About 30 miles west of Charleston, West Virginia is a little town called
Milton, which was the home to the Plato Records label back in the 1960s.
According to Al Collinsworth, vocalist and co-songwriter for The Outcasts, Plato was intended to be an African-American music (Afrilachian) label, but the only known Plato releases are a handful of garage rock and funk singles from predominantly white bands, like The Outcasts'
Loving You Sometimes. That particular track has seen an uptick in interest, since it has appeared on some recent mixtapes, including Diplo's
Chasing the Dragon (MP3,
streaming on Grooveshark). For more on those few known Plato recordings,
Garage Hangover has interviews, information and promo photos from members.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 13, 2013 -
7 comments
Jason Anderson, the singer who's "equal parts Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison" has remastered and rereleased his classic EP 'Omaha' and is offering it for free from his website. You can read an interview with him
here, which talks about meeting Calvin Johnson and his days as
Wolf Colonel.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants
on May 29, 2013 -
7 comments
Andrea Benini is a musician, music producer and composer from Cesena, Italy, and is more commonly known as
Mop Mop, or at least the head of a changing group of musicians who use that name. In 2005, collective Mop Mop released an album of
cool vibes, spare paino lines, tight grooves (
5 sample tracks, streaming on Grooveshark). The group has changed over the years, releasing a total of four albums, with the most recent, Isle of Magic, containing
13 tracks of pure voodoo jazz, Caribbean flavors, Afro-funk, exotic rhythms and soul music.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 10, 2013 -
3 comments
In 1965 guitar legend Jimi Hendrix was doing the chitlin circuit with R&B acts, where he honed some of the guitar artistry as well as the showman skills that would soon set the world on fire. Here's a taste of that pre-rock star Jimi, as a member of the Buddy and Stacy revue, doing the Junior Walker classic
Shotgun. If you want more pre-rock star Jimi, well, there's...
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 6, 2013 -
38 comments
GRiZ - Mad Liberation. Take a 21 year old bedroom producer from Michigan, raise them on the the internet with a near complete access to the history of modern music with a focus on electronic/dance and apparently you get this incredibly humanistic and cross-cultural album that's both homage, monument and appropriation of hundreds of influences in modern music in an incredibly dubby dubstep framework. (
Free album download here.)
posted by loquacious
on Sep 5, 2012 -
67 comments
'textbook definition of surrealism' In his epic new bio of James Brown, "
The One"--an account of not just the man's life and music, but a panoramic view of African-American, southern and American political and cultural history of the 20th Century--author R.J. Smith briefly discusses "Future Shock," a dance show that Brown hosted in the mid-1970s. It aired on a pioneering Atlanta station, WTCG, a Ted Turner-owned UHF station that would become a satellite channel by the end of 1976. Along with the pay-only HBO (started in '75 in select markets), WTCG paved the way for a cable TV revolution. Its name would be changed to
WTBS (otherwise known as Superstation WTBS) in 1979.
[more inside]
posted by raysmj
on Aug 14, 2012 -
13 comments
In the wake of their grunge-y breakout hit
"Creep" and the success of sophomore record
The Bends, Thom Yorke and the rest of
Radiohead were under pressure to deliver once more.
So they shut themselves away inside the echoing halls of
a secluded 16th century manor and got to work.
What emerged from that crumbling Elizabethan castle fifteen years ago today was a shockingly ambitious masterpiece of progressive rock, a visionary concept album that explored
the "fridge buzz" of modernity -- alienation, social disconnection, existential dread,
the impersonal hum of technology -- through a mosaic of
challenging,
innovative,
eerily beautiful music unlike anything else at the time.
