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Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Via the have_moicy group, I just found out about this site: CROZ.FM offers MP3's of independent origin -- i.e. audience recordings, radio broadcasts, demos etc. -- for download. There is a huge variety of music available -- listed by artist at the bottom of the front page -- just glancing at it I can see plenty of stuff I'd like to listen to.
posted morning of April 16th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, April 4th, 2009
Warning: do not look in this post for a train of thought. Sorry! I've been trying to come up with one for a couple of days but it's not happening yet. So this is just a placeholder, a couple of things I've noticed recently that want tying together. Rosa (with whom I've been corresponding in English and in Spanish, thanks to Conversation Exchange for getting us together) sent me the lyrics to Ana Belén's "España, Camisa Blanca", a beautiful song that has really captured my imagination in the last few days.
I do not understand the metaphor yet -- Rosa explains that the song is about the end of Franco's regime in the late 70's, and that a white shirt is a symbol of hope. Looking around I see (from an article on El problema de España which I have not yet read) that the song's title comes from a poem by Blas de Otero Muñoz -- however I have not been able to find any of his poetry online, don't know the context. In the same article I notice a painting of Goya's, "The 3rd of May, 1808":
-- notice the white shirt which is the most striking detail of this painting. (The soldiers who are about to shoot the man in the white shirt are Napoleon's troops, suppressing civil unrest in Madrid during the occupation.) And now Dave is telling me that this painting features in Buñuel's movie Le fantôme de liberté -- onto my Netflix queue it goes... Hoping I will be able to suss out a thread connecting these items...
posted evening of April 4th, 2009: 1 response
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Friday, April third, 2009
Saramago writes today about the 1907 strike and massacre in Iquique, Chile, in which the Chilean army (under pressure from the government and from foreign mine-owners) murdered more than three thousand people, striking saltpetre miners and their families who had congregated at the school of Santa MarÃa to demand an 18¢ per day wage paid in currency rather than scrip. The event was memorialized in the 1970's when Luis Advis wrote his "Cantata de Santa MarÃa de Iquique" -- here it is performed by Quilapayun. Lyrics are transcribed here.
 (a year and a half later) This massacre is quite an important reference point in Hernán Rivera Letelier's work.
posted evening of April third, 2009: Respond
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Monday, March 30th, 2009
We're having a concert! If you're in the area and free on the 24th, give me a holler -- Steve Suffet and Anne Price will be conducting "an exploration of Woody Guthrie's less known songs" here chez nous. Flier below the fold. (I first got in touch with Steve when I was researching "The Sad Bells of Rhymney".)
posted evening of March 30th, 2009: 1 response
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 Bob Dylan's new record Together Through Life is coming out soon; at least for today you can download one of the tracks, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," for free from bobdylan.com. I'm listening to it right now and pretty happy with it on first impressions. The feg maniac who alerted me to its availability thought the production values were not great, and I can see that; but I'm kind of liking the rawness of the sound. It sounds like rock and roll -- I'm looking forward to hearing the record.
 (Later:) ...I'm just looking at that picture of Bob and loving it. The composition is pretty masterful -- just the edges of his jacket in the negative space, and his sunburst guitar -- and he looks so joyful! So into the music he's playing.
posted evening of March 30th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, March 29th, 2009
It is time to break down  and buy a clip-on tuner for my violin. At the show last night I used Ron's tuner (plug-in, not clip-on; but that was alright since I had my pick-up attached for playing with their electric band); and it just made it a lot easier going in, to be confident my tuning is correct and the same as everyone else. I have always associated a sort of machismo value with being able to tune by ear; but here are the problems with that*: it takes a lot longer; my strings end up in tune relative to each other but there is no guarantee they are going to line up precisely with the rest of the band; and it is not always feasible in a noisy gig situation. In gigs I usually end up borrowing somebody else's tuner; things would be simpler if I had one of my own. I was getting frustrated last night about not being a member of the band -- if my musical activities consist of sitting in with other people's gigs, I do not ever get to be an integral piece of the sound -- it's more like I'm adding in on top of their sound, and I'm playing pieces I have not practiced with them so it takes me until the middle of the song to actually feel comfortable and believe in what I'm playing. I enjoy the times I play with Bob and Janis and Greg much more; but that does not seem like something we could extrapolate to performing, the privacy of the setting is a pretty key part of the music.
