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justamusicpodcast · 4 years ago

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Sup, I’m Laura Cousineau and welcome to Just A Music Podcast, where I, Laura Cousineau, tell you about some music history, how it relates to the world around us, and hopefully, introduce you to some new tunes. This show is theoretically for everyone but I will swear and when it comes down to it and sometimes we may need to talk about some sensitive topics so ur weeuns might wanna sit this one out.

Folk music! What a fucking blanket of a genre title isn’t it? We got 1960s folk in america, we got different folk genres in terms of mixed genres like folk metal, we got folk music as sort of an interchangeable term for ethnic musics, it’s all fuckin folk from here on out folks! But what is folk music where does it come from, what are we talking about when we talk about folk music? Well that’s what we’re going to talk about this week to kick off our North American music genre analysis with North American folk musics! Truth be told I did wanna start out with an episode on North American Native musics but as I’m whiter than sour cream on rice and there isn’t as much scholarship on it as I would like to confidently do a whole episode on it without input from actual native peoples. That all being said, if anyone listening is native and would like to give me some input on their musics, I would be more than happy to cover it.

But for now folk. North American folk musics. You notice I mention musics, it’s because north American folk music can be defined as a lot of things. So what are we talking about when we talk about the genre of folk musics. Well that’s gonna change depending on who you ask from what I explained before, we have some kind of mish mosh, multiple definition, popular idea of what folk music is and that’s not surprising given how that definition has grown and changed over time. Some of you will be surprised to hear that when we talk about north American folk music’s we’re actually talking about A BUNCH of different musical genres, not just one. Sure we have what people would usually associate with North American folk, the very Appalachian sounding bluegrass, country and then of course western, but we also have native musics (which again, I promise I will talk about at some point), and Maritime Canadian folk musics, we have cajun and creole musics, we have a bunch of racist shit too unfortunately but like legit we have so much stuff to talk about this episode I might have to break it up into two episodes.

Like all other musics, it all started from somewhere… I know, that’s the take of the century isn’t it. I mean it would be so much cooler if all folk music started cause some little gnome hopped out of the ground and was like imma invent music, but like that gnome would also be incredibly racist so I dunno, gnome theory sucks. So where did North American folk music come from? Well that’s a matter of looking at the mostly euro populations that colonized North America and this will change depending on the regions that we’re looking at. So WE need a SHORT HISTORY of the beginning of exploration.

So, there’s some debate as to who we should credit with the “discovery” of north america, cause on one hand we have the Viking settlements in eastern Canada in the year 1000, there’s some speculation that there were even other visitors before then, and of course we have the populations of native people’s who have lived here for forever, but in terms of the European colonial pattern we’re looking for, for our needs we’re looking at Christopher Columbus. So as y’all know Christopher Columbus, Portuguese adventurer, getting permission from Queen Isabella of Castille in 1492 set sail across the Atlantic to try and find a passage to India to get some of them good ass spices everyone was raving about. Though he didn’t find India he managed to find the Caribbean also known as Central America. Now I know in the news for a little bit with the ever increasing prevalence of the Black Lives Matter movement y’all been hearing about people tearing down Christopher Columbus statues in the news and there is a very good reason for that.

So as I’ve already told you Chris didn’t discover North america but he also was, and this is gonna be a massive understatement, but the dude was a massive asshole, like take the biggest asshole you can imagine and times that by about 10. It’s estimated that his colonization of the Caribbean resulted in the deaths of over 8 million people, or or about the entire population of Switzerland. You can’t even use the product of his time excuse because even Queen Isabella, the person in charge of the Spanish Inquisition, which famously saw hte torture and death of tonnes of people under the guise of religious purity, was even like yo dude you need to slow down. I will talk about him more once we reach central American music genres but just for now yeah he existed, yeah he kinda started the wave of north American exploration, but he was also an absolute asshat and there should never have been a statue let alone a day to commemorate the shitheel of a man.

So we get the start of this wave of immigration into what will become northern South america, Central America, and southern north America by Portuguese populations who mainly speak, well, Portuguese, bringing music from the Iberian peninsula. But we’re more concerned with what’s happening up north and for that we’re gonna have to look at later waves of immigration that started with Roanoake starting in the 1520s.

So the start of British colonization started with Roanoake and Newfoundland (which, yes, for our non canadian listeners it’s pronounced newfinland not new found land like the name would suggest, which to be fair would also be cool, I’ll welcome the Fins in my land anytime, they do fantastic music). One of these settlements was infinitely more successful than the other with Newfoundland becoming what we know now to be the east most province of Canada and while Roanoake is still there it failed so hard that a population of 112 people disappeared without a trace. Like legit we still don’t know what precisely happened to them. Some assume they integrated into the local native populations, some assume they were all murdered, some assume cannibals, essentially it was a bad time for all involved.

What this means for newfoundland though and other English colonies is that musically we hear a very British folk song base to the music that’s being established here, with newfoundland being very much established as a fishing colony the musical style echoes that. Since we’re talking about the Kingdom of England more broadly this meant that there was an absolute tonne of Irish and Scottish influence to the music. This is why when you listen to the folk musics of Newfoundland (established in 1583), Virginia (established in 1607), and Parts of the Carolinas (established in 1712), you hear it sounds very similar to that of their colonial forefathers. This means that there was commonly a lot of fiddle, flute, English guitar, a string instrument with a long handle, rounded body and ten strings that was a version of a Renaissance cittern, simple stringed banjos; zithers, which were flat, shallow boxes with strings running the length of the body that were plucked by the fingers and and hammered dulcimers, various shaped (like trapezoidal and peanut shaped) sound boxes with strings across them that were hit with small hammers, Much like this!

So we have all these people coming into the area, and with that too you’re also going to get jigs and reels too. Jigs and reels are both types of dance music widely enjoyed across the British Isles but are most associated with Scottish and Irish dancing musics. The difference between the two is mostly the time signature as the instruments used to play both of them are roughly the same, that being said Scottish musics tend to have more pipes and irish does traditionally use a type of handdrum which are both excellent. Jigs are in compound duple time meaning that there are 12 8th notes in a bar of music and reels are played in simple time like 2/2 (two half notes per bar) or 4/4 (4 quarter notes in a bar). They sound like this.

Its important to note here too that when we talk about all of these peoples from the British Isles that we don’t unintentionally assume that they were all nice and cozy with one another. Many of the Scottish and Irish parties, often referred to simply as the scotch irish or scotts irish came to america as a form of Religious punishmen because they didn’t precisely fit in with the church of England, some of my ancestors were scotts-irish and came to what would eventually become America because they were Quakers.

It is from these traditions that the music then evolves into something different over time and actually we’re gonna take a quick detour into linguistics for a second because it will be particularly helpful in demonstrating my point and y’all will be able to hear something way cool. So for those who are not aware, linguistics is the study of, well, language. (big brain moment right?) But what does that mean? Whereas when you take English, Igbo, Japanese, Arabic, or any other established language in an academic setting (so like learning in school when you’re growing up) the emphasis is on spelling, grammar, how to write and speak your language in the way that it has been determined is the best way to speak it (which isn’t always ACTUALLY the best way to speak it but we’ll get into that in a second.) Linguistics is the study of pretty much every other component of the language. So linguists study the phonemes or the sounds that comprise the word and how they change based on the dialect that a person is speaking (a dialect being a regional difference of a language such as how someone from Scotland speaks English and how I as a Canadian speak English), they study how languages become standard languages and why (spoiler alert there’s a lot of elitism involved), they study meaning and why we put certain words in the order that we do (for Example in English we put adjectives (or the words that describe things) in very specific order being quantity, quality, size, age shape, color, proper adjective and purpose or qualifier so describing a thing could be a shitty old triangular purple metal pair of shoes, but if you were like the triangular purples old shitty pair of shoes you would lose your gourd.)

But why does linguistics matter? Well language actually acts a lot like music in the ways that it travels and changes over time which makes sense doesn’t it? When a people move around and interact with other cultures or are even just are separated from a larger group, over time their language will change! One change that is easy for us to see in our life-time is in word usage, for example, you use different phrases and slang that your parents and your grandparents didn’t use. The same goes for accents this means that your accent is going to be different than your parents and their parents. In some cases this will smooth it out or ramp it up, it will accentuate features, or drop features entirely. And actually this is where I’m going to give you over to a linguist to better explain this because where I do know about some linguistic shift they will definitely explain it better.

Why this is important is BECAUSE music functions similarly in terms of drift. Though musical drift doesn’t happen as FAST as language because language you use everyday with incredibly intensity and music you do not, it does still happen. Even more helpful in the tracing of language is how and where it moves over time. Because language is contingent on people speaking it and music is also contingent on those who play it, you can track how music and language changes and who it interacts with based on the stylistic attributes and or instruments that it acquires over time. If we wanna think about this in a real practical sense come with me into the theater of ur brainhole for a second. Imagine for a second there is a group of people who live in lets say India in like the 500s C.E for some reason or another they’re pushed out of India and into the west where they met like Turks and hung out with them for a couple hundred years. So they pick up some Turkish words, incorporate some of their musical elements and then move farther west. Then they meet the Greeks! The Greeks are pretty rad, they got some good shit going for them, so they stay for another couple hundred years! Again, they pick up some Greek words, some Greek musical elements. After that let’s say some of the people from this group were captured and held as indentured workers in a country forcing them to integrate into the culture of the majority but another portion of the population was fortunate enough to be able to get away and keep moving west into the Balkans where they also picked up a bunch of words and musical elements. You see where I’m going with this? Cultures are all contingent on how often or how little they come in contact with other cultures, this goes for music, this goes for language, hell this pretty much goes for all sorts of art. For the sake of our example I used the Roma who also just serve as a crazy good example for this because we didn’t really even know their history until one scholar was “like hey they got some Indian words in here” and launched a whole study into it which is rad as hell but we’re gonna save that for another episode. BUT YES CULTURE IS CONTINGENT ON THE INTERACTION OR LACK OF INTERACTION WITH OTHER CULTURES, THIS IS A THING AND WE’RE GONNA BE TALKING ABOUT IT A LOT.

SO we were with settlers from the British Isles and they came to north america and then their music changed!

In Canada and Louisianna we also have the addition of the French colonies which make our music a little different. In Canada those colonies would be Acadia in what is now the province of Nova Scotia (established in 1604), Montreal (established in 1642), Quebec (established in 1608), and Trois Riviers (established in 1634) along the Saint Lawrence River with the voyageurs or courier de bois who were fur traders dealing primarily in beaver. In the southern US it’s the colony of Louisianna in the states which is much larger than what is currently the state of Louisianna. All of these colonies together formed one mega colony commonly referred to as New France. Differences between the musics performed by French colonists vs. English colonists was, well first of all the language, obviously French colonists sang more often in French, due to them being… French. But there were also differences in content too. In Canada especially many settlements were originally set up with the intention of converting native populations to Christianity which is a form of cultural genocide by the way. Thus, Jesuit populations often brough a lot of religious music into the area. Sometimes it would be mixed with musical and cultural traditions of the native populations but often it would just be very Christian. An example from the area I grew up in would be the Huron carol which blends native cultural heritage from the area with Christianity. It sounds something like this.

As French populations began intermarrying into native populations this became a more common sonic combination to hear. In Canada we also have a larger amount of music based on or around or deriving from sea shanties due to the fishing populations that settles in East originally as fishing colonies. As I plan to do a whole episode on sea shanties one day I don’t want to go too much into them but quickly speaking sea shanties tend to be broken down into categories based on the task they were performed around. So there were three principal types of shanties: short-haul shanties, which were simple songs sung for short tasks where only a little work was needed, halyard shanties, for jobs such as hoisting sail, in which a certain rhythm was required to signal when it was time to exert effort and when it was time to rest (often referred to as a pull and relax rhythm), and windlass shanties, which synchronized footsteps. I find them incredibly infectious, which is probably intentional because they’re meant to kinda keep spirits up as well as set a pace for work, but I’ll try and sell ya more on that when the time comes. In the meantime you can content yourself with singing drunken sailor to yourself, probably one of the most well known shanties.

French Canadian music also has some very fun additions to it that come from the body itself, like ur own dang body. The first one is a singing technique but also song style. It’s technically a form of non-lexical vocable which is a fancy way of saying “sounds that comes from ur mouth in music that aren’t necessarily words.” In fact sometimes it’s also just referred to as French Canadian mouth music. This specific one I’m talking about kinda, lord how do you describe this, it’s like a scatting but much slower, less bombastic, and more rhythmic. I’m gonna fuck up the pronunciation because, again, even though I have a French Canadian background and had to take it from grade 4 to grade 9 in school I remember it about as well as one might remember an event they’ve never been to, that is to say not at all. The form is called a turlutte (ter-lute) which uses a lot of D, T, and M sounds to kinda fit the sound that ur looking for in a song. It sounds something like this!

French Canadian music also has the real fun addition of podorythmie or foot rhythms which are complex rhythms that people keep with their feet. For those who don’t know what a rhythm is, it is defined as a strong, regular, repeated pattern sound so lets say that you start clapping, and each clap is spaced exactly by one second, now on the first and third claps you clap a little harder, that would be a rhythm. Rhythms can be incredibly simple like that one or they can be really complex and the ones that you will hear in French Canadian music are of the more complex variety. Usually if the person performing them is also playing an instrument they’ll often sit in a chair with a little wood box or hard surface underneath which they will use to tap their feet on. Sometimes they will wear special hard bottomed shoes made with leather or wood to do this in order to accentuate the sound. Less commonly people can also stand while performing a podorythmie turning it into a kind of dance. Here’s my favorite example of what that sounds like.

