Today’s most pressing news is not from Iraq, Wall Street, or the Presidential campaign; rather it can best be expressed as music, specifically some ancient hippie crap from the 60s Boston band Earth Opera (w/ Peter Rowan and David Grisman) whose song-title sez it all— “The Red Sox Are Winning” (3:32 mp3):
From last year’s Radio Labs episode Musical Language, check their segment “Behaves So Strangely” (mp3):
It’s an intervu w/ music-psych prof Diana Deutsch about the “series of striking auditory illusions and curiosities of sound perception” found on her CD Phantom Words and Other Curiosities.
Very nice piece on this past Weekend America by AnnH & KaraO on Burmese refugees in USA, “One Thing: From Burma to Indianapolis.” Features music and Burmese poet Sui Tluangneh.
We’ve blogged Martinibomb and The Coconut Monkeyrocket before. Here they both are at Oddio Overplay with the Halloween happy “Munster Beat!” (3:17 mp3):
Sound artist BJ Nilsen has a new CD (Touch Records) “based on field recordings and electronics, with mostly analogue equipment, using up to 50 year-old tapemachines, filters and generators.” From The Short Night here’s “Black Light” (4:16 mp3):
Painful & amusing video of NPR host (from new Bryant Park Project) trying unsuccessfully to melt the frozen Icelandic band Sigur Rós, repeatedly pursuing unpromising lines of questioning, which NPR titles “When Good Interviews Go Bad.”
This has inspired Stereogum to collect bad musician intervus. And while you’re wincing, here’s some Sigur Rós;, “Untitled 4” (mp3):
Andy Samberg’s (SNL) love song to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “Iran So Far:”
Sample is Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th;” singer is Maroon 5’s Adam Levine.
Too down home for words, Jimmie Rodgers sings “Waiting On A Train”:
via some velvet blog.
Even if mashups are so tres 20C, I still like some of ’em. In HV posts past we’ve streamed a few from Go Home Productions. Now, for a limited time, GPH, aka, Mark Vidler, has his whole collection of mashups and remixes as free downloads, 13 CDs worth. At KGLT our current fave has samples from every rock record ever recorded; well, lotsa ’em anyway, Outcast vs. ACDC vs. Queen vs. Crowded House vs. Led Zep vs. Beatles vs. a few more; from GPH’s This Was Pop, “Rock in Black” (3:58 mp3):
Photos by Scott Carrier, music by Burmese band Iron Cross:
This week’s HV cast is in support of Burmese demonstraters: The popular Burmese rock band Iron Cross is using music to challenge the nation’s infamously repressive regime. In the great tradition of rock and roll, Iron Cross is taking on Burma’s military government with song. A story by Scott Carrier, “Iron Cross Battles Burmese Repression” (7:39 mp3):
Magician Raymond Crowe, “Australia’s only unusualist,” offers this hand shadow vers of Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World:”
This week’s HV cast: John Cage was born 95 years ago, September 5 1912. Here’s a quasi-Cage-ian sound portrait with voxpop featuring folk answering the musical question: “Who’s John Cage?”
A story by Barrett Golding, “Who’s John Cage (Silence)” (2:24 mp3):
WYNC celebrates John Cage for 24 Hours and 33 Minutes on his 95th birthday with The Playful and Playable Cage: A WNYC Festival. Airs September 5th at 00:00 (midnight) until 00:33 September 6th. They’ve published an hour-by-hour schedule of the broadcast and A John Cage Web Reliquary with Videos | Interviews | Writings | Quotes | Timeline | Visual Art | Links.
JC on JC from WNYC (4:57):
Other HV Cage posts.
An Ars Technica article compiles the latest illegal music download research in “A $13 billion fantasy: latest music piracy study overstates effect of P2P.” These studies conclusively show P2P sharing nets cost the industry somewhere between $0 and $13B ($US) yearly. Doncha just love research?
Another band on the free net label Comfort Stand Recordings I’ve been playing lately (like The Coconut Monkeyrocket) with an affinity for audio appropriation is Martinibomb.
Martinibomb, “The Love God” (4:54 mp3):
Martinibomb, “cha l’ectro cha cha” (5:32 mp3):
It’s true, I’m a sucker for vox-sampling bands. One of the most rhythmic of the spoken-weird snippet genre is The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Their new CD is With Birds (emusic). Their site has mp3s, as does (the excellent “free music Net Label”) Comfort Stand.
Try “Accidental Beatnik” (3:51 mp3):
And “Shopping For Explosives” (3:48 mp3):
Young@Heart, whose “members all lived in an elderly housing project in Northampton, MA,” sing The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated:”
Also see Zimmers, the WEST Band, and Nonstop Robot Fighting Machine.Thanks to Jim Kehoe, KGLT.
Nawlins jazz flute player Eluard Burt passed this week. We did a nice (if we say so ourselves) sound-portrait of him in 2005. It’s part of our New Orleans [Yawp] webwork.
Burt’s flute was recorded at Dave Brink’s 17 Poets January 2005. Here’s “Eluard Burt, NOLA” (5:28 mp3):
George Ingmire of WWOZ is playing a tribute to Eluard on his show today.
OK, I’ll try not to post an FoTC vid every week, but just had to embed this French lesson from last week’ show, Flight of the Conchords “Foux Da Fa Fa:”