For the next few weeks, Amazon and Mojo Nixon are offering MP3 downloads of the the entire Mojo catalog for FREEEeee. Don’t know why, but do know it’s time to d/l some Mojo.
Your collection just ain’t complete w/o at least “Jesus at McDonalds” and “Elvis is Everywhere.”
via Boing Boing.
David Brynes likes bikes, and has a new book about it, Bicycle Diaires.
His music tour travels with a few folding bikes, and the crew pedals around the world’s towns where they’re playing. Here’s the NPR interview, and book excerpt, “David Byrne’s Wild Wild (Biking) Life” (9:31 mp3):
Just found out about the Lucky Dragons: sound-tech-music-visual collage artists. Lotsa listening and downloads of LD trax at the Free Music Archive and their site: Lukey Dargons (LD = Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara).
Here’s some scales off the Lucky Dragons…
A nice string thing, “Home” (0:58 mp3):
Street sounds with sweet vocals, the first track off the Dark Falcon album, “heartbreaker” (2:06 mp3):
One of their “audio reconstructions and rearrangements of field recordings from 4 anti-war protests” on hawks and sparrows, “track 7” (3:00 mp3):
And this Fader TV report, on an LD audio-invention, starts slow but gets good, so stick with:
LD links: site | space | shop/ | tube | blog | fma
via Some Velvet Blog.
3am in a Colstrip MT motel, most of the way thru a 6pak of Moose Drool and enjoying the fuq outta Radio Lab’s “After Life” (1:00:26 mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
070 Shortcuts Thru 1969: From the Moon to Woodstock
Host: Peter Bochan of WBAI-FM
Airs week of: 2009-09-09
“Shortcuts Thru 1969 ” (52:00 mp3):
1969, the year in an hour, another in the Shortcuts series by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up:
From Woodstock to Altamont, Washington to Vietnam, Chappaquidick to Chicago with stops at Stonewall, Hyde Park, Shea Stadium, The Super Bowl, Memphis, Times Square, Sesame Street, and the Moon. Featuring commentary from John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Roman Polanski, Richard Nixon, JFK, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Burgess Meredith, Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Lang, “Topaz Caucasion”, Chip Monck, Dave Marsh, Joe Boyd, Rob Kirkpatrick, Carl Capotorto, Arlo Guthrie, Hugh Romney, Harry Reasoner, Nile Rogers, various FBI and police agents, The Black Panthers, The Weather Underground, The Zodiac Killer, Apollo 11 astronauts and many others.
Music from Hair, Midnight Cowboy, Sly and the Family Stone, The 5th Dimension, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, James Brown, David Bowie, The Who, Les McCann & Eddie Harris, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Blind Faith, Roy Budd, The Plastic Ono Band, The Jefferson Airplane, Arlo Guthrie, Canned Heat, The Beach Boys, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, Beautiful People, Jimi Hendrix, Procol Harum, Henry Mancini and The Stooges! More…
AndreiC interweaves two simultaneous timelines, his and the intertubes, in this Internet History As Tracked By Codrescu : NPR (3:34 mp3 ):
On July 20, 1969, I mourned the last virgin moon, before man landed on it, with some hippies on a beach in Southern California. On Sept. 2, 1969, two computers exchanged meaningless data in the first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. [transcript]
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My hometown houses the Museum of the Rockies with “one of the finest paleontology collections in North America.” Several dinosaur diggers are frens of mine.
So was happy to hear their career glorified on They Might Be Giants new double kids CD/DVD Here Comes Science. The song is “I Am a Paleontologist (with Danny Weinkauf)” (2:32 mp3):
Another TMBG sci-song: “Electric Car”
They Might Be Giants (vocals: Robin Goldwasser)
via Some Velvet Blog.
Senator from Massachusetts Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009). Here’s his eulogy for his brother Bobby, delivered 8 June 1968 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York; “Address at the Public Memorial Service for Robert F. Kennedy” (9:42 mp3 | transcript):
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.
