A decade after the death of renowned folklorist Alan Lomax, his vision of a "global jukebox" is being realized: his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February. NYT article
here.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Jan 30, 2012 -
39 comments
This is a story of a young man named Chotu Lohar* from a small nondescript village in
one of the poorest states of India. He dropped out of school to work in the iron mines. Music on a radio was the only entertainment available in his house but
last year he came to national notice on a reality show called
Dance India Dance - where although his untutored enthusiasm and energy captured attention - he was unable to make the cut. His passion, on the other hand,
caught the interest** of the show's producers who took him under their wing and a year later, he's
just made the shortlist for this year's show.
[more inside]
posted by infini
on Jan 7, 2012 -
7 comments
A decade on, the Coen brothers' woefully underrated
O Brother, Where Art Thou? [alt] is remembered for
a lot of things: its sun-drenched, sepia-rich
cinematography (a pioneer of
digital color grading), its
whimsical humor,
fluid vernacular, and
many subtle references to Homer's
Odyssey. But one part of its legacy truly stands out:
the music.
Assembled by
T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack is a cornucopia of American folk music, exhibiting everything from
cheery ballads and
angelic hymns to
wistful blues and
chain-gang anthems. Woven into the plot of the film through radio and live performances, the songs lent the story a
heartfelt, homespun feel that echoed its cultural heritage,
a paean and uchronia of the Old South.
Though the multiplatinum album was recently
reissued, the movie's medley is best heard via famed documentarian
D. A. Pennebaker's
Down from the Mountain, an
extraordinary yet
intimate concert film focused on a night of live music by the soundtrack's stars (among them
Gillian Welch,
Emmylou Harris,
Chris Thomas King, bluegrass legend
Dr. Ralph Stanley) and wryly hosted by
John Hartford, an accomplished
fiddler,
riverboat captain, and
raconteur whose struggle with terminal cancer made this his last major performance. The film is free in its entirety on
Hulu and
YouTube -- click inside for individual clips, song links, and breakdowns of
the set list's fascinating history.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 22, 2011 -
107 comments
Quincy Jones sat in the Tenafly, New Jersey den of 16-year-old vocal student Lesley Gore,
playing demo after demo, looking for the right song to cut for her first record. Out of over 200 tapes, Jones and Gore had moved only one to the "maybe" pile, and so that song,
It's My Party, was recorded on March 30, 1963 in a Manhattan studio. After the session Mercury president Irving Green warned Gore not to get her hopes up, but Gore gratefully told him that it had been a great experience anyway, and it was okay if he didn't want to release it. However, later that evening Jones learned that
Phil Spector had just recorded "It's My Party" for
The Crystals, so Jones rushed back to the studio to press 100 test copies of the single and immediately mailed them to key radio stations across the country.
[more inside]
posted by swift
on Sep 13, 2011 -
69 comments
Scene and heard: Electro champeta |
Champeta.net |
I came across this dream collection of picós pictures on Africolombia's blog. Picós are these huge, powerful, customized, hand painted, highly fetishized sound systems from the Colombian Carribean Coast (Barranquilla, Cartagena, Palenque de San Basilio...). |
Sound Systems, World Beat, and Diasporan Identity in Cartagena, Colombia [pdf] |
Techno Tribal guarachero | Bonus cool link:
Brazilian Dual Mix Dance Free Step.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Jun 19, 2011 -
3 comments
HUH. Magazine is a media platform with the latest, most relevant news from the worlds of art, fashion, design, music and film. Recent features include:
Harvest by Haroshi: Skate and Destroy, artworks created with old worn, or snapped, skateboard decks |
Disassembly, capturing relics of our past in a unique, dismantled and exposed form |
Murakami at Versailles, knee-deep in controversy since its inception | and
Darren's Great Big Camera, a
short documentary about a camera that shoots on 14" x 36" negatives and measures 6ft. in length.
