Radiolab (the finest podcast on earth) did something special for a recent short episode called Curious Sounds, bringing in three artists specializing in very different – and very weird – soundscapes.

All three performances are worth listening to, but the big surprise was drummer Glenn Kotche of Wilco, removed from his usual habitat and throwing down something totally unexpected. Kotche plays a prepared drum kit laced up with rubber bands, screws and springs, tuned cowbells, and a fruit bowl, as well as a couple of traditional percussion instruments.

… percussionist Glenn Kotche of Wilco performs “Monkey Chant,” his retelling of the ancient Hindu epic the Ramayana–using different instruments in his drum kit to convey different characters. And after explaining how he once wrote a string quartet on the drums, he plays one more composition: “Projections of What Might.”

Kotche’s piece starts at 8’30” in — or 12’00” if you want to skip the introduction to his kit — so scrub past the Buke and Gass warm-up and dive in. It’s quite long, so leave this page up in the background and go about your business, or close your eyes and swim – it’s intense and wonderful. Kotche actually plays two pieces here, sandwiched by a brief conversation about how he orchestrates pieces for Kronos Quartet — on the drums. Apparently, a spiritual descendant of Harry Partch is behind the Dad Rock tradition.

More on Kotche at glennkotche.com

The day after the rapture, I drank coffee, watched both my children play soccer, drank more coffee, and ate jambalaya out of a paper container at a food festival in what looked suspiciously like downtown Oakland. In the end, or lack thereof, the armageddon craze led to little more than a flurry of judgment day music playlists, most of which included the most pretentious song ever written (sorry, Jim). It all seemed a little too predictable, until a research tangent led me to something more fun and equally preposterous: Samuel Beckett once served as a chauffeur for Andre the Giant. The Historical Meetups website explains:

In 1953, fresh off the success of Waiting for Godot, Beckett bought a plot of land near the hamlet of Molien, in the commune of Ussy-sur-Marne, about forty miles northeast of Paris. There he built a cottage for himself with some help from a group of locals, including a Bulgarian-born farmer named Boris Rousimoff. Over the years, Beckett and Rousimoff became friends and would occasionally get together for card games. Rousimoff had a son, André, known as Dédé, who was something of a physical marvel. By the age of 12, André was over six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds. No school bus could hold him, and his family lacked the means to buy a car big enough to schlep him back and forth to school in Ussy-sur-Marne. Enter Boris’ old card-playing buddy Beckett, who owned a truck and was more than willing to pay his friend back for his help with the cottage by giving a lift to his enormous pituitary case of a son on his drives into town. Years later, when recounting his conversations with Beckett (which he did often), André the Giant revealed that they rarely talked about anything besides cricket.

Elvis Costello, “Waiting for the End of the World”

John Coltrane, “Giant Steps” (animation by Michal Levy)

Everyone hearts Bo Diddley, everyone hearts The Clash. And once upon a time it all came together. One can only imagine the evening was slathered in awesomesauce, but “every generation has its own little bag of tricks.” Now about those amp stacks…

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.

Ted Hawkins, “Peace and Happiness”

After a lifetime of continental drifting, our everyman busker anchors himself on the California coast, channeling the ghosts of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke as he pleads for some peace, love and understanding. And what’s so funny about that?

Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, “Misirlou”

Once you get beyond know-nothingism and nativist paranoia, nothing could be more American than having the Boston-bred son of Lebanese and Polish immigrants electrify a Greek rebetiko classic, turn his guitar into an oud with a lit firecracker, and forge a new music that makes everyone think of … summer in California!

Gaslight Anthem, “American Slang”

Meet the new slang, same as the old slang. Despite packing more Jersey cliches than your average episode of the Sopranos and more Springsteen references than your average Hold Steady song, blue-collar standard-bearer Brian Fallon shapes a ’10 sound that at times seems more than the sum of its social distortions.

George Gershwin, “An American in Paris” (in North Korea)

The former Jacob Gershowitz and Tin Pan Alley teen sensation reached adulthood spinning melodies that are tough as body armor, remaining bulletproof in the most surreal of locations from Paris to Pyongyang.

Fans of the beautiful game throughout Africa are painfully aware that it took nothing less than the the second hand of God to keep Ghana’s Black Stars from becoming the first African side to reach the semi-finals in World Cup history. But if the World Cup were awarded for music, host South Africa’s opening concert offered compelling evidence that African bands deserved a place in the finals. While TV coverage here was mostly devoted to the likes of the Black Eyed Peas and Shakira, you can catch up on what you missed here.

Highlights included two of my favorite bands from Mali. Amadou and Mariam performed a fabulously funky version of “Welcome to Mali,” dressed in jumpsuits apparently on loan from Devo, and Toureag desert rebels Tinariwen showed several times why they are one of the best guitar bands on the planet.

Tinariwen, “Matadjem Yinmixan”

Amadou and Mariam, “Welcome to Mali”

What’s been the most embarrassing moment at your job this year? If you’re a broadcaster, the answer is obvious: trying, and failing miserably, to pronounce the name of that pesky Icelandic volcano that has turned into nature’s equivalent of Grecian fiscal policy. Try as they might, the most seasoned of non-Scandinavian reporters repeatedly stumbled home with clouds in their airspace after pretending that Eyjafjallajökull could simply roll off the tongue. Only one TV network seemed to master the feat, and as you probably guessed, it was Al Jazeera. But it turned out they had an ace pronunciation lesson from Iceland’s own Eliza Geirsdottir Newman, who is exactly the singer and ukulele player you always wished your own teacher could be. Now you can take the same lesson at home by viewing the clip below, which answers the musical question of what would happen if Björk’s chipper blond cousin suddenly discovered the Moldy Peaches. The reporter gets extra bonus points for attempting to use Angela Merkel’s picture as a mnemonic device.

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

Lewis on Twitter