Tentatively called
Ones and Zeroes, then
Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments, the band finally settled on
OK Computer, an appropriately enigmatic title for this
acclaimed harbinger of millennial angst. For more, you can watch the retrospective
OK Computer: A Classic Album Under Review for a track-by-track rundown, or the unsettling documentary
Meeting People is Easy for a look at how the album's whirlwind tour nearly gave Yorke
a nervous breakdown. Or look inside for more details and cool interpretations of all the tracks -- including
an upcoming MeFi Music Challenge! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jun 16, 2012 -
66 comments
On January 13 and 14, 1972,
Aretha Franklin sang during services at the Reverend James Cleveland's New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The audio recordings released as
Amazing Grace remain the largest-selling gospel album in history. However, of the 20 hours of 16mm film footage by Sydney Pollack - intended as a concert movie for tandem release -
only a few snippets have ever been seen.
(previously: 1, 2)
posted by Trurl
on Apr 22, 2012 -
8 comments
Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion:
Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson's repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person, gained a third arm, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions.
[ . . . ]
But Ehrsson's unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.
[ . . . ]
Ehrsson's work also intrigues neuroscientists and philosophers because it turns a slippery, metaphysical construct — the self — into something that scientists can dissect.
posted by troll
on Jan 3, 2012 -
23 comments
New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and for lots of folks that means... drinking. Plenty of drinking. And since there's no shortage of singers and songwriters who've had a little something to say about that particular topic, maybe some of the following tunes can serve as an appropriate soundtrack to your own joyous (or not?) imbibing of spirits. For example, there's... Jimmy Liggins with his succinct rendition of
Drunk, and there's...
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2011 -
67 comments
Back in May of this year,
Mayer Hawthorne put together
a free collection of covers and descriptions of the tracks. The collection includes covers of The Isley Brothers (
Work To Do,
1972), Chromeo (
Don't Turn The Lights On,
2010), The Festivals (
You’ve Got The Makings Of A Lover,
late 1960s), Shorty's Portion (Fantasy Girl or Child,
1975?),
Jon Brion (
Little Person,
2008), and Electric Light Orchestra (
Mr. Blue Sky,
1977). Chances are that you've heard of (or at least heard from) most of these artists, except
Shorty's Portion, a one-off band with a small-run album. The group was centered around Steve Salazar, who was born with a hole in his heart, and died just short of his 27th birthday.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Sep 2, 2011 -
7 comments
Say, you wanna hear a sad song? Eddie Hinton was a guitar player, vocalist, and songwriter from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Co-writer of one of the tenderest, sexiest hits of the late 60s, Dusty Springfield's
Breakfast in Bed, Hinton was a key member of the world-famous
Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section from 1967 to 1971 (turning down an invitation from Duane Allman to be a member of the Allman Brothers Band) who worked as a studio musician on albums by Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, the Staples Singers, and Toots Hibbert, but his early success was
sidetracked by mental problems, booze, and drugs.
[more inside]
posted by BitterOldPunk
on May 31, 2011 -
22 comments
How Soul Music Became "Soul Music."
A writer takes the occasion of the release of
Adele's new album,
21, to explore the popularity and implications of the young British soul singers.
"Because if we're truly living in an age that defies stereotypes and explodes clichés, where distances of all kinds have been virtually obliterated, then everything—timbre, blue notes, pronunciation, timing, diction—is available as stylistic options." [more inside]
posted by beisny
on Mar 6, 2011 -
36 comments
Swimming around in a mixture of language and matter, humans occupy a particular evolutionary niche mediated by something we call 'consciousness'. To Professor Nicholas Humphrey we're made up of "
soul dust": "a kind of theatre... an entertainment which we put on for ourselves inside our own heads." But just as that theatre is directed by the relationship between language and matter,
it is also undermined by it. It all depends how you think it.
posted by 0bvious
on Feb 4, 2011 -
17 comments
The new film
Blue Valentine (
trailer) features a damn fine 60's-era soul ballad called "
You and Me," of mysterious origin. The exposure has sparked
an effort to find out who sang it and where it came from. The archival label
Numero Group (
previously)
discovered the rehearsal tape, labeled only 'Penny and the Quarters', at an estate sale in Columbus, OH. Since then, "we have played this recording to over 100 movers and shakers from the time and no one has a clue."
posted by naju
on Jan 17, 2011 -
28 comments
It’s maybe a
little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares:
we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley
on Dec 3, 2010 -
30 comments