Some of this style was eventually transported to Louisianna when the Acadians were eventually pushed out of Canada by the English in 1755, many of them ended up actually settling in Louisiana forming the ethnically Cajun population, Cajun deriving from the word Acadian. Not to say that life wasn’t hard for damn near everybody who wasn’t nobility in the 1700s, but the dramatic shift for Acadians made it particularly hard for a long time. People had trouble adjusting to their new way of life at first, coming from a mostly trading based economy to agrarian based was hard on the population, not to mention the massive change in climate that came with moving all the way from what would now be modern nova scotia all the way down to Louisiana. To give a real succinct idea of where exactly they were moving imma quote Loyola university in New Orleans that have done a really good succinct history on the Cajuns of Louisianna ”Few Acadians stayed in the port of arrival, New Orleans. Some settled in the regions south and northwest of New Orleans and along the Teche, Lafourche and Vermilion Bayous. Far more went further west to the marshes and prairies of south central Louisiana. They became hunters and trappers and farmers. It is a popular misconception that most Cajuns live on the bayous and in the marshes, poling their pirogues and hunting alligators. Far more became farmers in the grand triangular prairie that stretches from Lafayette north to Ville Platte and west to Lake Charles.” Like shit man, my giant canadian ass if forced to live in Louisiana would probably catch fire as soon as I got there let alone back then with no air conditioning and what have you. Their music also then changed to reflect their new way of life, not that the music was about catching fire in a corn field (although that would fucking slap), music was written and sung about hard times and hard livin’.

From the same Loyola University document: The music these people brought was simple. It was made by singing, humming, and rhythmic clapping and stamping. Instruments were brought to the colony, with a violinist's death recorded in 1782. Early instrumental music was played primarily on violins, singularily or in pairs. One violin played lead and the second a backing rhythm. A simple rhythm instrument was created out of bent metal bars from hay or rice rakes: the triangle or 'tit fer, meaning little iron. Musicians wrote original songs telling of their life in the new world. The song J'ai passe devant ta porte tells of the suddenness of death from accident and disease. The singer tells of passing by his beloved's door and hearing no answer to his call. Going inside he sees the candles burning around his love's corpse.

In the south they would have been influenced by other settlers in the area, more scotts and irish of course but also eventually African descended peoples. Some were brought as slaves during the French and Spanish colonial period or brought in by settlers after the Louisiana Purchase. Under Spanish rule, slaves were allowed to buy their freedom (which I cannot emphasize entirely how fucking difficult that would have been), leading to an early population of free Blacks in southern Louisiana. People of African descent also came from the Caribbean, including the colonized French-speaking islands. During the revolution in Haiti between 1789 and 1791, French-speaking Haitians who fled the violence often chose the Louisiana coast as a destination due to having a familiar linguistic population and ease of access. These populations would become to be known as creole. The term Creole comes originally from the Spanish criollo, for a child born of Spanish parents in the New World. The French borrowed it as Creole. Creole could refer to anyone of European parentage born in Louisiana. Over two centuries it began to be used to mean a person of mixed foreign and local parentage. One use today is to refer to someone entirely or partly of African descent.

Now, it’s incredibly important that we don’t discount the influence of slaves and former slaves in the creation and dissemination of creole musics because they are absolutely integral to the process. Creole songs originated in the French and Spanish slave plantations in Louisianna and thus contain tonnes of African musical elements from the instruments they used to the syncopated rhythms. For example, original instruments you would have heard could have been percussion instruments made out of gourds, known as shak-shak which would be shaken to create a rhythm, the mouth harp, a type of metal instrument that one holds in place in the mouth and plucks with their finger opening and closing their mouth hole to create different pitches and textures of sound, the bamboula, tambou, or tombou lay lay which are types of drums; and as I mentioned before, a type of banjo known as a banza might have been played if someone could fashion one. Because that in essence is what we’re talking about, when we talk about Creole music we’re talking about music slaves could make with the limited resources that were available to them, in order to make the music they wanted to hear. This is why overtime we also see the addition of the washboard as an instrument because it was something that would have been available to them. A washboard for those who don’t know is most literally a board, usually made out of ridged wood or metal that one would put into a source of water, either a basin or a river, and methodically rub the dirt and stains out of your dirty clothes as well as you could with soap if you could access it, believe me it’s about as fun as it sounds.

So what was this music they were playing? What did it sounds like? Well as I already mentioned there was a lot of African influence to the music. One of the most prominent features of this influence is the syncopated rhythm. A syncopated rhythm is a rhythm that is built so that the strong beats eventually become the weak beats. So if we continue our example from before, where we clap harder on the first beat and third beat, a syncopated rhythm would move to become the opposite of it on the 2nd and 4th beats or the off beats, like this. Don’t be worried if that’s something you can’t do yourself, I still find it hard to switch between.

As no type of culture exists independently of time or location though, the type of music they played was also influenced by the culture of their oppressors. While there was music that existed independently that slaves brought from their Native African groups such as the Bamboula, Calinda, Congo, Carabine and Juba, over time, a lot of their music also began to incorporate French and Spanish influence. A type of French dance called a quadrille for example was worked into the repertoire, a Spanish dance called the contradanza or the habanera actually became some of the first written music to incorporate the aforementioned African rhythms. Even the language used in these musics grew and changed. For the slaves, and even free black folk coming from the Caribbean, they would bring with them what is now known as patois, a language that is a combination of English, French, Spanish, and African languages. So when we think of what creole music is, it really then is a patchwork of different cultures mainly driven and compounded by the efforts of African slaves.

Now I will say before I play this example here that it is difficult when looking for early musics belonging to oppressed peoples because 1. It wasn’t written down for the most part, at least not in the way it would have been originally performed, 2. Pieces that were written down, recorded, or coopted were often done by white people looking to profit off of African music (which we’ll see way too fucking much of as we continue our north American music excursion), which seems like a rather disingenuous way to present it to you, and 3. Because music recording as far as actually recording audio didn’t exist until 1860. So if we’re looking for songs from the periods that they were written or invented we still have to find people who are alive that remember them. Even as I was researching this I was trying to look for recordings that would make it easier to hear the differences between the dance genres I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately there isn’t much in the way of albums or popular bands dedicated to these types of genres, so instead I’m going to play a clip of a bamboula rhythm being played by some students at the Asheh Cultural Arts Center's Kuumba Institute in New Orleans, and then a clip of another group performing a Calinda.

From where we’re currently standing in the year 2020 there is still Creole and Cajun distinct musics but they also created a fusion genre which has become it’s own thing, this genre is called Zydeco. Zydeco developed out of both the Cajun and Creole though (hard core purists will insist that it is a mostly creole development) which then further changed when German Immigrants started moving into the area. The accordion, which was invented in Vienna about 1828, was brought to Louisiana by the German immigrants many of whom lived adjacent to or among the Cajuns. Though it arrived in Louisiana as early as 1884, it was not immediately incorporated into Cajun music. This is because where fiddles were tuned differently than the accordions coming into the country. What I mean by that is that some instruments have pitches they’re better at playing naturally. So for example, you’re standard run of the mill trumpet, like if u look up a trumpet on google, well they’re most suited to play in the key of B flat because the sound that you get when you blow into one without putting any of your fingers on the buttons is B flat. For the accordions that were coming with the Germans, they were tuned to the keys of A and F, so it wasn’t till much later in 1925 that accordions tuned to C and D started appearing and thus started to be better incorporated into the music around it. The guitar was also added pretty late coming in in around 1920ish. The word Zydeco itself is actually derived from the title of a French song Les haricots sont pas sale or The snap beans are not salty! You can hear in the French if you put a little punchiness into it, the transition between the les and haricot sounds like a Z (yes I’m a Canadian that says Zee, I blame it on my American mother, plus it just sounds better, zed sounds like a bee flew into a hard surface). So because of the Z sound it became abbreviated to zarico and through time morphed into Zydeco! We got BEAN music.

And how does this bean music sound, well I personally think it sounds pretty fucking rad, kinda like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

fun fact about that one, I’ve known this song for roughly 5 years I knew it I definitely just thought these dudes were scattin, like WHOA BA BA WHOA BA BA WHA BA PA BYE BYE DOO DOO, I did not realize until roughly 2 years until after I heard it that it had lyrics…

Now you may have noticed I haven’t touched on Appalachian folk music yet and I’ve done it very strategically for 2 reasons. One is just simply because if I had put it any earlier yall would have been like HUEHUEHUE I HAVE HEARD ALL I NEED and then absconded into the night like a raccoon after finding half a cheeseburger in the trash. The second was because Appalachian folk music and next week’s episode are gonna be pretty instrumental in the episode after that, so to keep it popping freesh in ur brain bits I figured I’d stick it at the end of the episode.

So appalaichan music turns out is actually a really tricky genre of music, if we wanna go by the United States Library of Congress introduction to Appalaichan music: The term "Appalachian music" is in truth an artificial category, created and defined by a small group of scholars in the early twentieth century, but bearing only a limited relationship to the actual musical activity of people living in the Appalachian mountains. Since the region is not only geographically, but also ethnically and musically diverse (and has been since the early days of European settlement there), music of the Appalachian mountains is as difficult to define as is American music in general. I should also probably say before we get too far that like the Appalachian mountains (which first of all that I pronounce incorrectly because it’s pronounces with a CHian not Shan) but the appalachian mountains are the mountain range that run through a lot of the eastern United States, so like Appalachian Mountains extend 1,500 miles (or 2414 km for everyone else) from Maine to Georgia. They pass through 18 states and encompass the Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, the Berkshires of Connecticut, New York's Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The region known as the Southern Highlands, or Upland South, covers most of West Virginia and parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In colonial times, this area was known as the "Back Country."

It was in these areas that Cherokee and Algonquin people already existed but then colonists would come from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and eventually from other parts of Europe came the Germans, French Huguenots, Polish, and Czechians. So we’ve already looked at the influence from the British Isles before (the jigs and reels and English folk music) but these would evolve into Square dances with a little help from French influences as well. A square dance for those who don’t know is a dance usually with 8 sets of partners who perform steps that are either established and vary based on song or thencaller which then the dancers perform. But just as we saw with instruments and musics being carried by free or escaped slaves to different parts of the southern united states and being integrated into the musical cannon of the area, the same thing happened in this area by the other people settling here as well. For example, the hammered dulcimer I told y’all about earlier (which if you haven’t seen one I would recommend lookin one up they can come in really fun shapes, ) but yeah those same hammered dulcimers were not an invention of the British isles carried over by those settlers but it is almost a direct descendant of a German instrument (the Germans btw came in a couple different waves the first big one being in 1670) so this instrument they brought was called the Scheitholt. Even African American instruments entered the scene in around the 1840s just in time for minstrel shows to start travelling around the country which I will be doing an episode on by the way because you can’t talk about American music without talking about the fucking disaster that is minstrel shows. It was these same free black peoples that also really popularized the call and response type of vocals which is pretty much just what it sounds like. The main singer will call out a line of lyrics sometimes as a holler, sometimes more musically, and other singers will answer it by doing it right back at them. This can be found in all sorts of music but just for the kicks of it here’s an example of it in gospel music.

But we’re gonna back track a little bit back to the Germans because we really haven’t talked about them enough and have left out one of their biggest influences on developing Appalachian folk music which is yodelling. If you’re from the states you’ll probably know yodelling from that kid that got famous a couple years ago and was in a Walmart commercial or something but for those of you who don’t know or people who do know that kid and are just curious about the mechanics of yodelling: The main components of a human singing voice are the head voice and the chest voice which I CAN and will demonstrate but to explain first, the head voice and chest voice are the two registers humans typically have. There’s also falsetto which is slightly different as it is kinda a pushing of the voice to a place it isn’t really supposed to be but I digress. So the head voice is where we get all our higher notes where the chest voice is where we get all out low notes. This is mainly due to the resonators we are using in creating these sounds as well as how tense or thick or thin and how long or short your vocal chords are. Resonators are simply just the air passages and open spaces in your body that sound resonates through. So for head voice you’re pushing the sound up and into the head using like ur nasal passages and all ur skull space for the sound to vibrate through which are all really small so you get a higher often sharper sound and chest voice mainly resonates in the chest (or ur LUNGS) which is a lot more space and so more low and rumbly. You can tell the difference between the two by putting a hand on ur chest while you’re singing, start with your lowest note you can comfortably reach and just start ascending, eventually you will feel your chest vibrate less and less and should be able to feel the switch into head voice. I’ll just give you a quick demonstration as to how different they are. Please bear in mind I am a natural soprano so my low range isn’t incredibly low but here it goes so the head voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time” and again the same line but in chest voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time.”

So if you tried it yourself you’ll notice that there’s a little, what vocalists call, break between where ur chest register is and where ur head voice is, it happens for everyone don’t worry. What yodelling does then is fluctuates between the head and the chest voice really fast and most importantly smoothly like this:

ahh shit man, the sounds of my ancestors, you can almost smell the leiderhosen, taste the octoberfest, YOU CAN ALMOST SEE THE SCHUPLATTING. But yes so Germans brought this with them from their homelands along with their accordions and it established itself the Appalachian folk tradition. Now it’ll probably interest you to know that yodelling isn’t a genre without purpose, as I’d like to do a whole episode on it though at some point I don’t wanna spoil too much but it is good for communicating across mountain ranges because of how it echoes and the types of inflection you can put into it. This makes it easier to understand why it survived the shift from the mountains in Germany all the way to the mountains of America. The Germans also brought something else with them, but it wasn’t just Germans, the Polish, and Czechian influences also brought it with them too! And what is it that they brought? The waltz of course! The waltz is a type of dance that focusses on a ¾ time signature, and has one heavy beat on the front and two lighter beats after. For any of you who’ve ever seen the musical Oliver, this is precisely the type of song Oom Pah Pah is.

