Simple but glorious idea: Scan all those 1″ banners at the top of old-timey LP covers that let the listener know what they were about to hear would be delivered in Full Living Stereo. Then make a giant tower out of them. Total visual treat. Click to shuffle the deck.
Vintage LP stereo banners stacked by Jive Time Records and Project Thirty-Three:
The black paper between the mirror breaks my heart that I can’t go.
Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow.
The good Cap’n has passed (through mirror paper?), evidence that the sun ain’t stable? If he wasn’t already, Don van Vliet is now having the neon meate dream of a octafish. Forever. Finally lost his battle with muscular sclerosis at age 69. His Trout Mask Replica was Number 58 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In a 1969 review, Lester Bangs called Beefheart “the only true dadaist in rock” and Trout Mask “a total success, a brilliant, stunning enlargement and clarification of his art.” Tom Waits spent a lot of time on the phone with Beefheart in his post-music years:
“He was like the scout on a wagon train,” Waits wrote in an e-mail Friday. “He was the one who goes ahead and shows the way. He was a demanding bandleader, a transcendental composer (with emphasis on the dental), up there with Ornette [Coleman], Sun Ra and Miles [Davis]. He drew in the air with a burnt stick. He described the indescribable. He’s an underground stream and a big yellow blimp.
Continue reading Practice in Front of a Bush: Stuck on Beefheart
John Cage’s seminal work 4’33” changed the world of music when its 1952 performance by David Tudor shocked audiences and critics into a new appreciation of avante garde composition techniques. The work was admired for its groundbreaking incorporation of audience noises such as shuffling chairs and blown noses, not to mention the creak of the piano lid as it opened at the start of the piece, and its thudding close at the end.
Unfortunately, like so much of the world’s great music, 4’33” has been copied to YouTube by copyright-disrespecting pirates, and millions of internet users can now listen to the piece in its entirety without paying a dime to the artist or label for the privilege. Fortunately, YouTube builds in protection mechanisms against copyright theft, so that content owners can cause the audio to be stripped from infringing videos without taking down the post entirely.
Here at Stuck Between Stations, we believe that strict copyright enforcement is the cornerstone of a rich musical economy, and we applaud the vigilance of Warner Music Group in ensuring that the audio track of this illegal posting of one of Cage’s most important works has been removed.
If you believe 4’33” deserves more respect than ever this year, please consider supporting the Facebook campaign to make it Christmas number one for 2010, just as ‘Killing In The Name’ was in 2009.
On the last day of this summer’s family Kauai trek, at the base of the road leading up to Waimea Canyon, stopped with my crew at a shave ice joint on the South Shore called Jo Jo’s, and sat on the side porch in the hot sun, enjoying our last licks. A few days later, after returning home with my new prize Kamaka pineapple ukulele, sat down to try and learn some of the licks from the masters at ukuleleunderground.com, starting with Seals and Croft’s not-quite-forgotten gem, Summer Breeze.
Jaw hit the floor when I realized that instructor Aldrine Guerrero was teaching the lesson from the very same bench at Jo Jo’s where we had just been sitting a few days ago. Of all the bazillion lat/long coords on earth, how could these two come into perfect alignment? Kismet, baby. My rendition of Summer Breeze didn’t turn out anything like Aldrine’s of course, but I did make pretty quick progress on the track. But the more I learned about Guerrero, the more I realized this was someone I definitely wanted to watch. Such a laid-back guy, totally living the Aloha thing, who seems to want little more than to help others learn great ukulele technique.
Continue reading Let’s Get It On (Ukulele Style)
In the tradition of Harry Partch, whose microtonal scales played on gorgeous one-of-a-kind instruments my son once described as sounding like “space chimps driving a broken car,” Diego Stocco bought a bonsai tree and went at it with piano hammers, bows of various sizes, and a paint brush. And a MacBook Pro. The result is haunting and beautiful.
See also: A Welsh Onion Flute for Trying Times
I always liked bonsai trees, and I was curious to try the approach I used for “Music from a Tree” on a smaller scale, so I bought a bonsai and recorded this little experimental piece.
To determine the key I used the lowest note I could play and recorded the rest around it.
Besides playing the leaves, I used bows of different sizes, a piano hammer and a paint brush.
As far as microphones I used my Røde NT6, a customized stethoscope and tiny MEAS piezo transducers.I played all the sounds and rhythms only with the bonsai, I didn’t use any synthesizer or samplers to create or modify the sounds. I hope you’ll like it.
More of Stocco’s sessions here.
Not since Hohner released the Siamese Twins model harmonica in 1904 – or perhaps since Tod Browning’s 1932 film opus Freaks – has our advanced civilization had the unmitigated pleasure of being serenaded by a pair of congenitally joined twin girls who have mastered the piano, ukulele, and accordion, each twin contributing their respectively available hand toward playing duties.
