Music —
This book review reminded me of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra… …which has forged a successful recording and performance career without the need of a conductor. Their group is not leaderless, members are keen to emphasize; rather, the leadership role shifts among them within a performance and even within a piece. Echoing Peter Drucker, the [...]
David Byrne always presents something new, something interesting, all wrapped in a consistent and genuine funky catchiness. He’s posted an mp3 of his song My Fair Lady to OurMedia, has a new album of opera-influenced songs and has been writing an online journal. From the latter, there’s introspection and honesty not common among his peers: [...]
We’re taking the digital+hard drive plunge and getting rid of our CDs. Ulrike discovered Second Spin to buy our used CDs. One just types in the UPC code and they tell you how much they’ll pay. After you’ve entered the discs in their system and get a receipt, you pack them up and ship them [...]
A lot of bloggers are getting hip to The Postal Service (iTunes), the band behind the infectious electronic The District Sleeps Alone and others from the album “Give Up”. Most don’t seem to know the mind behind the songs is Ben Gibbard, front man of Death Cab for Cutie. To explore Death Cab, I’d recommend [...]
Juan Sebastian gives me a heads up to es flamenco, a storefront crafted with care and content. Once spare time returns to my life I plan to study some Flamenco guitar, instead of the pigeon technique I have now.
Does anyone know which musician created the music for the new Swatch commercial? It’s gets me all dancy and stuff. Found it: It’s Five for Fighting’s Something About You (.wav) (iTunes). Whew.
Tea for Two (560K mp3)
Joel likes Listen.com. Sounds like a good deal, but so far it’s Windoze-only.
New York music lovers could do worse than check out Hamza El Din this Thursday at Lincoln Center. Here’s an older piece, an excerpt from ‘Manami‘ (850K), in what amounts to late 70′s Egyptian pop music. The tempo and rhythm shifts just floor me.
The Flamenco Guitar Home Page On my list of big things to learn someday is Flamenco guitar. I could start with these resources, which are excellent (for example, the combination of transcription, tabulature, and mp3s of early 20th Century recordings). But I know I would just be reinforcing bad technique, never having learned proper classical [...]
…A silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protégés, the Planets, has enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992. The silence on his group’s album clearly sounds uncannily like 4’33″, the silence composed by Cage in his prime…. ‘As my mother said when I told [...]
No! is a new album ‘for the whole family’ from They Might Be Giants. It’s a kid’s album. It’s fun. Robot Parade (~500k mp3) And sometimes it’s romantic, in that Narrow Your Eyes sort of way. Four Of Two And sometimes it’s scary, ’cause sometimes it’s fun to be scared. The Edison Museum In the [...]
Here’s a Philip Glass composition you can play yourself, as printed in Score: An Anthology of New Music (out of print I assume but probably findable in a university’s library): Any table top is amplified by means of a contact mike, amplifier and speaker. The player perfoms 1 + 1 by tapping the table top [...]
Finding wonderful female vocalists surfacing on my playlist these days. Here’s some mp3 snippets (all under 400K): Pink A talent for syncopation (just try and sing along) Patty Larkin Quirky and surprisingly addictive PJ Harvey Dark, and surprisingly addictive Amanda Ghost Imagine songwriting and production that mirror Natalie Imbruglia but with vocal chords soaked in [...]