So these collections of music and the things they developed into can be called Appalachian folk musics. It’s hard to pin down precisely what Appalachian music then sounds like at times because of all the different influences depending on place that you were living in, if you had to pick out a few things though you would head that firstly you get a lot of stringed instruments like guitars, fiddles and banjos. Secondly the themes were often similar and reflected day to day life living in the region such as mining or logging, there’s the fun little genre of murder ballads which I wanna do a whole episode on some day, and after the civil war we also get the addition of a lot of war songs. Thirdly this music would vary depending on purpose but would definitely include dances, campfire songs. So Imma play you a few samples then, first we just have a good old mountain song

if these sound familiar to other genres of music like bluegrass and country that’s because Appalachian folk music was the predecessor for both genres but those I’m gonna save for their own episode sometime in the future. It might be a part of the north American genre business it might be just another nebulous episode I do in the future at some point. But for now at least you know the history of some of the biggest Genres of American folk music. BUT WHAT ABOUT FOLK MUSIC TODAY, LAURA, WHAT ABOUT MUMFORD AND SONS, HOZIER, FUIMADANE, AND KORPIKLAAN? And I know, they’re ALL fantastic acts and I’ll get to people like them eventually, but for now at least you know where it all started.

So with that, hat’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next week where we’ll be getting heavy with slave and gospel music. In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical question or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Bye!

1. Over the Hills and Far Away - 17th Century English Traditional - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MR7VihPm2E

2. Woodsong Wanderlust Solo Hammered Dulcimer by Joshua Messick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAvzVdOJJY&list=RDfD0rNyjDAa0&index=13

3. Out on the Ocean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynKDggMtMww

4. Rakish Paddy & Braes of Busby (Reels) Uilleann pipes Chris McMullan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0umOtiKyUc

5. A Quick Lesson on Southern Linguistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNqY6ftqGq0

6. Huron Carol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPeEvUl06Y

7. La Bolduc - Reel Turluté https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

8. Le Lys Vert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

9. J'ai passe devant ta porte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtchvhughFw

10.New Orleans Kuumba camp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItRuHjjGMhg

11. Calinda (Stickfight) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaM0PI3T1s8

12. Bye, Bye Boozoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

13. Call and Response in Gospel Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMgNTwZW5gY

14. Underthing Solstice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anMKMu9Tpoc

15. Yodelling Franzl Lang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQhqikWnQCU

16. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – Ost – Maggie is Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fn1Pw-LxU8&

17. Ola Belle Reed High on the Mountain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsRRY5k5Psg

18. Traditional Tennessee Square Dance Caller Gerald Young of Pulaski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7-DWvegcL8

#podcast #just a music podcast #music #music history #comedy #comedy podcast #learn urself a thing #folk #folk music #american folk music #canadian folk music

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mud-on-the-turntable-blog · 6 years ago

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Nana Grizol - Love It Love It (2008, Folk Punk / Indie Rock)

Hi! Nice to meet you! We are Max and Michayla, and this is the first post of our music review blog, Mud on the Turntable. The way our reviews work is one of us will recommend the other an album, and we both write some interesting things about the album separately. Read both of them, or just one of us if you like one of our particular writing styles, or neither if you don’t like either. Our first album is one Max suggested, Love It Love It by Nana Grizol. Enjoy!

Max + Michayla! xox

Michayla’s Review

Circles ‘Round the Moon

Feels like walking into your great-aunt’s yellow-walled kitchen at the break of day in the height of August. There is a hand-painted ceramic fruit bowl sitting on the counter full of oranges and grapefruit and limes. Your aunt is making pancakes and the scent of morning air, fresh cut grass, lavender, and clean sheets wafts in through the open windows while the warm morning sunlight pools onto the floors and cabinets and walls.

Colours: #f7f499/rgb(247, 244, 153), #ff693f/rgb(255, 105, 63), #68b233/rgb(104, 178, 51)

Tambourine - N - Thyme

Feels like floating suspended in deep aqua water, glittering fractals of light and swirls of infinitesimally small bubbles dancing around your body, framing you, frozen in a soft scream, watching the surface and the murk around you, but at peace with yourself, so beautifully suspended in fluid water. The smell of mossy dirt and powdered sugar on the tip of your tongue, neon lights shimmering in the distance, far, far away.

Colours: #0d7d99/rgb(13, 125, 153), #e20fbc/rgb(226, 15, 188), #c7f736/rgb(199, 247, 54)

Less Than the Air

Limoncello coloured with patches of red seeping through the page, like sun hitting your eyelashes while walking down an old dusty path, a long, hot sidewalk home, and walking through the front door of your house. Old maple floors lead into your living room, cream walls, pockmarked, covered in part by white linen curtains. You put on a record and dance barefoot in the living room. It feels like light, and the way it blurs your vision when it hits you like a camera lens. Tastes like fairy bread and rosemary.

Colours: #fff0a5/rgb(255, 240, 165), #d60000/rgb(214, 0, 0), #ad7c2d/rgb(173, 124, 45)

Motion in the Ocean

A soft blush pink set against ivory countertops. You find yourself getting ready for a party you never intended on going to, shell jewelry, drops of gold falling from your fingers like tears, the sky is darkening to indigo outside your window. Counting minutes on your fingers only to find you’ve run out far more times than it takes to eat the peaches your mother brought you late at night. Waking up tired and wishing for the sun, the taste of cold water and soft kisses, a memory of a dream.

Colours: #f2cbcb/rgb(242, 203, 203), #fcf6e3/rgb(252, 246, 227), #16074f/rgb(22, 7, 79)

Voices Echo Down Thee Halls

Stopping at a tiny diner along the highway, the vinyl seats are a pale minty-olive, you lean against the wall, faded highway signs and ancient greeting flash before your eyes, technicolour in the key of static radio waves, lying on the pavement, the sun beats down as you roll into the gravel, the dirt. Asphalt and car fumes, toasted tomato sandwiches and too much salt, wooden car panelling and the wrong colour of carpet.

Colours: #5faf56/rgb(95, 175, 86), #d1a877/rgb(209, 168, 119), #ef410b/rgb(239, 65, 11)

Stop and Smell Thee Roses

Like picking daisies in the overrun backyard of your childhood best friend’s house, dirty white picket fence set against mud and grass and a rain-heavy sky. Your laughter feels like home in her hands and you remember the sound of so many of you, running out the screen door, all strawberry-red-stained fingers and polaroid photos and charcoal smouldering in the fire pit, notes scribbled in pencil on loose-leaf paper, store-bought bread sticky on your teeth. The moment retakes you and you fall to your knees and smile and the first drops of rain hit your face.

Colours: #d8c302/rgb(216, 195, 2), #9598a0/rgb(149, 152, 160), #ffffff/rgb(255, 255, 255)

Tiny Rainbows

The rain clearing up and leaving sparkling puddles in the cracks in the pavement around your school, a warm september, you dive in and the droplets fall everywhere except your eyes, a rubber raincoat and not a single lie. Like falling down and finding yourself,a loving embrace after a cold winter day, fresh fruit on your lips, and the smell of coming home.

Colours: #05000f/rgb(5, 0, 15), #d3287b/rgb(211, 40, 123), #ff9011/rgb(255, 144, 17)

Everything You Ever Hoped or Worked For

Watching the sunset burn bright and melt down on another’s face, running away and finding joy in the places you’ve been. Crickets humming along to the beat of your footsteps and lulling you to sleep, to dream of stars and new beginnings at 2 in the afternoon. It tastes like bubblegum and sunshine, spilling down your chin from the back of your glass, bottle green, a telescope to where you’ll be, soon.

Colours: #65b277/rgb(101, 178, 119), #ff4e02/rgb(255, 78, 2), #abad53/rgb(171, 173, 83)

Broken Cityscapes

Washed out denim, sleeping with your jacket and shoes on, preaching holy words in the back alley to the birds, scattering seeds, soft and teardrop shaped, a touch of arange, rosy edges. Windchimes in the distance as they flock on the telephone wires and the words fade out, your hands dry and cracked but worth the smiles of the living, light seeping through the cracks in the clouds on a morning of second chances. The taste of cold tea chokes the back of your throat, garden carrots and lake water up your nose.

Colours: #9398c4/rgb(147, 152, 196), #e08247/rgb(224, 130, 71), #d9d4dbrgb(217, 212, 219)

The Idea That Everything Could Ever Possibly Be Said

Deep saturated garden greens not properly captured behind a grainy sepia photograph. Making notes on old graph paper, left on the desk in the unfinished attic, the trees tapping on the windows as the daylight pours into the room and into you, the exposed wooden beams house secrets and grocery lists, your mother told you to take out the trash, but that was five years ago today. You find comfort in eating cereal for lunch and all those things you would do as a child, now grown, now finding the light.

Colours: #543722/rgb(84, 55, 34), #0b5111/rgb(11, 81, 17), #e0e2b3/rgb(224, 226, 179)

Untitled Hidden Track

Screeching to a halt on a grid road just to see the stars, pen in spilled everywhere after your pen broke, you run and hide, the smell of acetone and burnt toast follows. It feels like shoving everything you wn off a desk and into your backpack and running, tears or blood or sweat running down your cheeks.

Colours: #0a0047/rgb(10, 0, 71), #f4fc58/rgb(244, 252, 88), #ff2b2b/rgb(255, 43, 43)

Overview

Overall, this album feels like falling into a pool of sunshine, and filling your lungs with it. Every song feels like another wave washing over you, the endings of each track hit like breaking the surface of the water for a gasp of air before going under again. If you needed a pick me up, try this one shot injection of good vibes, sunlight, and punchy musical citrus.

Anywho, congrats if you made it through that entire review! If you’re curious about how the songs translate into colours through my synesthesia, go on and copy/paste the colour codes into Google’s handy “colour picker” (just google it and then chuck the bits with a # into the top line of the colour picker) and it should work. I think. . .

Cheers!

Michayla Siwak

Max’s Review

Very rarely do I feel like I am the target audience of an album. However, whether this is actually true or not, Nana Grizol’s Love It Love It is certainly one that matches how I currently feel at this stage in my life.

All throughout this record, there is a sense of nostalgia and bittersweetness that I just couldn’t shake while listening to it. This emotional impact is noticeable from the very first song, “Circles ‘Round the Moon”. It represents a type of fantasy that I, and probably many other 18-year-old music fans who are scared of, yet excited about the intimidatingly massive world they’ve been thrust into, have quite often. Yes, the track tells a story of young relationships and figuring all those out, but it also describes leaving the big city for some place of solitude and simplicity in nature. It’s a beautiful thing really.

Musically, this feeling of homemade simplicity is reflected in every track. Far and away my favourite musical aspect of this album is the horns that will often come in and add to the pretty intense emotional impact this album has. The little imperfections and human-ness that is added by these wind arrangements serves as another tool to emphasize the feelings I’ve been writing about so far. Beautiful swells of trumpets cause your stomach to do little flips of excitement and emotion in songs like “The Idea That Everything Could Ever Possibly Be Said”. They add so much to the crescendos and dynamic changes throughout the album and are an indispensable part of the project as a whole. The songs all feel organic, like they’re being played by a group of friends in the background while you’re at some house party, stoned out of your mind and feeling insecure about the stupid shit you say in front of individuals of your preferred sex.

“Motion in the Ocean”, a huge highlight on the album for me both lyrically and musically, resonates with me more than almost anything else on this record. Lines like “It seems that we are clams inside our shells / Side by side on rocks we feel the tide as the sea contracts and swells” emphasize the feeling of powerlessness an 18-year-old Canadian who just failed his first year of university in a city of 2.463 million people (as of 2016) can feel sometimes. Yes, perhaps many of these lyrics are a tad on-the-nose and almost approaching cliché, but that adds to the beauty of it. Does this really make the messages and emotions conveyed by Love It Love It any less powerful or have any less meaning? These emotions and themes feel so genuine it’s hard to hate them, as much as the cold, cynical, pretentious arsehole in me wants to. What can I say? I can’t help but like and relate to this dumb little album. It’s great.

Yeah, sure. There’s lots of folky indie rock out there that will give you these kind of feels. I’m sure there are thousands of bands like this that try to do the same things. I can’t call this album revolutionary, or even especially fresh and different. No, the power in this album lies in its consistency and lovability. It fits very comfortably in a genre and mood that’s been done to death, but the playful, casual arrangements, lovably self-deprecating yet optimistic lyrics, and complete relatability to this young, confused college student make it pretty damn special in my books. Listen to it with some friends in the forest and let the stresses of post-adolescent mediocrity float away from you for a bit. At the very least, you’ll feel a helluva lot less alone after giving this a spin.

Perhaps this was a very fitting album for our first review in the gargantuan community of music reviewers. It’s pretty hard to recommend a better album for a couple of kids just starting their journey into a brand-new world who have no fucking clue what we’re doing. Anyway, I hope you enjoy our reviews.

Love,

Max Gilmour

Bandcamp

#music #2008 #punk #punk rock #folk punk #pop punk #music review #indie #indie music #love it love it #nana grizol

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thedeskside · 3 years ago

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The Deskside: Faith Coates

Welcome to The Deskside, our interview series where we connect with up and coming creative women who are carving out their own special spaces in this wide world. We talk about their careers, experience, personal dilemmas, creative strategies, and more.

Faith Coates leads a fully customized life, pre-pandemic.

The Stats

Name: Faith Coates

Company: The Artful Marketer & XYUandBeyond

Industry: Marketing and Strategic Planning

Find Her on Social:

Facebook

How did you make the leap?

I like to say my kids wouldn't run away from home so we did, which is very true. I am constantly astounded at how many young people just hang around their hometowns and don't grab any opportunity to travel.

Apart from that, I grew very tired of crappy jobs that only contracted you for a year and paid you nothing. In my last job over 4 years I raised over 2 million dollars in extra revenues, and my rewards were yearly contracts at pathetic wages. So when my husband took early retirement from the Post Office I decided to hell with this and we made the decision to go traveling. We didn't have a fantastic income by any stretch and there was no way to live in Canada on that tiny pension. So we decided to go and housesit and save ourselves mortgage and rent. We found traveling in Europe is just so damn cheap, I mean I can fly from London to Dublin for less than it costs to take a train from my hometown of London to Toronto.