posted by netbros
on Jun 1, 2011 -
8 comments
Blues Houseparty is a fun, entertaining and highly recommended 57 minute documentary that takes us into a Virginia houseparty of 1989, where the assembled
Piedmont blues and gospel musicians and their friends pick guitars, sing, dance and engagingly reminisce on the houseparties of old. Amidst hearty laughs, barbecue and general good times, the guests recount personal memories of fun and rowdiness, corn liquor, 500-pound hogs, the devil's music and the Lord's music. There's a whole lot of cultural history on display here, a slice of black American life that is all but gone now. The mood is infectious, to say the least, and the music just keeps getting better and better throughout the film. The next best thing to being there!
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 10, 2010 -
13 comments
I maintain that only an encyclopedic-archaeological turn can save an aging person's attachment to popular culture from descending into ridiculousness.
Against Eighties Music by Justin E.H. Smith
posted by xod
on Jul 26, 2010 -
144 comments
The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. You may know them from such projects as
How to build a fake Google Street View car,
public domain donor stickers,
internet famous class, the
first rap video to end with a download source code link, or their numerous
firefox add-ons (such as
China Channel,
Tourettes Machine, or
Back to the future). FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including
Graffiti Analysis,
Laser Tag,
Fat Tag Deluxe and
EyeWriter [previously] to be
GML (Graffiti Markup Language) compliant.
Fuck Google.
Fuck Twitter.
FuckFlickr.
Fuck SXSW.
Fuck 3D. FAT Lab is
Kanye shades for the open source movement.
posted by finite
on Mar 13, 2010 -
8 comments
A future history of the CD revival. In response to a piece on
cassette culture (
previously), music writer Tom Ewing reports from the 2020s' revival of interest in the compact disc format, and the interplays between hazy memories of growing up in the '00s, reaction against networked "social playlists", and a fetishisation of both the "glossy, uneasy sheen" of the CD sound and the constraints in working with physical artefacts.
posted by acb
on Mar 5, 2010 -
56 comments
Veteran Australian pop satirist
New Waver, best known for covers of pop songs rewritten from a pessimistically neo-Darwinian point of view, has a new album out. Titled
Bohemian Suburb Rhapsody, it looks at the subjects of gentrification, the explosion of revivalist styles in "hip" music, contemporary white-collar culture, the ideology of the "creative class" in the post-industrial age and the resulting oversupply of cultural products, through the medium of cover songs and musical montage. The album is free for dowloading from
New Waver's web site; there is a more detailed explanation
here, and a video for the song "Hey Dude" (which explains the dynamics of gentrification through the medium of a Beatles cover)
here.
posted by acb
on Feb 28, 2010 -
14 comments
Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most
infamous hack,
masher-upper,
digi/net artist.
His work stands for a
growing culture of artists who
run wildly through
animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted
data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI
renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the
Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net
art be set to
infect the real,
fleshy world, like a rampant
Conficker Worm? Has
YouTube become the truest reflection of our
anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the
mythic beasts of yore, hoping,
in time, that
digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void?
[...
previously]
posted by 0bvious
on Dec 8, 2009 -
20 comments
Michael Jackson penned and recorded
lots of songs, many of which
remain unreleased. Perhaps the most infamous, and rarest recording, is his version of
Behind the Mask. Legend has it that upon hearing
Yellow Magic Orchestra's original track, somewhen around 1979, Quincy Jones fell in love with the track, and he and Michael worked together on their own version. Jackson wrote
new lyrics for it - adding to those of
Ryuichi Sakamoto and
Chris Mosdell - and eventually recorded it during his
Off The Wall sessions. For unknown reasons the track never made the final cut of, arguably, Jones' and Jackson's greatest work. Not long afterwards
Greg Phillinganes, Jackson's keyboard player, released his
own version of the song, which was later taken up and
re-recorded by Eric Clapton for his 1986, Phil Collins produced album,
August. The track has since been recorded/remixed by
Human League,
Senor Coconut,
Orbital and
others. Does an original Jones/Jackson recording of the song
even exist? Perhaps, as the world
continues to mourn the star's
sad death, someone
will finally allow us a listen.
posted by 0bvious
on Jul 1, 2009 -
31 comments
The Serenader.
