The music that Hypnotic Brass Ensemble plays might best be described as highly composed instrumental hip-hop. If it is jazz, it’s closer in spirit to jazz from a hundred years ago: accomplished and energetic music parceled-out in short songs designed for dancing. It stays in key for long stretches, and moves in easy-to-follow periods. In a typical Hypnotic song, the shifts in key and the emergence of themes happen against a sound of massed horn parts that provide a sense of solidity. The music stays rooted to the cycle of the beat and the riff, and the players don’t leave the center behind to leap around as they might in hard bop or free jazz. Unlike the musicians in the avant-garde community that Hypnotic grew up in, these players have no interest in dissonance or “out” passages of squeaking and skronking. They keep their compositions lean and their harmonies broad and varied. [READ MORE]
Jay Bennett, a singer and songwriter who was a former member of the rock band Wilco, died on Sunday in Urbana, Ill. He was 45 and lived in Urbana. [READ MORE]
"…Choral sometimes feels staid and a little postcard-y: a pretty gesture that fails to eclipse the experience of actually going somewhere. That's OK: The best parts of Choral — the title track, "Melodica", most of "Add Infinity"— suggest that the band's moniker refers less to the vistas their music may or may not evoke and instead to the shifting strata of sound they create. On Choral, Mountains arrange those layers in ways just subtle and precise enough to shift your headspace."
On February 15th Orange County rocker Will Crum and his band were able to sneak their music equipment (amps, drums, etc.) into a IKEA and performed a 3 song set in one of the kitchen sets before being shut down.
"We are not here to save the world, we are here to serve an emerging paradigm... [Places and spaces of possibility], they are kind of like midwives, places that are holding the template of what's trying to emerge,... so there can be a birth of the next stage of human evolution." — Rev. Michael Beckwith, "Serving the Emerging Paradigm" (video)
Looks like the recession just took its first major music festival victim. The 2009 Langerado Music Festival, which was to take place March 6-8 at Miami, Florida's Bicentennial Park, has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
Franchise is a 5-piece rock band that has just released their finest record! The band (which includes Dan: Vocals, "Gitfiddling pedal operator"; Matt: Guitars and pedals; Keri: Bass and pedals; Waylon: Drums) is described in their own words:
Influences: Anyone who worships the sun, or any other noise source. Sounds like: Progressive cultural train wreck. Record label:No Money Music
REVIEW: This record, simply titled '3,' is all the best music Sonic Youth, The Butthole Surfers, didn't have the talent to make. The multi-layered, at times dense, record rewards on repeat listens. Let it envelope you with feedback, noises, screams. What makes the record work is a very strong musiclal backbone. The band may also draw comparisons to older material from Mercury Rev or The Flamings Lips, but they soar past those references and deliver something unique and stunning in the process.
Oyvind sez, "Some weeks ago, NRK — Norwegian Broadcasting — signed a deal with music rights holder organisation TONO in Norway. The new deal gives NRK right to publish podcasts of all previously broadcasted radio- and tv-programs that contains less then 70% music. Podcast containing music may be up for four weeks, while our podcast without music stay up on our server forever. One result of this deal, is that we now can publish 'Vår daglige Beatles' - 'Our Daily Beatles' in English — as a podcast. In this series from 2001, journalists Finn Tokvam og Bård Ose tells the story of every single Beatles tracks ever made, chronologically. Each episode contains a 3 minute story about each track (sadly for our international visitors - in Norwegian) and the actual Beatles tune. This is — as far as we know — the first time you can download the Beatles’ music legally. Neither iTunes nor Amazon have The Beatles in their music stores." Last ned alt av “The Beatles” - og historien om hver enkelt låt (Thanks, Oyvind!)
Invisible aliens in a tiny flying saucer come to Earth looking for heroin. They land on top of a New York apartment inhabited by a drug dealer and her female, androgynous, bisexual nymphomaniac lover, a fashion model. The aliens soon find the human pheromones created in the brain during orgasm preferable to heroin, and the model's casual sex partners begin to disappear. This increasingly bizarre scenario is observed by a lonely woman in the building across the street, a German scientist who is following the aliens, and an equally androgynous, drug-addicted male model. (Both models are played by Anne Carlisle, in a dual role.) Darkly funny and thoroughly weird.
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Producer Katie Ball visits a child's lemonade stand in her Orlando neighborhood. After a cool drink and good-hearted conversation with the family, Ball notices that they had deliberately removed and/or covered their McCain campaign signs so as not to risk offending any would-be customers. SOURCE: Public Radio Exchange (PRX.org)
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