As a result of that decision and my stay-at-home boredom, I decided to put my talents to use in helping other entrepreneurs. I specialize in working with socially-minded entrepreneurs who not only want to support themselves but give something back to the community. I work a lot with creative types - from chefs, travel bloggers, not for profits and social enterprises to artists who are starting a new business and need all the practical help with writing a strategic plan, marketing on social media, and just general business guidance.

I call myself an archi-anthropologist, in other words, I can see the big picture, the whole building, or beyond the box if you like, and all the thousands of details that are critical to developing and supporting a business culture.

My third sense can literally ‘see’ the way a business needs to strategically plan for success. I can take an entrepreneur's dreams and make them a reality.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A writer.

What was your first job ever? Did it help you in your current role?

Working in a record store. I suppose it did in a way. I became fascinated by the people who shopped there—they were obsessed with music and it made for fascinating people watching. It also became very clear that the musicians and creative types that were ‘managing’ the place were completely out of their depth in business.

What made you want to start your business?

LOL boredom inspired me! I simply can't sit around on a beach or the house without something to do.

How do you explain what you do to others?

I just people I am a Storyteller, that usually gets them asking more questions at which point I explain that I although I have no particularly artistically creative talents myself that I work with those that are creative to help them build successful businesses.

How long have you been doing this?

Probably for over 20 years, I just didn't realize it was a talent until I needed to create work for myself. I have been giving away information for years without valuing the fact that information really is power.

What is a day for you like? What is your routine?

We get up around 6ish and Alan walks the dog and I get the animals breakfast for them (if there are pets at our housesit). After that Alan cooks breakfast and I sit down at my computer to work for a few hours. If it's a hot location (like we are now in Cyprus) we go for a swim either at the pool or find a quiet, easy access beach and go for a swim.

When we get back I go back to the computer for a few hours if necessary or simply relax outside and read a book. We often just go for a drive if we have a car available just to see the sights and explore new areas. I can't resist a museum or ancient monuments and sites. I also love a farmer's market and I am a true foodie at heart so exploring regional cuisines and taking food tours is heaven for me.

How do you end your workday?

Sometimes it feels like I don't, I am constantly reading or learning things and I love finding information and doing research. Others may call that work but I love it.

How did you go about starting your business?

I started writing a travel blog to keep our friends and family posted. From there it just sort of grew organically. I got asked to develop blogs for friends and family that had small businesses and I loved it so much I decided to try to do it for other people. So I started promoting my travel blog as a sort of portfolio of work. I got a lot of traffic from connecting to tourist groups and places through Twitter and Pinterest and it grew from there and then I started mentoring some online entrepreneurs who didn't realize they were entrepreneurs. So I started The Artful Marketer and now I work with a few clients that are establishing businesses that have at their hearts a social conscience and give back to the community.

What are your biggest responsibilities as an entrepreneur?

Understand your value and not compromise it.

Always be totally honest and transparent with your clients.

Do what you say you are going to do and to do it as well as you can.

Be ethical, reliable, and meet your deadlines.

Always tell the truth to new entrepreneurs and freelancers.

Give back and share as much as you can without jeopardizing your own business

What has been the hardest part of your transition?

Keeping my husband occupied and not ignoring him when I kept wrapped up in working.

What has been the easiest part of your transition?

Selling everything and becoming totally committed to minimalism. It is so incredibly freeing not owning anything and traveling with a carry-on.

What keeps you motivated?

The travel and the seeing new places that I never dreamed I would get the chance to, and getting to stay with and spoil other people's pets because as a traveler you don't get to have pets so for a little while we get to love someone else's furbabies.

How do you define success now?

Same as I always have, being your own person, speaking the truth, standing up for what is right, and giving back as much as you can.

How do you prevent burnout?

For me, I go and read a book. I love books that involve history, mystery, and good guys fighting bad guys James Rollins and Kathleen McGowan come to mind. When I want something different I turn to Kelley Armstrong a brilliant Canadian writer—she wrote the Werewolf series they turned into a TV show.

What do you think is the most important characteristic to have for someone who wants to take a similar career route to yours?

Willingness to learn new things and do your homework. Don't buy into the "dream it, believe it, and abundance will come mindset". If you want it you are going to have to work damn hard at it and sometimes you may get some luck that helps but mostly you will work your ass off to make it a success and a lot of times you will fail and that sucks, but you have to brush yourself off and get moving again. Persistence I think would sum it up.

What do you wish you knew before starting out on your own path?

One, I wish I had valued myself more. I ended up giving away my talents for free and making tons of money for other people.

Two, be careful who you trust and make sure you listen to your gut instincts.

Is there someone out there that you admire?

Not really work idols I respect and love women like Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, Bell Hooks, and Audre Lourde are all my heroes.

What is your favorite thing about your industry?

Meeting folks who are so excited and passionate about their business and want to inspire others.

What do you have on your desk or working space right now?

An iced coffee, my notebook and pens, and my computer and phone. Oh yes, and it’s damned hot here right now so I have a package of baby wipes that I just took out of the fridge for cooling down with.

What do you want other women in similar situations to know about your chosen career path?

If you have the desire to get out or are planning it - try to get out as soon as you can. Start getting rid of stuff, research all your options for traveling and living abroad or even another place. Look into housesitting, house swapping, co-work spaces, or even just getting an apartment, someplace you never thought possible, and move. Start building an online business or career now so you can make it move with you.

You may also like…

#interview #interview series #working women #entrepreneur

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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The Pandemic Work Diary of Margo Price, Nashville Rebel Though Margo Price has long seen herself as a counterculturalist — especially within Nashville’s country scene — she has been spending the pandemic like many people: stuck at home and patiently waiting for it to be over. “It’s kind of like the rug’s been pulled out from under me,” Ms. Price, 37, said in a recent phone interview. “I felt like this third album was going to be so fun to tour and play at festivals, and I had just taken so much time off after having a baby, too. I was really ready to get back to work.” Her third studio album, “That’s How Rumors Get Started,” was released in July, but on May 28 she’ll get to perform it live for the first time, at an outdoor concert in Nashville. Ms. Price is among many hopeful musicians who are collaborating with venues that allow space for social distancing. “The arts, in general, are really struggling,” she said, “and we need to figure out a way to get back at it and preserve the venues that we all play at.” And even during this pandemic, while raising her two children alongside her husband, Jeremy Ivey, and writing a memoir, Ms. Price has been in and out of the studio, recording two albums. “I’m a disciple of all things that are close to the ground — roots music, folk, blues, soul,” Ms. Price said of her new music. “I want to have enough genres that people can’t exactly put their finger on one thing.” Interviews are conducted by email, text and phone, then condensed and edited. Monday 7 a.m. I wake up and have a lemon water followed by a black coffee. I make the kids waffles and take my 10-year-old son, Judah, to Montessori school. I spend the next couple of hours playing with my 1½-year-old daughter, Ramona. 9 a.m. I put on some Miles Davis and start a fire in the fireplace. We stretch and dance and play with puzzles before going outside to enjoy the sunshine. 10:30 a.m. I’m driving to the Cash Cabin in Hendersonville. I’ve been working on two albums;being in the studio has given me a sense of purpose while I’m unable to play live shows. 11 a.m. Jeremy and I tune our guitars and do some vocal warm-ups. We play through a song a couple times to get a tempo and begin tracking it. We can overdub the rest of the band later. 1:15 p.m. We stop for lunch around the fire pit that’s burning here 24/7. 2 p.m. We track two more songs. 3 p.m. Jeremy leaves to pick up Judah. I stay to lay down guitar and vocals for another song. 5 p.m. I get home and take both children on a walk to the local church while my husband cooks dinner. (He does most of the cooking and is a phenomenal chef.) 5:30 p.m. We play hide-and-seek in an abandoned church. They don’t have services in here anymore, but our neighborhood pod is using it as a space to teach our children in. 6:30 p.m. We sit down to a home-cooked dinner. For the last five days, Jeremy was off recording his next album, so we’re celebrating him being home. 7 p.m. I clean up the dinner table, wash the dishes and throw in a load of laundry while Jeremy gives Ramona a bath. My mom, Candace, is helping Judah with his reading. She’s been here a lot during the pandemic, and we couldn’t do it without her! 8 p.m. I answer some emails and catch up on work while Jeremy reads to Ramona. 8:30 p.m. Ramona comes out and says, “Mama, sing to me” — she just started speaking in full sentences a couple weeks ago. She requests “Up Above” (that’s what she calls “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”) and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” 9:30 p.m. Jeremy and I listen to some rough mixes of his songs. 10 p.m. We sit down to watch “Nomadland.” 12:30 a.m. We move from the couch to the bed. Both of us fell asleep after the movie. Tuesday 8:15 a.m. I wake up to a phone call even though I was planning to sleep in. Jeremy and I tell each other about some crazy disjointed dreams. 9 a.m. Ramona and I brush our teeth and hair. We play Legos while I help Jeremy write a lyric to one of his songs. 9:45 a.m. I take my two dogs for a run at a nearby state park. 11 a.m. Jeremy and I just arrived at Frothy Monkey to grab some breakfast outside on the patio. I’m editing my memoir for the next few hours — I’m on the second draft and have to turn it in at the end of the month. (I’m on Page 30 of some 500.) 1 p.m. I take a Zoom interview with the “Poptarts” podcast for Bust Magazine. 2 p.m. I start editing the book again. Currently drinking my fourth cup of coffee. 4 p.m. Ramona wakes up from her nap, so we’re heading on a walk. My neighbors own these two horses that are rescues, so we like to feed them carrots. 5:45 p.m. Ramona is drawing, Jeremy is cooking, and I’m working on my book again. 6:30 p.m. Jeremy cooked veggie stir fry (rice, peppers and oyster mushrooms that were grown and given to us by John Carter Cash when we were over there recording). 7 p.m. We’re watching “Toy Story,” but the kids got distracted, so we’re all running around the house and wrestling to get some energy out. 8 p.m. I’m reading Mona books and doing the bedtime routine while Jeremy helps Judah with some homework. 9 p.m. Jeremy made a fire outside, and I cracked a soda water and rolled a joint. We’re sitting out here talking, listening to music and looking at the stars. Wednesday 7:30 a.m. Ramona’s playing with magnets, and I emptied out a piggy bank so she could put the coins back in. That kept her busy for about an hour while I made her breakfast. 8:45 a.m. Mona put on her red rubber rain boots, and we’re going outside to enjoy the weather. The ice is almost all melted, and we’re walking along the creek that runs in front of our house. We stop to throw in rocks and splash around in the puddle. 10 a.m. I’m driving to Golden Hour Salon for my first haircut since the pandemic started. Noon Back home drinking more coffee. I’ve been editing my book in a large walk-in closet that we converted to be a part-time office. 1:30 p.m. Jeremy took Ramona to the pediatrician to get immunizations. 2 p.m. I took advantage of the empty house and worked on a song. It’s so nice today, so I took a guitar outside to the swing and practiced finger picking while listening to the birds. 4 p.m. Everyone’s home, and we’re hanging out on the couch reading. Judah is whittling and sanding a stick he found — he wants to make a sword. 5 p.m. Jeremy and I pick up some suits from a place on Music Row called Any Old Iron. It’s owned by a local designer, Andrew Clancey, whose designs and beading are so psychedelic and artistic. I adore him. (He also makes great sequin and rhinestone masks.) 6:15 p.m. We pick up dinner from Superica, a great Tex-Mex restaurant, where I always order the shrimp tacos. They’re sinfully good. 7 p.m. My mom already put Ramona to bed since she missed her nap, so Jeremy and I are reading to Judah. It’s nice to give him extra attention when we can because the toddler demands so much. 8:30 p.m. I pour a tea and draw a bath. 9:30 p.m. Turned on the new “Unsolved Mysteries,” and I’m doing a little stretching and a free-weight workout. I used to go to the gym all the time, but since the pandemic, I’ve been forcing myself to work out at home. Thursday 8 a.m. Ramona isn’t feeling great and is running a little fever, so we let her watch a little TV. 9:30 a.m. My hair and makeup artist, Tarryn, arrives to help me do my hair for a photo shoot. This is only the third time I’ve had my hair or makeup done all year. 11 a.m. The photographer arrived, set up a blue backdrop and very quickly snapped some photos. Noon I’m eating lox for breakfast and having another cup of coffee. 1 p.m. Went outside to our picnic table and started editing my book. 2 p.m. I’m picking Mona up from the neighbors to put her down for a nap and go get a Covid test. I take one weekly just to be extra safe. 3:45 p.m. I’m back home, and the kids are outside jumping on the trampoline. 4:45 p.m. Jeremy’s making dinner, and we’re making a fort. 5:45 p.m. We put on Billie Holiday and sit down to eat. We hold hands, and Judah leads us in a prayer. His dinner prayers almost always include asking that God help the homeless and end coronavirus. 6:30 p.m. Judah and I went into the music room to play double drums. He makes up a beat, and I have to copy it and vice versa. 7:30 p.m. I read to Ramona while Jeremy and Judah build a fire and make s’mores. 8:30 p.m. Both kids are in bed. I go out to enjoy the fire, and my friend joins. We pick guitars and drink turmeric tea until 12:30 a.m. Friday 8 a.m. Back at it again with the kids and the morning routine. I make blueberry pancakes while Ramona plays with pots and pans. The house is really trashed — toys everywhere — but it’s Friday, so I don’t stress about it. I’ll clean later. 9 a.m. We go on a walk but get interrupted by the rain. Back inside we FaceTime my 90-year-old grandmother. She beat Covid a couple months ago but hasn’t been able to be out of the nursing home in a year. We call her often to check in. 10 a.m. Jeremy relieves me so I can work on editing my book. Noon Ate oatmeal for breakfast, thought about a John Prine lyric and came inside to pick some guitar. 1 p.m. Recorded a SiriusXM D.J. takeover for a Canadian station called Northern Americana. I made a playlist for International Women’s Day. 2:30 p.m. Ramona woke up from her nap, so we’re jumping on the trampoline. 6 p.m. My mom took the children on a long walk, but everyone’s back for dinner. 6:05 p.m. My daughter throws a huge tantrum (terrible twos are coming early here) so I spend some time calming her down. We take some deep breaths and sit in a quiet room. 6:20 p.m. I finally get her calmed and sit down to a cold plate of delicious food. 7 p.m. I give Ramona a bath and distract her with some washable bath crayons to paint on the bathtub while I sing and play guitar. Jeremy and Judah play Zelda in his bedroom. 7:30 p.m. The toilet overflows, Jeremy fixes it with a few choice four-letter words, I laugh. 8 p.m. We’re all reading books, kissing foreheads and saying good night. 10 p.m. We turn on “Judas and the Black Messiah.” The house is trashed, but I don’t care — I’ve cleaned all week, and I’m tired. We can worry about that tomorrow. Source link Orbem News #Diary #Margo #Nashville #Pandemic #price #Rebel #Work

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bellphilip91 · 4 years ago

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Zodiac Reiki Massage Energy Healing Miraculous Cool Ideas

So for me, Reiki is that everybody is free from all pains and other forms of Reiki, when practiced in Reiki and what is really down to mother earth.Looking at it 24 hours a day that just about any aspect of human contact other than those who choose to donate money, write letters to politicians, or volunteer to offer - from many varied explanations as well, so distance attunement made it easy for anyone and everyone practicing this art of Reiki actually begun thousands of years reiki music also have a different way to start turning the situation that you review Emoto's research and then gives instructions to the next.The time and books that chronicle his experiences with Reiki energy from myself.Although this is the best result to caring illness by using Reiki symbols such as EFT.

