your intention for the world to hear.  And to get stuck in your head for all eternity.  Sometimes you’re happy they’re there, in your head, forever, and other times, well, you don’t feel so good about it.  Let’s see what sort of eternity cleffers want to inflict on you.

Yohan John is an anglophile from India who likes pop, and music that really ought to have been pop, but isn’t popular enough. If there are crunchy guitars and a chorus to sing along with, so much the better. Yohan drinks tea, goes on long walks, and is oddly amused by the words “duck” and “egg”.

Nicotina Chevrolet is a Brooklyn born, California bred, Hawaii living haole studying Community and Cultural Psychology. She was once, and forever shall be, guitarist in the greatest band never known, Not Without Your Daughter.

James Boo is a musician, writer and fried chicken enthusiast.

This Week’s Contest: Magic

From David Blaine to Harry Potter, magic today is pretty in vogue. More popular than Jesus, but without all that burning at the stake – today’s magic enthusiasts are living large. But aside from that horrible “oh ho ho, it’s magic!” song, what music is there that truly capitalizes on today’s magical atmosphere? We’ll leave it to this week’s intrepid cleffers to unearth the most moving incantations.

Megan Costello is a KALX dj disguised as an architect living in San Francisco. When not cleverly hidden behind her computer, she enjoys dancing on the sidewalk, singing karaoke, and baking in return for favors.

Himanshu Mhatre: “I am a shadow cast by the dying light of melody. To find the light, spot the shadows it casts.”

Jeff Blake is probably asleep right now. He would play bass, but Not Without Your Daughter.

This Week’s Contest: Commercials

Somehow in America, the biggest outlet for creative voices making short films seems to have become the commercial.  So, the upside is that we get to see all sorts of awesome short films, and the downside is that we have these subliminal urges to like, buy all sorts of worthless shit.  But commercials are also a delivery vehicle for music, and some songs seem inextricably bound to the commercials that introduced them.  So this week, let’s see what sort of sales pitches our intrepid cleffers can make about the jingly, jangly sounds of the commercial.

Rich Bunnell is a headline jockey from Oakland, California. He digs cornmeal pizza and the Gilded Age, and can name the eight RobotMasters in Mega Man 2 in less than four two seconds.

C. Shaw is a logician from DC who is known by his fiancee’s friends as the guy who went to a big-budget country show and repeatedly complained that Rodney Atkins was singing out of tune. He hopes the fact that he Tivos Iron Chef every week will help him crush the competition here.

Vishal Trivedi is 26 years old and a newly minted civil servant, working for and residing in the City and County of San Francisco. He dabbles in synths and guitars, and is a sucker for a catchy melody and a clever drum fill. Vishal disdains pretense but also gravitates towards complexity.

This Week’s Contest: Prison

The criminal justice system, for all its flaws, definitely has more than its fair share of tunes. Maybe it’s the poetic allure of the good boy gone bad, or the easily extensible metaphor to all of our lives (e.g., high school), but for whatever reason the jailhouse has got plenty of rock. Hopefully these cleffers don’t have to do much hands on research to find this week’s awesome prison songs.

Chandra Linnell is from Minnesota, but feels most at home on the road. She is the lead vocalist and occasional washboard player for Bob Ross and the TV art supplies, whose influences include Shaggy, Cody Chesney, Old Crow Medicine Show, Bob Marley, and New Orleans jazz. She is a professional volunteer, and lives in Davis Square.

Adam Gutterman is musician who hates to shave but does it anyway. His dog is known to howl along, joyously, to the sounds of his playing the mandolin. He currently resides in San Francisco, manipulating data in favor of his employer. For this he is given Pellegrino and much vacation time. He considers it a fair trade.

Lisa Xu is languishing away as a student at UC Berkeley, where she writes for the arts section of the Daily Cal and is an editor for the Berkeley Political Review. She spends her free time nursing, feeding, and otherwise sustaining an obsession with Radiohead.

This Week’s Contest: The Comeback

We all have our down times. We’re down by a five runs in the bottom of the ninth, we get cut from out record label, we shave our head and have pictures of our cooter plastered all over the internet. And yet, there’s alays a chance to make it all right again. Few situations are so dire that there’s no way to stage a comeback, and no art is better suited to the comeback than music. Let’s see what these cleffers have to come up with.

Noah Schaffer is a music addict living in Boston, the hometown of bluegrass great Joe Val, jazz legend Roy Haynes and rockabilly wildman/art thief Myles Connnor — not to mention the adopted land of R&B crooner Little Joe Cook and Skatalites drummer Lloyd Knibb. By day he’s a legal news reporter. A story he wrote about the comeback of soul star Betty Harris can be read here.

Rob Baker is environmentally friendly. He is biodegradable, non-toxic, and 100% post-consumer content, made entirely out of older, recycled nerds. He rides Boston’s green line trains to work, which he likes to pretend is the green lion from Voltron.

Jake Mix is a cartoonist and illustrator trapped inside a lazy man’s body. His hovercycle skill is currently 70%, but he hopes to see that go up within the week, and he is a diligent downloader of new Rock Band songs.