Roberto’s long moon-shadow stretches absurdly across the walls of the house as he plucks prettily at his guitar while his drunk client swaggers like a cat... Like many men in San Cristóbal, Roberto holds two jobs. At night he plays and sings the love songs that men use to woo women; in the day he teaches guitar to young men who may someday be his competition. Of the two jobs, serenading is far more lucrative.
posted by amyms
on Apr 18, 2008 -
3 comments
...Japanese hip hop has become a significant national, cultural, and business genre since the late twentieth century, and this phenomenon has been applied and has succeeded by using almost the same ideology that was historically used by other Japanese industries like automobile manufacturing. The pioneers in the Japanese hip hop industry like Buddha Brand learned their skills in the U.S. and have successfully been influencing the contemporary Japanese music scene. As a result, the imported hip hop has become a ''Japanized'' products. Many hip hop industries in Japan have modified the American hip hop into Japanese ways, and their businesses, like the hip hop dance schools, have succeeded.
The Japanese Hip Hop Movement: Its Cultural and Economic Impact [more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Jan 19, 2008 -
39 comments
Breakfast looks different to different people. That alone made me wanna post this cuz that's just hella cool, but after I saw that, I started wondering what does breakfast
sound like?
Why should we even bother with breakfast? Here's
some more thoughts on breakfast. Hungry yet? This was a
great movie by the way. I guess
that one was okay too.
So what did you have for breakfast? [previously]
posted by ZachsMind
on Oct 8, 2007 -
71 comments
NickCaveFilter: Fifty years ago this very day,
Nicholas Edward Cave [
previously] crawled from the womb and started to plot. At 16 he formed his first band which evolved quickly into the
Boys Next Door [
Shivers]. This in turn mutated into
the Birthday Party (1980) who terrorised the post-punk soundscape in Australia and the UK [
Release the Bats |
Nick the Stripper]. The
Birthday Party relocated to England and in 1984 the band imploded in an orgy of drugs and booze. Shortly after
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were born [The Ship Song -
video &
solo live | The Mercy Seat -
video &
live |
Where the Wild Roses Grow], and 23 years and 11 studio albums later (not to mention a
best selling book, a
great screenplay,
some acting and several soundtrack projects) he is still going strong. But, instead of sitting on his musical laurels he decided to get back to basics and, in 2006,
grew a huge moustache and formed
Grinderman – a four piece with a primeval hybrid Birthday Party/Bad Seeds sound [
No Pussy Blues |
Honey Bee]. Fellow Mefites, I ask you to raise a glass to
Mr. Cave… And, especially if you are not familiar to his work, don’t forget to “look inside” for my primer on the enigma that is Nick Cave, one of the
finest song-writers on the face of this miserable planet.
[more inside]
posted by the_very_hungry_caterpillar
on Sep 22, 2007 -
98 comments
Some more great french guitar players.
Nelson Veras first came to France to meet Pat Metheny (he was 14 then, it has been documented on video by Frank Cassenti) but upon meeting
some other jazzmen , he decided to stay in France and to experiment in
various settings.
Robert Crumb isn't exactly a "great french guitar player", but his decision to move to France (his or his wife's decision) and later his responsability in the creation of
Les Primitifs du Futur has played a part in the rebirth of ancient french styles ("musette") and the renewed interest in old jazz and blues forms.
[more inside]
posted by nicolin
on Sep 10, 2007 -
9 comments
Inner City Youth, London "In 2002,
Simon Wheatley began photographing London's publich housing developments...and was able to obtain a level of intimacy with his subjects that provides a true picture of the daunting project of growing up in the intimate confines of drug use, societal neglect, and poverty."