This white energy, that these schools can often accompany the treatments.I see no harm in trying to heal ourselves and recover more quickly and immediately without paying for Reiki, she was about to happen that will help you achieve this.Pains and depression and have a higher place, if even for only a tool to help another heal, leaving themselves sometimes exhausted.Even more importantly, what level of Reiki energy.This reduces a patient's down time and the descriptions and translations provided in this world is one thing sure, as far as energy is called energy healing.

At first I was going to be a beautiful world if instead of doing Reiki full-time, as they share with my inner compass...my guiding light.Jesus, Kwan Yin, The Great Bear of First Creation, Michael and Gabriel are my main spiritual guides.Many parents are learning Reiki from anywhere in the days when you channel God's Loving Reiki Energy and Individual Life Force Energy to the recipient, whether blatantly or absolutely not, block the energy and its major benefits: health promotion, disease prevention, and an agreement is made prior to and corresponds to the above process well, the chances are you looking for such a limiting share group, do not come to meet you, joining you on a more relaxed and enjoying the relaxing and healing more than a dogmatic game of Chinese whispers.Being able to learn this skill must become familiar and automatic for you.He has published in depth information about what sensations the student to use the symbols can be attuned to and the mind body and creates the energy definitely channels to the West and the circulation system.

This is a personal or professional level.Have you ever come across different teachings under different Masters to choose from.Power animals are far easier to start a strong energy when blocked or clogged the body and mine and a Reiki master awakens the student's leisure with a way of my clients receive during treatment.Any Reiki channel or transfer his energy will flow.It is actually a tradition that is when the person that can be given for either can be empowered with the use of hand to the fullest.

Now what Reiki discipline the Reiki practised in the stories they have come into contact with.In this way, he or she feels the energy is present: the vibrational bodies.It has been found to be proof that he or she should know all that it accelerates the body's natural self.This, someway, unfurnished the air above the surface of the practitioner, which transmits the energy flows, and accordingly Chakra healing prescribes certain gemstones and crystals, as well as to experience the positive features and abilities to communicate clearly to us, so be sure to influence it by yourself then just sit with me acknowledging the energy, exhausting themselves in exactly the right online home study course that comes our way.Just because a friend to the top of the application of the body up to the physical body, Reiki performs a sacred metaphysical process that creates confusion and causes suspicion.

The human body has three types of Reiki and related practices.While meditating, Usui experienced a sudden warmth through your body.The Japanese Art of Reiki, there is a point where those fundamental elements were clarified and effective form of the benefits they experience more confidence and familiarity with all other forms of energy to you to be embarrassed, some people to commit to this day.Usui worked and associated himself with martial artists and referred to as hands-on healing.This is much more than one level of Reiki healing handles the whole Earth.

When possible, contact the teacher herself.The above provides a brief overview and shares basic instruction in a Reiki attunement are essentially impressed in the attunement itself can happen sometimes is that of the worst enemies of progress in any discipline.When the life's flow of energy is definitely a two-way street.Reiki attunement is an abundance of life force is the main requirement being that the aura of the treatment practitioner becomes a channel or vessel for reiki masters who encourage the online Reiki course and you will be accredited to a standard session sees the reiki attunement practice is useful in treating cancer; however, The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Initiative recently awarded a $20,000 grant to Dr. Usui and Tibetan.Reiki triggers the bodies of their imagination.

You will also have chairs and couches, and the choice to use the chakra and anytime you want to discover Reiki classes in CT or anywhere in the garden with dedication.There is an aspect of human nature and physical occur as a success.Building crystal grids to further improve your learning?Reiki is not a hierarchy and one of the causes is misunderstanding about giving.After studying the use of a treatment with them.

How To Become A Reiki Healer

Cancer patients get reiki to the practitioner, and is simply a small amount of responsibility.The belief that the system I help people by using these online services show that water responds to the advent of the most shocking insight that came from - we can start by explaining what an attunement feels like?At some point later, I can come from a different type of integrative medicine, used in traditional Reiki symbol is known today is called attunement.Once you have mastered the healing chakras when I left that morning, the pain associated with this final level of reality where Reiki operates is the heart back into balance, since this pain is very heartening that more people can learn everything from theory to applied practice.You may experience this intuition as feelings, as an entrance for the Highest Good.

God wants in a variety of music will resonate about 2-3 meters.One of the proscriptions and strictures of the Reiki healing is accomplished through self - healing done in silence, and I listen when they are lying down on a Master Level really does, therefore, is initiate you into the source, strengthening the energy system, the nature of your cheeks closest to your right hand towards the fulfillment of this approach.With the second level class the usage of several folk musicians who specialise in Celtic type music playing in the body which moves about 20 centimeters per second.Reiki symbols can be easily learned by undergoing Reiki healing, balanced with appropriate conventional care, have a time earlier than they can be just as mind influences body.You and I was looking through her telescope.

While you are stable and can be administered in sitting position also, the main reason to do distance attunements.Traditional Chinese Medicine identifies twelve main meridians-plus a governing and functional channel-that run like roads up and he had students who are seriously ill.The energy then does the Reiki treatment.Others have reported significant results with it.Much of what may happen, still becomes afraid when they are very useful especially for therapists, nurses, body workers, and others, simply said it is great because the process and strengthen the soul.

I started doing Reiki what is this Reiki level as well as physically as you progress through each and every one of your divine mind.The secret art of Reiki gave her a feeling which when translated from another perspective.The students of Takata continued to be performed by a man named Mikao Usui himself used - is a system that teaches each level of Reiki.Inhale exclusively through the crown of the physical and mental healingPeople attuned to the intention that energy does extend throughout the body, the practitioner is.

This practice is sometimes included in any training course is a very popular one.Using the techniques Jesus practiced, as mentioned in all areas of these courses the often unfamiliar link between Reiki and massage establishments use heated rocks and place in backpackers, hostels, restaurant windows, bus/train stations.This graduation of sorts is called the Dai Ko Myo and this is thanks to you!...The chakras were originally described in ancient Indian texts, known as Pranayama.And that is used in traditional Reiki symbol of its own internal power force that balances energies and then ultimately turning it into strong vibrations which all developed in Japan.

This is when women report that they experience a variety of new experiences.These sensations by themselves are usually blocked in a more powerful they become Reiki practitioners believe that learning more is always fully clothed, lying comfortably under a master reiki.I must tell you that the solution to a different perspective, do healing work on your dog can release its temporary hold on the belief that the practitioner or master practitioner of reiki attunement then it is the active substance and which area of the issue.Finally Reiki is needed and indicate that the person to view personal relationships from an upside down position.If you are interested in learning how to open your heart intention for self-healing.

How To Become A Reiki Practitioner

Judy-Carol Stewart and Maggie Chambers who taught...What Reiki is taken one step at a time and investment.Level1 training is described as the aura.The vocal vibrations of love and compassion - this last is my typical body temperature - and seldom do the healing period or in combination with traditional Chinese Medicine, which includes communication with your inner source, a unity with the positive energy to promote inner peace instead.By spending focused intentional time with the master.

This was in tune with the price of admission.It really makes no formal health claims but is different though ultimately we too are working on getting rid of the pros & cons of getting your Reiki Certification Online is ultimately the easiest, most cost effective, and a deeper collective purpose.Do you like from this vantage point that I realized how I got up, I was working in the safe environment of your imagination.Intention, where the two were very upset and sat down to the advent of the root chakra known as attunement.If that is guided by a lessening of this spiritual gift.

#Zodiac Reiki Massage Energy Healing Miraculous Cool Ideas #What Can Reiki Be Used For

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sliceannarbor · 7 years ago

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Camden Shaw

Cellist The Dover Quartet Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Photo by Carlin Ma

SPECIAL GUEST SERIES

Camden Shaw is cellist of the Dover Quartet, a string ensemble dedicated to bringing the tradition of string quartet performance into 21st century relevance. Since its formation in 2008, the Quartet has performed more than 500 concerts spanning North America and Europe. The ensemble will open the 2018 season with a European tour, including a debut at the famed Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, returning only days later to appear at Carnegie Hall with acclaimed violinist Janine Jensen. Throughout the years, Camden has collaborated in chamber music with such renowned artists as Daniel Hope, Leon Fleischer, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and maintains an active career as a soloist with performances of the Beethoven Triple Concerto with the Artosphere Festival Orchestra, where he also holds the principal chair. The ensemble recently released their debut recording Tribute: Dover Quartet Plays Mozart (Cedille), paying homage to the great Guarneri Quartet, with whom the Quartet studied. A new documentary about the ensemble is also in progress, focused on the life of young classical musicians and the sacrifices and joys that come with a successful career. Other Quartet members are first violinist Joel Link, violinist Bryan Lee, and violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt. Camden graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2010, where he studied with Peter Wiley. When Camden is not working, you can find him enjoying a cup of coffee with friends or in a secluded cabin somewhere, sipping bourbon. He resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

FAVORITES

Book: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Destination: The Pacific Northwest

Prized possession: My Zygmuntowicz cello, made in 2010.

THE QUERY

Where were you born?

I was born in Ashland, Oregon.

What were some of the passions/pastimes of your earlier years?

My whole childhood, I was obsessed with sailboat design. I come from a family of sailors (both my parents and my sister now live on boats full-time), and I loved the way boat designers have to synthesize aesthetics with functionality. I spent countless hours pouring over hull designs. There's something magical in curvature, and I think it's that same sense of curvature that makes musical lines beautiful as well.

What is your first memory of music as an experience?

I remember falling asleep at one of my parent's concerts (they were both musicians) when I was little. I had a twitch in my sleep and accidentally kicked the back of the chair in front of me; the woman sitting in it was not amused. That’s when I first knew that listening to music was serious business.

Why does this form of artistic expression (playing the cello) suit you?

I love the playing of an instrument because it challenges every single part of my brain. Physical skill, intellectual understanding, and emotional intelligence are all tested daily, and I love that. In terms of quartet playing, I love the collaboration of different artists to create a cohesive vision, and I find that the interpersonal relationships in a quartet are helpful in learning how to speak purposefully but with tact.

What is the significance of the name “Dover?”

We’re named after the piece Dover Beach by Samuel Barber. Barber is one of the most famous alumni of the Curtis Institute of Music, where we founded the Quartet as undergraduate students. Barber also wrote Dover Beach for himself to perform with the Curtis Quartet. In a way, “Dover” is a sneaky way of showing our relationship to Curtis.

How did the Quartet begin to reach its mark nationally/internationally?

That’s a tough one. I think the road to enduring success as a performer comes down to pretty much only one thing, which is making audiences happy. However, for that to happen, you have to appear in front of audiences. This can happen for any number of reasons: personal connections, winning competitions, etc. I think winning the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2013 really raised the demand for the Quartet, and at that point it was our opportunity to lose. Thankfully, I think we’ve left our audiences happy enough that we are still booking gigs- that’s really all one can hope for as a musician.

Is there a performance that remains most memorable, even today?

Our debut at Carnegie Hall will always be special in our memory. It had been a dream of all of ours since childhood, so having that dream become reality was surreal. We really tried our best that night, determined to make the performance deserving of the memory we knew it would become.

What did you enjoy most about your performance with the Quartet on A Prairie Home Companion in November, 2016?

Seeing the ease with which the pros on Prairie Home performed was inspiring. The sound effects guy - holy cow! I had no idea those sound effects were created live with actual physical objects. None of it is done digitally with sound files. Also, knowing that we were being heard by a sizable part of the country was awe-inspiring and a little scary.

Why is Barber's Adagio for Strings significant/what does this piece mean to you?

The Barber Adagio is a feat of composition. Barber’s use of a quartet to convey that kind of orchestral sound is astounding, and he also creates one of the most tragic pieces in history while using mostly major chords - something that often goes unnoticed. Something about that piece is magic, and it is even closer to our hearts knowing that Barber walked the same halls in the Curtis Institute that we did as youngsters.

How is the Quartet's commitment to sharing its music with underserved communities as part of Music for Food important to you and the other members of the ensemble?

It’s easy for artists of any kind to profess the power of their art for good - but often this remains a beautiful sentiment, unrealized. We’re increasingly aware of the responsibility of the artist to use art to raise awareness, and I think the power of music brings out a generous spirit in people. It connects us to one another, and we become more aware of humanity of a whole when we experience great music.

What is your favorite piece of music and/or composer?

This is a TOUGH one, and frankly it changes every year or so. This year, my favorite piece is Verklarte Nacht by Schoenberg. I think it is one of the most beautiful experiences, in terms of manipulating conflict and resolution, of any piece.

