music
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2009
From 1980, a television appearance by the brilliant Tom Lehrer, where he performs a song that never made it onto any of his records back in the day. (I hear it's on the CD re-issue, though.)
Via David Nessle.
nisbetmc | June 2, 2009The Dave Matthews Band's latest album debuts today on iTunes and in stores. Early reviews at the WPost and Rolling Stone are lauding the release as DMB's best since the days of Under the Table and Dreaming and Before These Crowded Streets.
Of note, guitarist Tim Reynolds joins the band on this album, which is welcome news to fans of his past acoustic work with lead singer Dave Matthews. To be honest, I haven't enjoyed much of DMB since at least Before These Crowded Streets and so I will be curiously listening to the new album today in the office. I also have tickets to see the band in…
oracknows | May 31, 2009I've noticed that a hilariously literal-minded parody of that 1980s chestnut "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler has been making the rounds in the blogsophere. I was suitably amused, but I also found this new tidbit amusing.
I haven't seen the latest Terminator movie yet, but I've been a big fan of the Terminator movies since the very first one back in 1984. I even kind of liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. At least, it wasn't as bad as I had feared, and parts of it were pretty entertaining. However, what the Terminator movies have always lacked is one thing. That's right: A…
terrasig | May 30, 2009I was tagged with a meme by BikeMonkey (whose initials "BM" make me laugh) at Sun Dappled Forest a few days ago but didn't have a chance to get to it.
Post your best/worst covers and tag some more muppethuggers. Oh and do a linkback to whomever tagged you if it wasn't me.
In the meantime, several of those tagged have posted many of those songs that the world agrees are among the best covers of all time: The Jimi Hendrix Experience's "All Along The Watchtower" is phenomenal and so beyond comparison that even its creator, Bob Dylan, is on the record as loving it so much that he adopted Hendrix…
goodmath | May 29, 2009The Flower Kings, "The Truth Will Set you Free": One of the superlong Flower Kings opuses - in fact, the first thing by the Flower Kings that I ever heard.
Solas, "Pastures of Plenty": a stunning version of the old Guthrie song, played by one of my favorite Irish bands. It's a brilliant cover - the original song is clearly there, and yet its embedded in a reel.
Valley of the Giants, "Cantara Sin Guitara": truly fantastic post-rock. Valley of the Giants is the first PR ensemble that I think really
stacks up to Godspeed.
Jadis, "Standing Still": neo-progressive rock, produced by
Marillion's…
nisbetmc | May 13, 2009
Last week I bought my tickets for the Wilco concert in July at Wolf Trap. The "alt country rock" band from Chicago has sired two of the best albums of the last decade, starting with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and followed by A Ghost is Born. (Best heard on vinyl.)
I saw them in concert last year at the 930 Club and have eagerly awaited their lastest album release which fans will be happy to know is now available for free online streaming in its entirety. There's a citrus clean sound to this latest release, perhaps reflecting a lifestyle change for the band.
neurophilosophy | May 11, 2009Music can be thought of as a form of emotional communication, with which the performer conveys an emotional state to the listener. This "language" is remarkably powerful - it can evoke strong emotions, and make your heart race or send tingles down your spine. And it is universal - the emotional content of a piece of music can be understood by anyone, regardless of cultural background.
Are the emotions evoked by piece of music similar to, and can they influence, other emotional experiences? The answer to these questions is unclear. But a new study, which has just been published in…
terrasig | May 10, 2009
This is for all of my peeps in SW Florida and all who love folk music. I received a lovely e-mail last week from Robin Leach, wife of mandolin player Dan Leach (and mother of bassist Andy Leach), who came upon my posts about a very special musician. Dan played with a gentleman named Steve Blackwell, a Midwestern transplant who came to the Sunshine State as a high school English teacher and became a fixture in the Florida folk music scene. My path crossed with Mr Blackwell in the months before his untimely departure from melanoma at age 58.
Yesterday, my friends celebrated Steve's life and…
goodmath | May 8, 2009Gordian Knot, "Singing Deep Mountain": As frequent readers of my FRTs may have figured out, I'm not typically a big fan of instrumental progrock. Most of the time, I find it to be
cold, sterile stuff - technically impressive, even amazing - but utterly devoid of meaning,
emotion, or feeling. Gordian Knot is one of my favorite counter-examples to show that it's not
the vocals that I'm missing; GK manages to create instrumental music that's got
both incredible technical virtuosity and real feeling.
Jason Ricci and New Blood, "I Turned Into a Martian": a few weeks back,
a commenter on my last…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2009
Lately I've been listening a lot to Damn!'s fourth album, Let's Zoom In, that was released last year. Damn! is an unfortunately namned soul/funk octet from Malmö in southern Sweden, mostly known as a backing band for rapper Timbuktu. Excellent stuff, among the best music the country has to offer! Though the album's main single played in the live clip above is a shouting-blues type of thing, most of it is dominated by ultra-smooth Curtis Mayfield style falsetto singing. And there's a lot of kraftwerkesque vocoder on it too.