As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”
HV used an excerpt from above in our Oddio Art interactive toy, and in our survey of 1968.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
069 Pen to Paper: Charles Bowden & Isak Dinesen
Host: Scott Carrier of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-09-08 (Originally: 2009-08-26)
“Pen to Paper” (52:00 mp3):
Audio essays on authors:
Writer Charles Bowden reports from the US-Mexico border about the drug wars, the poverty, and the environment. His writing is harsh but unflinchingly accurate. Host Scott Carrier portrays Bowden in the words of the people he has written about.
NPR host Susan Stamberg revisits the world of Karen Blixen, aka, Isak Dinesen, when she lived in Kenya and wrote Out of Africa (produced for NPR by Larry Massett; mixed by Barrett Golding.)
Poet and wordshaker Alex Caldiero (The Sonosopher) ponders the writing and sounding of “That One” word, with music by Theta Naught.
Scott Carrier (Communication) and Alex Caldiero (Humanities/Philosophy) are professors at Utah Valley University in Orem. Go Wolverines!
Hearing Voices from NPR®
068 Jean Shepherd 2: A Voice in the Night
Host: Harry Shearer of Le Show
Airs week of: 2010-07-21 (Originally: 2009-08-19)
“Jean Shepherd 2” (52:00 mp3):
Shep rides again:
The final hour of a two-part tribute to radio raconteur Jean Shepherd. For info or to Comment, see Jean Shepherd, Part 1.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
067 Jean Shepherd 1: A Voice in the Night
Host: Harry Shearer of Le Show
Airs week of: 2010-07-14 (Originally: 2009-08-12)
“Jean Shepherd 1” (52:00 mp3):
Hour one in this two-part tribute to radio raconteur Jean Shepherd:
Jean Shepherd used words like a jazz musician uses notes, winding around a theme, playing with variations, sending fresh self-reflective storylines out into the night. Marshall McLuhan called Shepherd “the first radio novelist.” From 1956-1977 Shep spun his late night stories over WOR radio, New York City. PBS gave him a TV series, “Jean Shepherd’s America.” In 1983 he co-wrote and narrated the film version of his “A Christmas Story.”
Shep inspired a new generation of spoken narrative artists who tap into the American psyche. Among them was Harry Shearer (Le Show), who hosts this two part tribute to Jean Shepherd. Shearer interviews Shep’s co-workers, friends and fans, including Robert Krulwich, Joe Frank, Paul Krassner, and Jules Fieffer.
Thanks to Mr. Shearer, KCRW– Santa Monica (and Sarah Spitz), NPR, and Art Silverman for production support, and for allowing us to re-air this two-hour tribute. This is part one; part two is next week.
One time I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning. My radio was still on, and a man was talking about how you would try to explain the function of an amusement park to visitors from Venus. It was Jean Shepherd. He was on WOR from midnight to 5:30 every night, mixing childhood reminiscence with contemporary critiques, peppered with such characters as the man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the brand name of the refrigerator it came from and the year of manufacture. Shepherd would orchestrate his colorful tales with music ranging from “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues.”
–Paul Krassner (from “How the Realist popped America’s cherry“)
The Realist: series of Jean Shepherd essays, Radio Free America, issue #42, #44, #48, #50.
Jean Shepherd – The Great American Fourth of July – PART 1
After the Calzetta family returned from their 4K coast-to-coast bicycle trip, they compiled these Rules for returning to civilized society (from their Shut Up and Pedal blog):
1. No spitting.
2. Daily bathing is highly recommended.
3. Wear underwear. Preferably clean.
4. No eating food off the ground.
5. No made-up songs that contain profanity.
6. No bacon double cheeseburgers with ice cream sundaes.
7. No sleeping in your sleeping bag on top of the bed.
8. Use “inside voices” when inside.
9. No belching the words on road signs.
10. No shouting “A tour bus is coming” when your mother is peeing by the side of the road.
11. No peeing by the side of the road.
12. And please, no yelling “Fire in the hole” just before loudly farting.
NPR: “Crossing The Country On Tandem Bikes” (4:39 mp3):
The Calzaretta family on the Atlantic, at the end of the 4K cross-country miles
Hearing Voices from NPR®
065 Cowboy: Cheyenne Frontier Days
Host: Josh Darsa of NPR
Airs week of: 2010-07-28 (Originally: 2009-07-22)
“Cowboy” (52:00 mp3):
Host Josh Darsa of NPR spends nine days with rodeo riders in a rural Wyoming town:
This 1980 classic radio doc from the NPR archives visits Cheyenne Frontier Days, “The Daddy of ’em All.”