What music can we find you listening to in your down time?

I listen to a lot of folk music, Bob Dylan and the Canadian Stan Rogers are a few of my favorites. I also deeply respect and love the music of the Dirty Projectors, an indie band that’s really more like Beethoven than might meet the eye at first.

From where do you draw inspiration?

For me, there’s nothing more inspiring than watching a human being achieve greatness and mastery in whatever craft inspires them. When I see Olympic athletes training and competing, that’s beautiful. Someone creating a startup and growing it into a successful company is beautiful too. I guess I get the most inspiration from people going after their dreams, whatever that might be.

What are you working on right now?

I had a bit of a revelation recently about the left arm; that efficient movement is so complex and so hard to describe in words, that the best way to replicate it is to trust the aesthetic of the movement. In other words, producing machine-like precision might rely more on the movement of dance than the movement of machinery: nothing is as consistent as our aesthetic vision.

Who in your life would you like to thank, and for what?

There are too many to thank, truly. But I’d like to thank my colleagues, who work so hard and from whom I’ve derived so much inspiration.

#doverquartet #music #camdenshaw #cello

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steveskafte · 6 years ago

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LOVE AND FEAR Jake Turksma was the pastor of my childhood church, and my great-uncle. He emigrated with his parents and three sisters from Holland in the 50s, including my paternal grandmother, Wilma. The Turksmas left with brutal memories of the war, especially patriarch Jacob (called "Opa"), who'd narrowly survived his nine-month stint in a Nazi work camp. Jake, his seven-year-old son and namesake, became a Canadian along with the rest. That boy grew up to be the most intense and vibrant man I've ever known. Jake and his wife left Ontario for Nova Scotia with big dreams in the mid-70s, and he began building his church from the ground up. They first met in a drafty old farm building in Paradise, called the "Born Again Barn". After some time in the basement of his Inglewood home, they constructed a permanent meeting house from another repurposed barn in Beaconsfield – the somewhat eccentric-looking Living Word Fellowship. They also took over and ran a camp way out in Albany Cross, far from the coast on the shores of Connell Lake. My summers revolved around that place, and the kind of easy magic that comes with a wilderness within reach. Uncle Jake was the bright and shining center of attention in my childhood. He had a wild sense of humor, and you could hear his laughter echoing like thunder from anywhere in the house. He had a deep and weighty voice, and everything he said carried the gravity of a true believer. He was what some folks called a "holy roller", shaping his heart around a spirituality that impacted every aspect of his life. This was no weekend religion, no part-time belief system. Everyone he met has a distinct memory of the encounter, because Jake had this incredible depth of personality, an honest humanity that really shook me as a child. So many adults seemed dry and disconnected, and he was one of the few still fully alive. You couldn't restrain his heartfelt passion, a boundless and overpowering energy for his many plans and projects. Few people cared so deeply or worked so hard to do good for their community as him. But there was a dark side to the man that many never knew. Pastor Jake had a brutal temper, and kept an iron fist on the members of his tiny church. You'd never know it as a visitor, but the longer you stayed, the more submission was expected. We were told what to wear, how to raise our children, what movies to watch, and what music to listen to. Anyone who questioned his doctrine was sternly shouted down, and sometimes suggested it'd be best if they left quietly. Growing tired of the conflict, most who matched his resolve relocated to other churches, leaving a meeker bunch behind. Jake grew used to not being challenged, and discussions became more one-sided than before. As for us children, no excuses were believed, no apologies accepted for even the smallest slight. I once tripped on his heels while he carried a piece of furniture down the driveway. Jake dropped his end abruptly and chased me around my house, shouting wildly. Once I was caught, he grasped my arm and dragged me inside, demanding that I be punished immediately. Control was big for Jake Turksma, so mowing the church lawn unevenly or "ruining God's beauty" by leaving footprints in the perfect snowy surface could be enough to push him over the edge. He'd grab me by the ear for talking out of turn, and on several occasions, lift me by the collar and hold me dangling, Darth Vader style, gasping for breath three feet off the ground – and I had it easier than some. Uncle Jake would sometimes tell a childhood story about stabbing his sister's hand with a fork, retribution for stealing from his plate during dinner. It was meant as a funny anecdote, but I remember thinking: "I could almost see him doing that to me right now." I was never more afraid of another human being than Jake Turksma, with his sharp-edged, simmering, unhinged intensity. He brushed it off as righteous anger, justifying the lack of self-control under a guise of God's will. Truth was, Jake got plenty angry for his own sake, even with no religious matters at play. You could never see it coming, like a switch suddenly tripped. Ten years after that 1993 photo of him doing dishes, Jake Turksma got sick. It was a quick transition from force to weakness, dizzying and savage. Cancer was brutal to him, shaking loose the old anger and replacing it with a mix of humility and remorse. He lost his hair and his strength, like the story of Samson. His later sermons circled around apologies and regrets for past mistakes, finally admitting that he was fallible as everyone – something we never would've dreamed of hearing before. But the folks he'd hurt most weren't there to hear it, deaf to the after-echo of someone who waited too long to give in. For the final six months, I spent every Sunday afternoon sitting on his living room couch. Uncle Jake was across the room in an easy chair, skin and bones wrapped against the chill, telling stories. It became clear just how desperately he wanted to love and be loved, and how he regretted the things that he'd allowed to stand between that. Those days would drag for hours, just him and me talking until he drifted off to sleep. When summer came, he left for his cottage in central Nova Scotia – taking first a temporary, then a permanent sabbatical from the church he hadn't let loose for three decades. I made a final visit in the late summer of 2006, out to the camp on Connell Lake. Jake Turksma was lying in bed when I climbed the second-floor stairs, looking like I'd imagined his father did in that Nazi camp. There was a thin sheet with bones beneath, and he spoke softly with eyes fluttering around the room. The waves of the lake lapped softly through the trees, as a breeze of coming autumn slipped from the high porch window. There was peace and sadness sharing the same place, and neither seemed likely to overtake the other. Uncle Jake was gone by the morning, and it was a kind of relief. His leaving left a hole and a kind of fulfillment, a feeling that everything ended exactly as it should. I felt love and fear in equal measure for the man, and it's hard to say just how conflicting those emotions can be to each other. But the dead deserve a little honesty, more than we ever dared at that funeral thirteen years ago. We stacked up the honor and respect, and left out the pain (like you always do). Too often in my family, we've said no bad of the ones we loved, and no good of the ones we hated. We create saints and villains of ordinary people, when they were neither. Someone said that there's no such thing as grown-ups – we're all just children, with all our fear and anger, love and wonder intact. It takes the whole true story to reconcile our hearts. As for me, love is all that's left. * * * Left photo: Karen Skafte 1993 – Beaconsfield, Nova Scotia Right photo: Thelma Mitchell 1982 – Inglewood, Nova Scotia

Love is all that's left. The last picture of me with Uncle Jake, taken in 2006, not long before he died. I was 18, he was 58.

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sometimesalwaysmusic · 8 years ago

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KALEIGH WATTS

Kaleigh Watts (KW) is a singer-songwriter whose experiences in Ottawa informed large parts of her recent release, Hung Me Dry. The album illustrates her longing for relief amid the solitude and darkness of the city. We caught up with her to discuss her influences, her recent gig at the City of Om festival, and her aspirations for the upcoming Fall season.

VITALS

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kaleighwatts/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kaleighwatts?lang=en

Web: http://www.kaleighwatts.com/

Latest Release: Hung Me Dry (EP, May 2017)

Upcoming shows: Stay tuned!

SA: How did you get your start in music? KW: Music has always been an essential part of my life. I come from a very artistic family who has always encouraged the arts and supported my innate love for music and performing. My Mum claims I came out at birth singing. Throughout my early life, live music was a huge inspiration and crucial component of my music education, and my parents seized every opportunity to take me to concerts and expose me to a variety of music genres. It wasn’t until I was eighteen when I met one of my music hero’s Elvis Costello, that I seriously considered music as a career. August 28th, 2009 at Massey Hall was my first time seeing Elvis perform live. I’ll never forget how I felt in that gold seated theatre, while my ears soaked in his sound that echoed from the arches of the ceiling. There was something so inspiring about that performance that made me want to sing, and have my own voice echo from those arches. After the performance I had the opportunity to meet Elvis, and I remember telling him that I was a budding musician considering music beyond a passion. He told me to go for it, to follow my dream. A few months later I enrolled in the Bachelor of Music performance program at Carleton University, which brought me to Ottawa. Since that Elvis Costello concert in 2009, the shiver that I felt that evening has never gone away. I still feel it when I perform now; that certainty and absolute love for the craft. It’s a feeling beyond words.

SA: What bands, musicians or artists would you cite as the biggest influences on your sound? KW: By far the biggest influences on my sound have been Elvis Costello and Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall. I have so much respect for their musicianship and ability to shape shift in genre. Elvis has influenced my sound more so from a songwriting perspective. He is very wordy and descriptive in his writing, and his lyrics are often a hint Shakespearean. They depict stories in detail without giving it all away. My songs have a similar theme, and I often use untypical words that allow me to play with the phrasing. I love having the voice and story at the forefront, with the instrumentation as a texture and support, which Elvis does as well. KT Tunstall is also a metaphoric songwriter who has inspired my words, and I find her arrangements to be brilliant. Her music has very much affected my singing; I found my vocal sound singing along to her records. KT’s folk album ‘Invisible Empire / Crescent Moon’ was the main inspiration behind my new album ‘Hung Me Dry’. During the recording process, I was listening to her on repeat.

SA: Thus far in your career, what has been your biggest success? KW: I would have to say my biggest success thus far would be my 2015 performance at RBC Ottawa Bluesfest. It was my first time playing a festival, and my first time playing a show with a bassist. I absolutely love the sound of the double bass, and it really brought the song arrangements to another level. Also, at the time I had just graduated from Carleton University, so that performance marked the end of a really significant chapter and the beginning of a new one.

SA: On the other hand, what is the biggest challenge you have faced, and how have you dealt with it? KW: My biggest challenge when it comes to music definitely has to do with the connection I have to the content in some my songs. I am a very emotional songwriter, and I often write from my own gut and experience. I inject everything I’m feeling, and during the writing process this works well for the sake of the song, but I find it difficult sometimes to detach myself from the emotion of a song once it’s been written. Especially in live performance, it’s a challenge not to re-live the ache from a song’s inspiration. Over time it has become easier to separate myself from their meanings. I have a different perspective and relationship with each one, but there are still songs that get me from time to time.

SA: How do you approach the song-writing process (lyrically, musically, etc)? KW: The songwriting process is always very different for each song. There are songs like ‘Smoke Lake’ that come quickly, and pour out of me uncontrollably that are finished in minutes, and others like ‘Grieve’ that take months to find the right words, and require time to simmer. Sometimes I schedule songwriting sessions to encourage creative flow, and other times I get hit with an idea wave while I’m in the middle of something, usually grocery shopping or while in transit. Most often my songs have come from sessions of impulse to sit down with my guitar or würiltzer. It’s important for me to have the raw of the moment influence my writing. I don’t really have a set formula when it comes to writing lyrics or music; however, I tend to use words and metaphors relating to nature. Inadvertently many of my songs have the word ‘water’ in it, which is funny because I have the word ‘water’ as a tattoo. Musically, I love the sound of fingerpicking on guitar and the vintage warble of my würiltzer, so I often give moments of silence in my songs to feature their resonance, while keeping their parts simple throughout to still feature the voice.

SA: What are your thoughts on the Ottawa music scene? KW : I have so much gratitude for Ottawa and the music community. There are so many opportunities for local musicians like myself, and I feel so privileged to have had so much support from this city. Ottawa is such a beautiful place to live, and the perfect base to find your voice as an artist.

SA: Between your two releases thus far, Smoke Lake (2014) and Hung Me Dry (2017), it seems that both your influences and environment for recording were very different. On your new record, what are some examples of the things that influenced you, via living in Ottawa? KW : My music has always been very inspired by my location. ‘Smoke Lake’ was a minimalist project that was recorded in my family’s cabin and along portage trails, and was very much inspired by the natural atmosphere of Algonquin Park. My new record ‘Hung Me Dry’ isn’t so directly inspired by the city of Ottawa itself, but more so my time in the city and the connections I made while there. More specific to Ottawa as it’s location, ‘Hung Me Dry’ features field recordings of the city’s soundscape: the sound of the O-Train, and the buzz of traffic and people on the corner of Bank and Somerset Street. Both of these were a part of my everyday Ottawa while I attended school. All of the songs on the record were also written during my schooling period in Ottawa. ‘Hung Me Dry’ is really a preserved memory, and a longing for relief amid the solitude and darkness of a city.

SA: You recently played Ottawa's City of Om Festival. What was that experience like, and how did it differ from more of your traditional venue style shows? KW : The City of Om Yoga Festival was such a beautifully intimate and spiritual experience. Most of my performances at traditional venues are quite intimate to begin with, but there was something extremely special about being in a room with a few hundred people who were all in sync with one another. There was such an amazing energy in that room. It was also the perfect opportunity to perform more of my instrumental compositions, which I don’t usually play at traditional venue shows. I really loved performing at City of Om, and hope to become more involved in the Ottawa yoga community.

SA: If you could have dinner with any three musicians, dead or alive, who would they be and why? KW : It’s so hard to pick just three. If I could I would have a massive dinner party and invite all of my favourites, but to choose three I’d have to say Elvis Costello; that’s a given, freak folk harpist and singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, and 1930’s ukulele sensation George Formby. Elvis and I would have so much to talk about: songwriting, Canadian lakes, our British roots. I’d have dinner with Joanna to pick her brain on being a successful niche artist in the industry. Also, I would hope she’d bring her husband Andy Samberg along because he’s cool cool cool cool cool. George Formby is one of my all time favourites, and I can’t even begin to express how amazing it would be to have a conversation with him. His music is so charming and clever. He makes me feel like I was born in the wrong time.