Evelyn Evelyn changes all that, with an autobiographical vaudeville revue cum baroque Pop-Rock opera (don’t swallow with Pepsi!). It’s complicated.
EVELYN and EVELYN NEVILLE are a songwriting duo performing original compositions on piano, ukulele, guitar and accordion. The sisters are parapagus tripus dibrachius twins, sharing three legs, two arms, three lungs, two hearts and a single liver.
Born September 11, 1985 on a small farm on the Kansas-Colorado border, the Evelyns have traveled the greater part of North America performing with “Dillard & Fullerton’s Illusive Traveling Showâ€.
Their unique musical style is inspired by their many eclectic influences – from 80’s music to showtunes, Joy Division to the Andrews Sisters.
The sisters currently reside in Walla Walla, Washington. They are fluent in chicken and their favorite colors are purple and yellow.
Sometimes the simplest music hits you like a ton of bricks. Somewhere between Chopin and Sun Ra (in his more pensive moments) lie the gorgeous etudes of 87-year-old Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, reflecting on her passage from religious persecution to depression to solace. Emahoy’s piano moves between dark sultry and enlivened pizzicato, like the soundtrack of a pre-talkie drama full of sweet melancholy, punctuated by fleeting moments of hope. Her melodies are a graceful, fleeting ballet of simple truths, spiritual insight, and awkward stumbles. In every phrase, you can hear the course of Emahoy’s life, so different from your own.
Meara O’Reilly for Boing-Boing:
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is a nun currently living in Jerusalem. She grew up as the daughter of a prominent Ethiopian intellectual, but spent much of her young life in exile, first for schooling, and then again during Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia’s capitol city, Addis Ababa, in 1936. Her musical career was often tragically thwarted by class and gender politics, and when the Emperor himself actually went so far as to personally veto an opportunity for Guèbrou to study abroad in England, she sank into a deep depression before fleeing to a monastery in 1948.
Emahoy is now 87 years old and plays piano at her monastery nearly seven hours a day.
This is music poignant and hopeful, for reflecting on life lived and not yet lived. You want this in yours.
One of the great things about my job is that I get to go to SXSW every year. The drag part is that I only get to go to the Interactive week, not the Music week (the part where the attendees start looking less like grown-up, pot-bellied Eddie Munsters complete with chunky eyeglasses and more like Iggy Pop). Still, there’s a bit of overlap between festival phases, and every now and then you hit a Lucky Strike. Was finishing up a plate of street tacos when I heard from a nerd that the Twitter party was happening across the street at the Parish. Why not?
Flashed the badge, shambled upstairs, helped myself to a free whiskey (the very best kind), and got hit by this wall of pawn shop blues that knocked my socks off. I’d never heard of Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, and thus assumed that my flux capacitor had misfired, landing me sometime before 1967 when Otis Redding still walked the earth. Took about 30 seconds before my body started bouncing involuntarily to this deep soul groove, which soon segued into a more James Brown-style funk.
Wait… he can play guitar too? Like, deep guitar? Holy crap, there’s Leadbelly in here! And Jimi too. “What is this band?,” I yelled to the person standing next to me. “The Relatives!” Went to check out the merch. Ah, I had misheard – it was The Honeybears. Later found out the merch was all wrong – it was The Relatives after all. Turns out Black Joe Lewis plays with both bands. Who cares? Lewis is a force to be reckoned with.
I’m Broke
Don’t let the self-consciously 60s camp visual style of the video throw you – this stuff is as sincere as it gets. Stuart Derdeyn for National Post on Lewis:
He’s like the best moments of a classic Texas six-string slinger and a razor-sharp New Orleans funk n’ roll review in one. As ever here, his band is crazy tight and puts amperage into even the most tired and true blues riffs. Plus, he’s a really fine singer. This is blues for people that really want gritty R&B rather than Chicago I-V-IV boogie.
The night ended way too soon – I had arrived late and only caught half the show. Left the joint buzzing, thirsty for more “garage soul” … more of that throw-down funky blues, more of that back-yard Texas summer under Chinese paper lanterns, surrounded by shimmying glitter lame’ dresses and the pervasive aroma of ubiquitous, very slow barbecues. Yeah, there’s some retro camp there, but it’s also the real deal, and I could soak up this flavor any night of the week.
Sugarfoot
From the tippy end of the Very Long Tail comes this morsel of immutable baritone joy, apparently culled from the set of an obscure entertainment programme aired only in Russia in the early 70s.
The full title is “Я очень рад, ведь Ñ, наконец, возвращаюÑÑŒ домой,” which I believe translates into something like “A Gleeful Prayer From The Soaring Alter-Ego of Lurch the Butler.”
Update: Apparently there is a domain dedicated to serving this single song: trololololololololololo.com
Chris Weingarten (@1000timesyes) on music criticism in the age of Twitter. A 10-minute rant well-worth watching.