As I explained to my wife yesterday, a vocoder is a beautiful thing…
edyong | April 30, 2009Snowball, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, is an internet superstar. He's known for his penchant for grooving to music, notably Everybody by the Backstreet Boys. As the music plays, Snowball bobs his head and taps his feet in perfect time with it. If it speeds up or slows down, his rhythm does too. He is one of two parrots that are leading a dance dance revolution, by showing that the human behaviour of moving in time to music (even really, really bad music) is one that's shared by other animals.
People who've attended parties at scientific events may question the ability of humans to move to a…
terrasig | April 29, 2009Word around town and just tweeted by local hero, Ayse, is that the great Ernie Barnes passed away yesterday at the age of 70.
From the biography at Mr Barnes' website:
Born Ernest Barnes, Jr. on July 15, 1938 to Ernest Sr. and Fannie Mae Geer Barnes during the Jim Crow era in Durham, North Carolina, his mother worked as a domestic for a prominent attorney. As a child, young Ernest would accompany her to work and was allowed to peruse the extensive collection of art books. One day in junior high school, a teacher found the self-admitted fat, introverted young Barnes drawing in a notebook while…
terrasig | April 25, 2009I'm not one for gratuitous, traffic-enhancing YouTube posts but my contemporaries (80s college folks), and especially indie rock musicians, need to catch these two videos (below) from British guitarist, Daniel Earwicker. Daniel performs his own music as Primrose League (MySpace page here) but I first learned of him while Googling when I was learning to play Billy Bragg's, "Greetings to the New Brunette," referred to most often as "Shirley."
There is a killer 12-string guitar run under the duration of Greetings that Daniel suspects was not done by Bragg himself but rather Johnny Marr. Marr…
grrlscientist | April 23, 2009tags: The Soloist, homelessness, mental illness, movie trailer, film, true story, streaming video
Wow, now this is a movie that I must see! I heard an interview with the author of the book on which this film was based, LATimes reporter, Steve Lopez. He meets a mentally ill homeless man playing Beethoven on a violin with only two strings, and, recognizing his talent, writes a story about him. Lopez's readers send him musical instruments to give to this homeless man, who was a musical prodigy as a child. The resulting friendship transforms both men's lives in this inspirational true story [3:…
goodmath | April 17, 2009Explosions in the Sky, "Yasmin the Light": beautiful post-rock.
Kansas, "Miracles Out of Nowhere": Old Kansas - great stuff.
The Flower Kings, "Starlight Man": People who've read my FRTs know
that I pretty much worship the ground Roine Stolte walks on. Even a short,
simple ballad like this, Stolte manages to turn into something amazing.
Metaphor, "Don't Sleep": Metaphor is one of my favorite discoveries. They're
very obscure; most proggies that I talk to haven't heard of them. But they're
really excellent. Definitely Flower-Kings inspired, but with a very distinctive
sound, and a…
bioephemera | April 16, 2009You've never heard "in real time" screamed with so much passion. Not just one, but two big-haired metal-band bio-rock videos after the fold. . .
(sources: here and here)
terrasig | April 14, 2009
Well, it's that time of year for public radio stations in the United States: the biannual fund drive to support operations and programming. Many public radio stations are run by or associated with universities, thereby giving provide course and internship opportunities to students in print and broadcast journalism, graphic design, recording engineering, and music studies.
I love my radio station, WNCU-FM 90.7 in Durham, North Carolina - "Your Connection To Something Different." WNCU is a jazz-intensive station run out of North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a HBCU within the…
edyong | March 31, 2009Classical ballet is one of the more conservative of art forms. Dancers express emotion and character through the same vocabulary of postures that was originally set in 1760, and often with entire choreographies that have been handed down for centuries.
But even amid this rigorous cascade of tradition, there is room for change. Over the years, successive generations of ballet dancers have subtly tinkered with positions that are ostensibly fixed and limited by the physical constraints of a dancer's body. The only changes ought to be a result of the dancers' varying abilities. But that's not…
goodmath | March 27, 2009The Flower Kings, "Retropolis By Night": Not one of the best things ever by
the Flower Kings, but Roine Stolt's mediocre is other peoples' brilliant.
Porcupine Tree, "Arriving Somewhere But Not Here": very typical longish PT. Very good.
Moxy Fruvous, "The King of Spain": incredibly silliness. Moxy is a Toronto-based group that does mostly comic songs, frequently a capella. It's extremely funny and very fun - particularly if you see it live. Alas, Moxy went on what seems to be
permanent hiatus a few years ago, after releasing an amazingly lackluster final album.
Genesis, "Mad Man Moon":…