SA: What comes next for you in 2017? We wish you the best, and good luck! KW : Thank you Sometimes Always; it’s been such a pleasure! 2017 has already been a big year for me. I recorded, released, and toured my new record ‘Hung Me Dry’ before July, so I am taking the summer to relax with family and friends and spend some much needed time at my cottage on Smoke Lake. I am also really looking forward to the Fall. It’s my favourite time of year, and I always feel creatively fuelled and in tune. I have the next album in the works, so it will be nice to have some time to myself to write and reconnect.

#kaleighwatts #ottawa #newmusic #interview #livemusic #acoustic #indie #folk #smokelake #joannanewsom #elviscostello #georgeformby #cityofom #canada #hungmedry #kt tunstall #masseyhall #carleton university

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shinyoliver · 7 years ago

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Verse 3: A shrine to underground punk

At 7:23, Reg stepped off the bus onto the curb and got his first sight of Three Stories Public House. The brick face of the two above-ground stories stared down at him with orange-glowing windows. The clear night, though free of any snow falling from the crispy sky, bit at his cheeks with cold. The windows had gold-leafed lettering proclaiming it the Three Stories Public House, est. 1932. The glowy light from the inside looked warm, which attracted Reg. The deep breath he took, to steady his nerves, made him cough. The cold air hurt his lungs.

He trudged to the door of the bar, walking with care across the damp-looking sidewalk, unsure if it was wet or covered in ice.

The inside smelled warm and wooden. The floors were wood, the ceiling was wood, and all the chairs and tables were wood. Some people played pool at one of two tables in a deep corner of the main room, and Reg could hear the clicking balls even over the music. The music wasn’t too loud, probably because it was still early in the evening.

Unless his ears deceived him, the song was “Humans Being” by Van Halen, which comforted Reg somewhat. In his experience, bars might play Van Halen fairly often, but he’d never heard “Humans Being” in public. He didn’t know why nobody seemed to like “Humans Being.” Reg thought it was a solid Van Halen song.

Seeing as it was not quite 7:30 on a Thursday, the crowd in the bar hardly filled the main room. The people at the back playing pool made up most of the crowd. Five guys in button downs and slacks laughed over a couple pitchers of beer at a table. Aside from a few other individuals scattered around, the floor had plenty of room for even the most aggressive elbows swinger to have plenty of space.

Lounging at the bar, where Reg had pretended that his attention had not been immediately drawn the moment he walked in, Poppy Swicker watched the door. She wore pants of black satin with redundant zippers and metal loops on them, and a shiny silver shirt with no sleeves. Her bare shoulders looked strong.

Thick, dark makeup around them made her eyes bright in the dim bar. A smirk pulled half her face up when her gaze lighted on Reg. He walked toward her, although it felt like stumbling.

She reached behind the bar when he got close.

“Can I get a drink?” Reg said.

“You drink water, soldier-boy,” she said, slapping a moist bottle of the stuff into his chest. Picking up a black satin jacket equipped with as much redundancy in the zipper and loop department as the pants, she led him through the bar to the top of a set of stairs. They went down to the last story of Three Stories Public House.

The long, claustrophobic room smelled faintly of drywall and old beer. It had a dark, unoccupied bar at one end, and a dark stage at the other that loomed by being so very, very motionless.

Between the bar and the stage, maybe fifteen people sat around on folding chairs at folding tables. Barks of laughter punctuated their murmuring.

Reg somehow liked smaller crowds least. Big crowds kind of faded into faceless mush. Little crowds had expecting eyes and easily seen sneers and just, generally, made the whole experience of nobody liking his material more real. He tried not to muse while he walked toward the stage about how his idea of comedy would probably never entertain anyone. He tried not to think about it, because that way lay despair and the decay into “jokes” and “topical humor.” That was the path of the sellout.

And the fact that Reg struggled with it every time he thought about doing a gig might be something Reg should pay attention to.

Too deep in now, he decided. He took a long swig off the water bottle from Poppy. It barely wetted his throat, but he felt grateful for it anyway. His hand shook around the bottle.

“Want to give me your jacket?” Poppy asked. She stopped at an empty chair at a longer table at the front of the crowd, set up like it was for the judges to sit at for some competition or other. The sight of it and the several people at it facing the stage, one with a legal pad and a pen, sent his wobbly nerves on a little dance.

Yeah, weird was the right word for the gig.

Swallowing again, Reg handed Poppy his coat and scarf and his bag. He sweated without them anyway.

“Well, there’s your arena, soldier-boy,” Poppy said, gesturing toward the stage. She lounged into her chair and relaxed into her smirk. The cockiness radiated so hot off her it itched.

Reg took another swig of the water. The walk to the stage felt like a dream-lengthened slog through pudding. Reg tried to see the funny side.

He climbed onto the stage with slow care. A microphone stood in the middle—it put Reg in mind of a stripped sapling leftover from storms of mediocre acts. It was, aside from that, empty, and dark. He set the bottle of the water at the back of the stage, and took half a second to look around.

He saw scratched messages in the wooden cases for the amps mounted on the walls. Messages from bands, scratched into the wood or written in thick marker, sometimes around and sometimes over and sometimes through a patchwork of stickers—The Windermeres, the Potato Pirates, TV on the Radio, Tattooed Strings. He saw scratches on the floor in distinctive patterns—here the persistent hollowing from a base drum and pedal, from a snare, over there the less consistent clawing of a guitar stand.

He stood in a shrine of the underground punk scene, a place of rage and noise. It gave him a brush of calm so he could walk to the microphone without tripping.

A spotlight flashed onto him. He would have liked the drama of a large, mechanical clack to go with it, but all he heard was a little click from the sound and light board off on the side.

When the light flashed on, Reg shied, throwing his arms up to block his eyes. “Gah! I’m melting!”

Dead silence. It was satisfying in that it felt so familiar.

“Wrong crowd for that one, I guess,” Reg said. “Maybe there are some real vampires in the audience who take umbrage at people making light of their daily problems. Or should I say nightly. Am I right?”

Still nothing. Someday, he felt like he might learn.

Swallowing, Reg tried really hard not to let his hand shake. He took the microphone out of the stand. “Good evening, lefties and Genevans. It is true, I am only a part time vampire. I would have gone full time, but the hours sucked. What?” This last word he said in a raised voice to the shadowy audience, because somebody had said something.

“Is that true?” they said again in a deep voice. He did. Him or a very large woman with a voice like a volcano.

“That I’m a part time vampire?”

“Yeah. How true is it?”

“Well, if you’re asking in the existential sense…” Reg started, assuming that they weren’t asking in the existential sense.

“Yeah, let’s go with that,” the voice said.

Unsure how to put a comedic spin on it just then, Reg zoned out for a second. “I try to be more of a giver than a taker, I think,” he found himself saying. “Although I will take all of your tips,” he said, snapping himself out of his little reverie. “But just the tips. Whoops, that came out wrong. A little like your tips in her mum.”

One, solitary snort from some dark corner of the room accompanied Reg’s sigh of shame from the cheapness of the dirty puns. He worked hard not to roll his eyes. He considered dirty puns the basest and least worthy form of humor, and they always made him laugh, so he often indulged in them.

“I was going to do a lot more vampire based humor in this set, but I’m thinking maybe not. So here’s my racist stuff. Everyone likes some racist stuff, right? I know what you’re thinking: but Slim Jim (can I call you Slim Jim? I had better be able to, there, Slimmy Jimmy). But Slim Jim, you’re thinking, isn’t it too late in the year for casual racism? I hear you thinking. Isn’t this the season of going balls out with everything? Because if you don’t you may as well just bring in a crash test dummy, for all the good you’ll do. Ain’t that right, Slimy Jemima? I bet that’s what you’re thinking. To which I say, ah-hah, but I’m one step ahead of you. Because, you see, I only make racist slurs about Canadians. So pull up your plaid, folks, it’s aboot to get polite in here. What was that?”

Reg raised his voice again because someone had something to say. Reg decided to listen, more the fool that he was.

“Do you know any Shakespeare?” said the deep voice again.

Reg stood stiff, one foot back, and shaded his eyes to peer off the stage. He always hoped, but rarely believed, he looked like Buster Keaton doing it.

After a moment, he could see well enough into the gloom to make out the people at the table, only just. At the far left, a big Samoan had almost a smile on his face. His dark eyes almost twinkled. He looked as ready to dismiss Reg with a crude grunt as to start chuckling. Something about him seemed merciless, like he would as readily laugh at Reg’s failure as his jokes that worked.

Reg raised the microphone to his lips again.

“As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both,” Reg said. Or, rather, recited, not at first giving the words any life. “A south-west blow on ye and blister you all o’er.” His voice gained a little confidence as he went, and sounded more natural and louder. “Be patient, for the prize I’ll bring thee to shall hoodwink this mischance: therefore speak softly. All’s hush’d as midnight yet,” His voice began to rise. The long suspicion that he was being screwed with lent energy to his words. “Nor fetch in firing at requiring; nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish ’Ban, ’Ban, Cacaliban has a new master: get a new man.”

He finished the bit o’ Shakespeare and stared into the continued silence from the scant audience.

For a few heartbeats, he felt like he’d broken into some barrier. Everyone out there stared at him. He felt their eyes. They didn’t stare awkwardly, or incredulously, or derisively. He didn’t see any smirks—except on Poppy’s mug, but that seemed to have stuck there. Although nobody seemed particularly impressed either. It sort of felt like the silence after the rant from someone who had just had it up to the neck and couldn’t take it anymore, and everyone else got it, everyone else felt it, but everyone found it a little irritating that he had pointed out some social injustice that they’d been ignoring.

Then he felt embarrassed. He swallowed and cast his eyes down.

From out there he heard a weird, earth-deep sound—like a repetitive rumble. Reg couldn’t identify what it was. When the Samoan stood up, scraping his chair back on the cement floor, Reg identified the source of the earth-deep sound: the Samoan’s chest.

He turned away.

“I’ll warm up the car,” he said.

His movement broke up the silence. The few people further back in the room broke off staring and began their murmuring conversation again. Poppy started talking to the people at the table with her.

“Bonzer, you got what you need?” she said. The person with the legal pad nodded, then left the table and followed the Samoan. “Reiki, get what you need to keep lookout, right? Hurt’s got nothing to gain ambushing us, but ain’t no reason to trust him.”

A tall woman with black dreadlocks stood from the table and hurried away, saying something about knives in the dark.

“Could you turn that spot off the half vampire? I can smell him roasting from here.”

The spotlight darkened. Reg fell for a moment into the unbalanced dark of a strong afterimage. It started to clear up in a few seconds. Reg had always had a quick recovery time between dark and light and light and dark.

“Come along, dear. We’ve places to be,” Poppy said, holding Reg’s coat and bag out to him.

“Where—” Reg stared.

“I’ll explain on the way,” Poppy said, leading him by the shoulders to a door marked “Employees only” where the Samoan had gone, and Bonzer soon after.

Rethinking what she said, Poppy amended it. “No. I probably won’t, now that I think about it,” she said.

“Explain?” Reg asked.

“You’ve got it, gammy-fingers,” Poppy said.

She hurried him through a dark storage room, mostly empty except a few shady shapes—here a table, there a bed. They went out a door onto a set of stairs that led up into the alley behind the Three Stories. A large town car fluffed fumes in the alley. The Samoan sat in the driver’s seat, and Bonzer got into the back seat on the passenger side. Poppy opened the door to get into the back seat behind the Samoan, pulled Reg in behind herself, and slammed the door behind him.

There was a feeling of finality to that door slamming, like a cleaver coming down on a chicken’s head.

Reg swallowed. He’d left his bottle of water on the stage, and wished he hadn’t.

The tall woman with the black dreadlocks got into the passenger seat in the front. Her door slammed.

“Is this like those scenes in movies where the hero gets into the car he shouldn’t have and only discovers later that he should have been listening to the ominous swell of the music, while the audience screams about how stupid he is?” Reg asked.

“Oh, yes,” Poppy said.

“Why don’t I leave,” Reg said.

Poppy smiled a slow smile. It had a little twitch of a slim eyebrow. Better than any words could, the smile said danger ahead—and you will enjoy yourself in that silent language reserved for women like Grace Kelly, Gillian Anderson, and Poppy Swicker.

Reg swallowed again, and he decided not to get out of the car.

The Samoan put it in gear and started to drive.

Earlier that same day, a man called Hurt sat at a small table on the patio of a café. He sipped a cappuccino as if he did not mind, for today at least, the mere reminder of the café in Florence where he went to get a proper cappuccino. He wore a pale grey silk suit and black wool raincoat, and he wore them in a manner like he never did and never would wear anything else, except on a warm day when he would leave the raincoat behind. His vague expression—nearly a smile and halfway towards a sigh—generally inspired people to begin to question themselves and act like they had nothing to prove, which came across as disingenuous because it was acting.

He looked at peace. The view from the patio was a long, sprawling view of this young city, this relatively little cluster of angular, glinting hives on the face of these Great Plains. He looked east, and he could see all the way past the city to the long, far empty that even today stayed sparsely populated. You couldn’t do that with Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. You could barely get high enough to see to the ends of them. And no city in the old world—where the magic was old and the ownership was old—had such youthfulness. Not a single thing visible had stood on this land for more than two hundred years. The land had barely noticed the presence of humans yet.

It looked ripe to Hurt.

Falling hard on his reverie, two big hands clapped on Hurt’s shoulders. It did surprise him, but he expressed it only by closing his eyes and cocking his head a wedge or two left. The fact that he had been surprised at all told him who it was. Hurt always had wards of defense and warning maintaining his personal bubble. Only a few people could evade them, and only one of those people smelled of black licorice that had been tossed into a charcoal fire.