* (Leaving aside the obvious problem of its ludicrosity.)
posted morning of March 29th, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, March 27th, 2009
Coming up! This evening is not quite upon us yet; I need to do things like put Sylvia to bed and tidy the kitchen, before it can truly be thought of as evening; but I am planning once all that is taken care of, to spend a couple of hours listening to and writing about the songs on Goodnight Oslo. (I did this a couple of years ago with Perspex Island, at the beginning of my infatuation with Robyn Hitchcock.) I just noticed (at Hot Rox Avec Lying Sweet Talk) a really nice quote from Robyn, in a 2002 interview with Rolling Stone -- he is asked about what fan reaction he is anticipating to the forthcoming Nextdoorland, and replies:
They'll be initially pleased to hear it, and then they'll say it's not as good as Under Water Moonlight and then about five years down the line they'll probably get to like it on it's own merit," he says. "I can see the different layers of icing -- they'll like licking off the first layer, they won't like licking off the second layer, but once they've got through, the third layer's pretty good.
(And, argh, here Robyn is talking about his fans licking frosting off of his records and he is happy about it -- confusing... Makes me more confident about my initial reaction to his quote about Moss Elixir.)So, stay tuned -- more later.
 (Update: Oh wait, strike that. The disc is in the car which Ellen drove to visit her friend. Oh well, something else... maybe I'll do some reading instead.)
posted evening of March 27th, 2009: 2 responses
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
 This weekend Ellen and I watched "Wild Combination: a Portrait of Arthur Russell" and were very taken with it; thanks for the recommendation, Bryan! There was a huge variety of music from Russell's brief career, and it was all brand-new to me. Here is one of my favorite pieces from the film, "Go Bang" by Dinosaur L, produced by Russell:
posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, March 23rd, 2009
Another Robyn Hitchcock interview, from Yep Roc -- here he is talking, among other things, about the title track from Goodnight Oslo, what it is about and where it comes from. As you get older, I suppose you have to vacate certain comfort zones. Because in the end, they're not comforting, they're stifling. So, you have to move out of your shell -- you cannot stay where you were.
I'm meaning to write an extended post or series of posts about the songs on this record, which I like a whole lot -- trying to find a couple-of-hours block of time that I can devote to that.
posted afternoon of March 23rd, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Robyn Hitchcock speaks with Paul Byrne of Movies.ie about making Rachel Getting Married (which sounds like a whole lot of fun) and about Sex, Food, Death, and Insects.
Byrne: During [Sex, Food, Death, and Insects] you said at one point, "At heart I'm a frightened, angry person -- that's why my stuff isn't totally insubstantial, I'm constantly deep down inside in a kind of rage..." And it made me think, well, here you've got people like Gillian Welch and... Jonathan Demme's a fan... you've been playing music for a long time, The Soft Boys and everything, and I was thinking does that make it easier? Because for a lot of artists, to have some kind of recognition, some outlet, you know, eases the soul a bit, I don't know whether, is it still true that you have that rage in you? I guess you only said it last year so maybe it is still true... Hitchcock:
I haven't had enough therapy to get rid of it completely, you know, just enough to find it... Yeah, everybody is at some level of discomfort. Even the people you mention. And some people are in more pain than others, some people know what to do with their discomfort. You know, I mean I could be playing with my hair, I could be, you know, picking on an E♭ or something like that, I could be smoking except it's illegal to smoke now; there's all these manifestations of what to do with your own dis-ease... For me, I turn it into music, and a lot of other people I know; that's how we metabolize. We breathe in life and we breathe out music; it keeps us sane and it seems to be somehow good for the environment, you know, like plants take in CO2 and produce oxygen, we take in the anxiety of life and give out music. And I'm very happy to be able to do that.
posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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