Along the way, Darsa digs into the the history of the “cowboy,” mixing in the experiences of Baylis John Fletcher on an 1879 cattle drive, herding 2000 longhorns from Texas to Wyoming (read by Paul Blakemore from the book Up the trail in ’79.
And underscoring it all is the wild-west symphonies of Aaron Copland.
Josh Darsa wrote and narrated. The technical director and recording engineer was John Widoff, assisted by Miles Smith, Dave Glasser and shop technician Bob Butcher.
“While we were at the rodeo, Josh Darsa wanted to record multiple vantage points of a single scene. For instance, I’d have a Nagra tape recorder on the roof of the grandstand and Miles Smith would have a Nagra in the chutes where the riders would bust out for their ride. Then we would have a free-running Nagra III on the rodeo announcer. We ran them in sync kinda like you would do in video with multiple cameras. This gave us three vantage points. During the show you hear the perspective change through cross fading which is a result of these different but simultaneous perspectives.
There must have been 70 hours or more of tape we shot out there in Cheyenne and every single thing got dubbed. What you heard in the halls of the old NPR were rodeo sounds coming from RC1. Constant horses, bulls, things crashing, just all kinds of things. I think it drove people nuts hearing this stuff up and down the halls.
This was the height of my career at NPR. It was a combination of everything… the music recording, the production sound recording, interviews… every single thing that I had ever done for this company all came together in this show. This was probably how Walt Disney felt when he made Mary Poppins. It was a dream come true for me to build something like this. ‘Cowboy’ is the kind of show you would listen to in a darkened movie theatre. The writing is spectacular.”
–John Widoff, “‘Cowboy,’ a Study in Radio Tale-Telling”
Read the entire interview.
More Josh Darsa at NPR.org: “An Italian Mosaic” (1978) | “Josh Darsa Obituary” by Alex Chadwick (2000)
The DJ deep w/in me can’t help screwin’ w/Grooveshark. I kicked out an hour of song and spoken-weird to stream outta our HV1 Grooveshark playlist:
Hearing Voices from NPR®
064 Outer Space: Moon and Beyond
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2009-07-15 (Originally: -0-0)
“Outer Space” (52:00 mp3):
For the anniversary of the first Man on the Moon, July 20th 1969:
“Exploration” (3:25) is put to music by The Karminsky Experience from The Power Of Suggestion (2003).
In the early 1960’s, the United States was losing the Space Race. The first satellite in was the USSR’s Sputnik, 1957. The first human in space was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, April 1961. The next month President JFK made a Special Address to the US Congress (2:10), that started the program which landed us on the moon eight years later.
“President John Kennedy’s Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961”
“Zero G, and I Feel Fine” (6:01) transmissions are from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, with music by Jeff Artnsen of Racket Ship.
A women dreams of a visitor from the “Third Planet” (2:14) by Bisophere.
The “Last Man on the Moon” (2:41) are Apollo 17 astronauts Ronald Evans, Eugene Cernan, and Harrison Schmitt. They left the lunar surface December 1972. No one’s been back since. The music was by Jeff Arntsen.
A President has a distorted phone conversation with an underwater spaceman in “LBJ & the Helium Filled Astronaut” (7:21). Commander Scott Carpenter spent thirty days in the ocean at a depth of 200 feet as part of the Navy’s SeaLab project. This 1964 tape of helium speech comes to us from Larry Massett and Lost and Found Sound. More…
Got an email yesterday:
Name: christopher
Subject: field recordings in the sahel
Message: greetings – currently tramping around the desert recording music and sounds. thought something you all might find particularly interesting.