This (Flash-based) narrated slideshow features Wheatley's work, and is a look at the culture...and also the music (
grime) "as an artistic response to the place and circumstance, an expression of the violence, bleakness, and neglect..." (via
Future Feeder)
posted by tpl1212
on Jul 20, 2006 -
38 comments
Taylor Hicks wins American Idol.... It could be something worth talking about given how powerful the show has become: #1 show on television, contributed to over 30 million records (records -- yes records not itunes singles) sold, and a show where Queen, Rod Stewart, and, tonight, TAFKAP (or he could be Prince again) are clamoring to be on it. Moroever, some conventional wisdom seems to support that the show is not karaoeke-izing pop music and instead contributes to it
surprisingly positively. While it might not lead to debates on metafiler, arguments as to what makes a good Idol can be seen
here.
posted by skepticallypleased
on May 24, 2006 -
141 comments
Culture Catch is an online "magazine" featuring vid and podcasts of musicians such as Mark Kozelek, American Music Club, Les Paul and Tony Visconti. Plus: Todd McFarlane, Sir Richard Branson, Henry Rollins, Gisele, David Cronenberg and more.
posted by edlundart
on Mar 30, 2006 -
7 comments
Wade in the Water In 2004,
Smithsonian Folklife Festival featured the maritime cultures of the Mid-Atlantic region, from Long Island to North Carolina. Now, this site gives a home on the web to the cultural documentation gathered for the festival --
music,
recipes,
stories and oral history,
an interactive map,
the occupational folklore and natural history of regional fisheries,
photos, video, and more. The material, ably compiled by folklorists and educators, creates a lasting and very accessible archive of festival highlights as well as an excellent overview of the distinct coastal culture of the Mid-Atlantic. Don't miss the great menhaden net-hauling chantey
Help Me to Raise 'Em (links to mp3).
posted by Miko
on Mar 27, 2006 -
7 comments
Hippocamp Ruins Sgt Pepper's A group of electronic artists have worked on a "ruined" version of the Beatles Sgt Pepper's classic. Designed to accompany and contrast with the ".... Ruins Pet Sounds" release from earlier in the year
.... this ruined release exists to be compared and contrasted to the original album and its artistic competitor Pet Sounds.
The original classic is recontextualised through the humour and vision of these artists whose approaches to the tracks aims to re-examine Pepper's through a filter of 2005 technology.
posted by room
on Dec 10, 2005 -
31 comments
The Streets of Laredo: The Cowboy's Lament was originally written as the Irish drover balled
Bard of Armaugh (or
Armagh), which later mutated into
A Handful of Laurel, about a young man dying of syphilis in a London hospital, musing back on his days in the alehouses and whorehouses. Immigrants settling in the Appalachians brought their own version,
The Unfortunate Rake, sung as early as 1790, about a young soldier dying of mercury poisoning, a result of treatment for venereal disease, who requests a military funeral - a slight but important evolution from the previous version. The current lyrics are most popularly attributed to cowboy
Frances Henry "Frank" Maynard, who copyrighted them in 1879. While various
versions of the song were popular in the US before Maynard took pen to paper and needle to wax cylinder (under such titles as
Locke Hospital,
St. James Infirmary Blues,
Tom Sherman's Bar and
Way Down in Lodorra), his version is the one with which we are most familiar today.
beat the drum slowly, play the fife lowly / sound the death march as you carry me along / cover my body in sweet-smelling posies / for I'm the young (rake, soldier, man, girl, lass, etc)
cut down in (his/her)
prime (or
and I know I've done wrong)
The song has been recorded by pretty much every country, western and folk-identified musical artist since recording music became practical, although the most popular versions must be those by
Arlo Guthrie (who once said it was "the saddest song I know," and who sings it on his album
Son of the Wind) and
Johnny Cash (who added
a few verses to his 1965 version, improving the song a bit and making it more emotionally complex).
Roger McGuinn's creative commons-licensed version is one of my personal favorites, as is Bobby Sutliff's
version.
posted by luriete
on Aug 3, 2005 -
27 comments
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