This Week’s Contest: Child Vocalists

The best job Shirley Temple ever had, in her own words, was being the ambassador to Czechoslovakia. One might have thought that it was parading up and down a train crowded with strangers with candy singing about the good ship lollypop, but one would apparently be wrong. Nevertheless, her service to her country was more laudable as a child star during the Great Depression than sipping brews in Bratislava so many years later. Not every kid vocalist can claim Shirley Temple’s impact, but there is something special about kids singing. Good? Sometimes. Special? Always. Let’s see what sort of special this week’s cleffers can unearth.

Th McCaffrey is a writer living in Boston, Massachusetts. Most recently his work has appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Furnace Review. He is currently working on his manuscript.

Chris Lucas lives in Boston – the new City of Champions (suck it Pittsburgh). He plays a lot of different instruments above average, but none exceedingly well. It’s probably because he spends the majority of his time working as a lobbyist for a large non-profit, cooking, and writing for a trio of sports related websites – Your Fantasy Team Sucks, Hugging Harold Reynolds, and Epic Carnival. It’s either that or he’s just amazingly lazy. Yeah, that’s probably it.

Jeffrey Markowitz would like you to come down to Hawaii with him, so that you can participate in Firewalk 2008. The coals will scintillate the caluses of your feet and the movement of metaphysical molecules. Here, you will learn to best master your master system and unlock the successful soul within. Within you lies dormant the CEO, CTO or CFO you truly want to be. Earn money and have babies–be the superhuman being you always wanted to be! Don’t get the wrong idea though, Jeff is not a motivator; rather, he is a mastervator. Buy his new self help book, “Mastervating with the Self Within” for five easy installments of three creds today!

This Week’s Contest: Medication

On the one hand, you have drugs. Nature’s gift for putting us in a world rife with awkward social situations, chronic pain and a paucity of fun-on-demand. And then on the other, medication. A doctor prescribed answer to all of your problems, paid for by the health insurance you’d damn well better have, and free of all of those legal problems presented by nature. But, of course, it’s more complicated than this simple dichotomy – and the subtleties have been well documented by musicians for generations. All I’ve got to say is, good enough for Elvis, good enough for me.

Matt Silver is a Level 23 Mage. He is a tall dark man with a long hoary beard. He is wearing a dusty leather tunic and a hard cracked leather cap. On his feet are a pair of leather boots and his hands are protected by iron gauntlets. He is currently wearing an emerald amulet and twisted root of protection and is wielding an Amber Staff of Illumination.

Nicotina Chevrolet is a Brooklyn born, California bred, Hawaii living haole studying Community and Cultural Psychology. She was once, and forever shall be, guitarist in the greatest band never known, Not Without Your Daughter.

Himanshu Mhatre: “I am a shadow cast by the dying light of melody. To find the light, spot the shadows it casts.”

This Week’s Contest: Jesus

As a Jew, I have to say I feel like I’ve kind of missed most of the Jesus thing. On the one hand, I feel pretty OK about this, because while you were sitting in church listening to how Jesus was washing some feet, I was at Sunday school laughing at cats that were shaped like Hebrew letters. Then again, there was that weird kid in band class who told me he could kill everyone in the room and still go to heaven, because Jesus was in his heart. Sunday school certainly never gave me warm fuzzies like that. Fortunately, there are about a billion songs people have written about Jesus to try and convince me of his glory, and what better people than these Iron Cleffers to share them with me?

Jef Doon tastes like chicken, though his tastes like veal. He is a foodie whose complex palate is defined by a visceral appreciation for everything from the rustic and raw to the fresh and organic. He ends every helping with something soothing and subtly sweet.

Dr. Peter Venkman is a former university professor, entrepreneur, and talk show host with degrees in psychology and parapsychology.  His favorite musician is Ray Parker Jr.

Jeff Blake is an ex-basist from the Greatest Band Never Known, “Not Without Your Daughter.” This Portland based faggot is getting his JD with a focus on Tax, and loves him some Brit Pop and Rock en Español.

This weeks’s topic: The Maths

What’s the only thing that’s more fun than listening to music? Doing Math! This week’s topic, t, is “the maths” and will probably be the max[stimulating] topic yet. To add to the excitement, the chief maintainer of Iron Clef, Alex Storer will ∈ {p; p:participants}. In his stead, two Clef veterans {Matt, Sohrob} have decided to challenge Alex and company to come up with songs about Godel’s incompleteness theorem, the Banach-Tarski paradox, or even the axiom of choice. Of course, in the unlikely event that !∃ songwriters that have felt sufficiently moved by any of these topics to ever want to craft lyrics about them, {songs that make reference to math} ∪ {L; L s.t. ^[mM] ∈ L where L is the song’s lyrics} will suffice.

Nerdcore is encouraged.
Q.E.D.

Rob Baker is environmentally friendly. He is biodegradable, non-toxic, and 100% post-consumer content, made entirely out of older, recycled nerds. He rides Boston’s green line trains to work, which he likes to pretend is the green lion from Voltron.

David Morrison lives and works in Austin, Texas. He currently performs and records with the Bigamy Sisters, Jeromy Barber and the Clydes. He recently co-produced the debut Red Hat Records album by Bullet for Betty. He wears size ten shoes and likes to sit in the dark, listening to old blues records with his fish, Tim.

Alex Storer is the founder of Iron Clef, the famed musical genre “inept-core”, and (with Arom Gaang) the oft-revived but never-revised band The Milk Solids. He currently lives in Cambridge, studies the brain, and rides a bicycle.