‘Deed I did find the site interesting. Lots of great street and county music from Africa. Like “Mohammad accompanies Boubacar, a Songhai guitarist, in a group in Timbouctou.”
“Boubacar on guitar” (mp3):
What: Living and traveling through West Africa along the fringes of the Sahara. Collecting sounds and music in guerilla recordings and unorthodox ethnomusicology.
Place: nouakchott, timbouctou
Tools: zoom h2 recorder and folk guitar
“The traditional music of Fouta is based on the Hoddu; but many traditional ‘universal’ songs have been adapted to the guitar.”
“Tidiane playing Douga” (mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
063 Lincoln Monument: A Civil War
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-06-29 (Originally: 2009-07-01)
“Lincoln Monument” (52:00 mp3):
For Lincoln’s birthday bicentennial year and Independence Day, Old Abe, the Civil War, and its still-present aftermath:
The United States Marine Band recorded a “Lincoln Centennial” on February 12 1909 (from A Lincoln Portrait).
Abe’s 1860 presidential campaign song was “Lincoln and Liberty;” it’s sung for us by Dan Zanes (ex-Del Fuegos, off Parades And Panoramas: 25 Songs Collected By Carl Sandburg For The American Songbag).
“I Heard Lincoln That Day,” says Gettysburg eyewitness Walter Rathvon, in archival audio recorded on Lincoln’s birthday 1938 by WRUL radio, Boston. Set to an instrumental “Lincoln’s Triumph (a Funeral March),” part of the Lincoln Shuffle (by Bryce Dessner, guitarist for The National and Clogs, composed for the great bicentennial site 21st Century Abe, used with their re-mixing blessings).
NPR recreates the “Gettysburg Address,” with the words of John Dos Passos read by Noah Adams, and Lincoln’s speech read by Lars Hoel; produced by Bob Malesky for NPR’s The Sunday Show. More…
Hearing Voices from NPR®
062 Talking Dads: For Father’s Day
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-06-15 (Originally: 2009-06-17)
“Talking Dads” (52:00 mp3):
Sons daughters, and dads (photo: Pat Vowell with his twins, Amy and Sarah):
Storyteller Kevin Kling shares pancakes with his “Dad,” from his CD Home And Away
Sarah Vowell is a gunsmith’s daughter, in “Shooting Dad,” produced for This American Life (from Lies Sissies & Fiascoes
Joe Frank lets us eavesdrop on a father-son phone call between “Larry and Zachary” Block, from Joe’s hour Karma 3.
Host Larry Massett and several other sons try to get to know their “Lost and Found Fathers,” produced for Soundprint, with help from Barrett Golding, Brian Brophy, Bob Burrus, and Henry Dennis.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
061 Educating Esme: A Teacher’s Diary
Host: Alex Chadwick of Interviews 50 Cents
Airs week of: 2009-6-10
“Educating Esme” (52:00 mp3):
During her first year teaching fifth grade in a Chicago public school, Esmé Codell kept a journal. This radio hour is based on her book Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year
Esmé Raji Codell: Planet Esme | Blog | Amazon
Photo by Katie Davis:
Jesse Jean with Teri and Toni.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
060 Getting Out: The Education of Jesse Jean
Host: Katie Davis of Neighborhood Stories
Airs week of: 2010-05-05 (Originally: 2009-06-03)
Getting Out: The Education of Jesse Jean (52:00 mp3):
Go to school, keep your grades up, go to college. That’s what we tell kids — over and over. What if just leaving your apartment, and walking up the block is risky? What if it feels safer to stay home, play video games, keep a low profile. When you do go out, head somewhere safe, like the teen center, the basketball court. That was the world of African American teenager, Jesse Jean.
Jesse lived a half a block from host Katie Davis in their Washington DC neighborhood. He was lucky enough to get a scholarship to a private boarding school and brave enough to take it. Katie kept in touch with Jesse, as he moved into this new world. We hear three stories covering seven years, starting in summer, 2001.
Jesse’s Stories on NPR: 2002 Turning the Corner (photos) | 2004 Beyond Myself (photos) | 2008 An Urban Teen Beats The Odds.