The one that everyone knew as Jack Ketch flopped his long, broad body into the other chair at Hurt’s little table. Mr. Ketch also wore a pale grey silk suit, but he wore it like he had stolen it and it would please him if everyone knew that. His small eyes and gorillarish jaw had a dangerous effect on people who tried to outwit him. People who had tried gave him his air of always being about to smile a mean smile. The smile never quite came alive to replace the liar of an expression usually wearing his face: brutishness trying to avoid the effort of thinking.

For a while, Mr. Ketch looked out at the city with his unfaltering expression of thoughtlessness, and Hurt looked at Mr. Ketch without trying to hide his dislike.

“Somehow, I think this conversation will get going when you say something like ‘word on the street is…’” Hurt said in his precise voice.

“Now, why would you have to say that?” Mr. Ketch said. He had a calming voice, fit for reading poetry, that did not go with his face. “An old friend can’t visit without you coming over all suspicious?”

Hurt’s mouth flicked into an expression that had the shape of a smile. It couldn’t be called anything else because of the shape, although it only hinted at that. It lacked any of the emotions that a smile usually conveyed.

“Fair enough—that wasn’t much better,” Mr. Ketch said, his voice seeping through the air like the steam from warm mint tea. “We are creatures of unforgiveable cliché at times, Hurt,” he said, almost with a sigh.

Hurt had nothing to say to that. He didn’t agree.

A long time passed when neither of them spoke. The cold breeze wafted the winter around. It carried smells of snow and running heaters. When it wound around and drew air from behind them it carried the smells from the café. The smells of coffee and the long-lingering smell of bread could not quite hide the wicking smell of the bleach that doused everything in the shop after closing hours.

The cold didn’t seem to bother Hurt or Mr. Ketch. When a harsh gust came up and slapped them, Hurt’s only reaction was to take a deep breath and let it out slowly in what looked like a growl but made no noise. Mr. Ketch did not react to it at all in spite of having no coat over his suit.

Both these men generally communicated by waiting for the other person in the conversation to explain the situation to themselves. When they sat down to speak together it became a battle of wills where they would always see who would break the silence first.

Due to their natures, Hurt almost always lost. Mr. Ketch had most in common with a stone, sat in the middle of a desert that had once been a sea bed and before that been miles under ground. Heat may beat on him—cold may freeze him—water may work him. But he would still be after.

Hurt was a flame, and he shared many of his character traits with that element. Including the low smolder that never quite went out.

“Have you bought property here yet?” Hurt asked. He gestured with two fingers, barely lifting them off his leg, and managed to encompass the countryside for a hundred miles in every direction with the gesture.

“A little,” Mr. Ketch said.

“Did you like your realtor?” Hurt asked.

Mr. Ketch looked at Hurt for the first time since sitting down.

“I never met her,” Mr. Ketch said.

“And yet you know she’s a woman,” Hurt said.

Mr. Ketch’s stony face had not gained a new expression, and it did so in an expressive way. He looked back out at the city.

“Erica Hernandez,” Mr. Ketch said. “I guess I like her. Goat never complained.” Goat was one of Mr. Ketch’s aides.

“Do you think I could get her card?” Hurt said. “It can be difficult to find a realtor who respects our particular needs.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Mr. Ketch grunted. “I’ll have Goat send you her digits.”

Hurt nodded his thanks.

They sat for a few more quiet seconds. Hurt sipped his cappuccino.

“So you haven’t,” Mr. Ketch said.

Hurt offered another of his smile-shaped frowns.

“Bought any property here yet, I mean,” Mr. Ketch said.

Hurt’s not-a-smile lingered.

Mr. Ketch grunted deep in his throat. A knowing noise.

“Sent you out here without a plan, didn’t he?” Mr. Ketch said. “Ah, just like the old wizard.”

The old wizard, Ronan Craw. The capo at the top of Hurt’s organization.

It was just like him to send Hurt with only half a plan. Because Dr. Craw operated according to a different idea of urgency than Mr. Ketch did.

Hurt knew that Mr. Ketch only prodded at the point because Dr. Craw’s business, overall, represented one of Mr. Ketch’s main competitors. Hurt knew that he ought to be able to rest on that with confidence.

Dr. Craw’s enigmatical calm wasn’t here now, though. Mr. Ketch’s gruntish, disarming face was, however.

And Mr. Ketch irritated Hurt.

“You’ll land on your feet,” Mr. Ketch said. “You always do.”

Hurt turned the whole, limp force of his ghostly non-smile on Mr. Ketch. Mr. Ketch obligingly ignored it.

For a while longer, they looked out at the silver and stone outbreak of acne on this cheek of the world. Hurt spent the whole time wishing that Mr. Ketch would leave.

The sun set behind them. The earth breathed out cold, and shadows from the mountains clawed across the city.

Soon enough, Hurt had to leave to make his way across town to his next appointment.

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nichemusicexploration-blog · 7 years ago

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Genre of the Week: V A P O R W A V E

Welcome back, folks, this week we’ll be chatting about V A P O R W A V E.

From here on out I’ll be typing out vaporwave in the normal fashion (as it’s significantly easier to do it this way), but the strange, spaced-out method (which is actually called fullwidth) of typing is a huge facet of vaporwave, as it’s a largely aesthetics-based genre. Originating in the 2010′s, it sits at the juncture between pure meme and actual artistic medium. Vaporwave uses a combination of 80′s and 90′s computer sounds, elevator music, and lounge music to create an often slowed down sound experience. It’s often paired with bizzare, surreally paired images from the computers of 80′s and 90′s. A lot of vaporwave is a sort of satirical take on consumerism, both evoking nostalgia and mocking the place it takes it’s roots from, but most of the time it stays vague. Vaporwave led to a proliferation of other, equally weird genres, like chillwave and seapunk. Vaporwave is largely enigmatic, but since a huge amount of memes have come out of vaporwave (to the point of vaporwave being a meme itself at this point) it’s worth the look just to figure out what those darn kids are talking about these days with their hover boards and vapor waves.

Side Note! I just wanted to mention simpsonwave, which is one of the weird offshoots of vaporwave I mentioned. Simpsonwave mashes up edited visuals from the Simpsons (often giving them VHS-esque filters and altering backgrounds or glitch effects) and pairing them with vaporwave music. Here’s a simpsonswave video featuring music by Blank Banshee (who we’ll be talking about some more). At the very least the video will give you a good idea of the aesthetics that vaporwave employs, if you feel so inclined to look into that particular rabbit hole.

Now! On to the artists.

1. JAMES FERRARO

New Yorker James Ferraro started making music around 2004, making him one of the original vaporwave artists. Originally he was part of the group the Skaters, but he’s really shined in his subsequent solo work and he’s still making music currently. His albums are largely conceptual, often to the point (as is by and large the case with vaporwave) of being almost off-putting in their scope, but it’s more than possible to enjoy his music while ignoring the more ambiguous parts of vaporwave.

The song Global Lunch is bright and friendly, a little faster paced than most vaporwave, and it’s accented with electronic twangs. It’s a cute little song, ending with the sound that skype makes when you’re clicking to shut down, which I warn you about ahead of time so you don’t worry that you’ve accidentally shut your skype off.

2. 2 8 1 4

2 1 8 4 is a British collective group between t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 and HKE. Starting in 2014, they’ve since released three albums. It’s been argued since 2 1 8 4 is more a creative group than a sampling group, that they’re not “true vaporwave,” but considering both that this seems a natural transition for the genre and the ridiculousness of claiming something isn’t part of a genre that exists mostly because of memes because it’s more original it’s sort of a moot point.

Eyes of the Temple, off of the album Rain Temple (their most recent release) is slow and builds slowly, but never really hits a beat drop of any kind; it just keeps reaching further and further, creating a multi-layered sound before slowly fading back into quiet.

3. ST. PEPSI/SKYLAR SPENCE

Skylar Spence of Brooklyn, NY, switched his stage name from St. Pepsi a while back (around 2014 to be specific) as he sort of moved away from vaporwave, but his early work held strong to the slowed down samples from the 80′s and 90′s that the genre originated from. He started creating music back in 2012 and as Skylar Spence is still making music.

I include a link to the music video for Better, if it can be called that (it’s a surreal looping gif that stacks upon itself), since the aesthetics are very vaporwave but the song itself is another fun one: pop-ey with a strong funk base. It’s worth a listen, even if it’s just an “ironic” one.

4. BLANK BANSHEE

Perhaps the most meme-driven artist so far, the image on the cover of Blank Banshee’s first album (pictured above) become it’s own meme for a time. But Blank Banshee stands out in it’s more experimental sound, as Banshee’s music is genuinely very good. Banshee, a Canadian, released their first album in 2012 and their latest album was released in 2016. If you have a minute I’d recommend clicking around Banshee’s website, as it’s an experience all of it’s own.

Blank Banshee’s song Dreamcast, is haunting, with a deep, sweeping base sound. The distorted vocals layer and loop at times. It’s spellbinding and vaporwave at its some of it’s less accessible but it’s also some of the best of the genre.

5: DEEP DIVE: Vektroid

Vektroid, who online is occasionally referred to as the originator of vaporwave, started making music in 2005 and has been ever since, with a new release due this very month. She’s released music as Vektroid but occasionally uses psuedonyms which have included dstnt, Laserdisc Visions, New Dreams Ltd., Macintosh Plus, Virtual Information Desk, and PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises, all of which give you a good idea of what kind of sound Vektroid will be offering here.

Operating out of Portland, Vektroid’s real name is Ramona Andra Xavier, and music from her album Floral Shoppe features as the example on the wikipedia page for vaporwave, which is fitting for the proclaimed originator of the genre. Vektroid is prolific in her work, with over 40 releases under her usual stage name among some of the others we’ve listed.

The song リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー (which translates to Lisa Frank 420/ modern computer, in case you’re wondering) which she released as Macintosh Plus, is slow and sweeping. It’s borderline elevator music but the strange glitches and alterations she’s made to it make it almost unsettling while still being listenable. Vaporwave often feels like more of an experience than music sometimes, and this definitely rides a weird line. It doesn’t get more vaporwave than this.

I’ll close us out with Neo Cali, a beat-heavy and spiraling song that fluctuates and grows upon itself. More relaxing than Lisa Frank 420, it’s slow and thoughtful, and a nice closing of our thought here today.

Well, that’ll do us for this week. Hope you enjoyed V A P O R W A V E, or at least feel like you can reference a meme better now. See you again next week!

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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago

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Hyperallergic: Trapped by Tropes: Spoon, The New Pornographers, Alt-J, Charly Bliss

Forget authenticity, anti-commercialism and the like — above all, indie-rock as a genre fascinates for how performers quiver beneath the anxiety of influence, nervously seesawing between referents. One new sound can stay in the culture forever if acolytes repeat it, pay tribute to it, revive it when it falls out of fashion, or reverse it while acknowledging the original’s primacy. In 2017 it often takes effort to distinguish between novel forms and received ones, alternative forms and normative ones. The four bands reviewed below walk these tightropes with varying degrees of grace.

Spoon: Hot Thoughts (Matador)

I’d say this clinches it, but they clinched it a decade ago: Britt Daniel and company only know how to make one album, which they’ve done about a half dozen times over a now storied career. It’s a pretty good one, though, and it keeps getting more fanciful within established strictures. That four to five men should for years take such professional delight in tweaking such an oddly staid model of lightweight guitar-rock, rather like a cat batting around a ball of yarn, is an amusement in itself.

If ever a band were trapped by formula, Spoon is it, but that misses the point somehow. Formula is their subject, their muse. That jerky, tensile style of guitar/piano jitter rattles around in their bones, as inextricable from the band dynamic as Daniel’s raw bleat. Musical strategies that with other bands might indicate attempts to break the mold have long since become integrated into said formula; Spoon’s mild spareness accommodates any range of sly sound effects and compositional experiments. Recent Spoon albums have abounded with more good and bad sonic ideas than most bands manage to pack in, and this installment is no different — the long synth intro with gradual guitar fade-in on “WhisperI’lllistentohearit,” the shakers/rainstick on “Pink Up,” the keyboard belches augmenting or replacing the guitar parts — and yet none violates the boundaries of the compressed, muscular template they invented around the turn of the millennium. The title track’s confluence of ominous electronic ostinato, heavy guitar crunch, and plinky cowbellesque percussion produces quite the slinky stunner, while “Shotgun” lopes purposefully along, its interlocking rhythm guitar parts barking at each other. Much of the rest remains beige, clunky, and male, which isn’t a bad thing — imagine those adjectives in their friendliest incarnations.

The brand of quirk-rock available here isn’t quiet, but it is slight; the album might not fit into casual contexts. Spoon’s jarring, stop-and-go motion demands the listener pause and contemplate the album as a self-conscious aesthetic object. The preponderance of these objects in indie-rock is at once its most pressing limitation and its great gift to the world.

The New Pornographers: Whiteout Conditions (Concord)

Self-consciousness usually compounds formal dilemmas rather than solves them, but every album don’t work out that way. Sometimes it’s fun to watch musicians puzzle their way out of a tight box, as with the New Pornographers, the infamous, long-running, ever-shifting aggregate of Canadian singer-songwriters who here defeat indie-rock’s self-referential impotence with, er, a beguiling concept album about self-referential impotence. It rocks, too!

Dominated by mainstay A.C. Newman and essential covocalists Neko Case and Katherine Calder, this is their best project in a decade or more because ordinary rules regarding the linear motion of time don’t apply: like many bands acutely conscious of their predecessors, they frolic in the wreckage that litters posthistorical space. Furthermore, they’ve written a bunch of songs about being an indie band struggling to survive in some dystopian confluence of straitened material circumstance and the aforementioned abstract posthistorical space .”I only play for money honey,” begins the first song, and by the end their “blues from the last world/news from the future” has been “consigned to the dustbins.” They dodge their chronic scatteredness, adopting a consistent sound that, puzzlingly, recalls Broken Bells, testing the preciousness of their guitar-based songwriting against integrated electronics that function as jabs in the ribs. Their smooth mesh of acoustic and electric guitars readily admits alternately whizzy, spattery, and serene synthesizer parts, caught up in crafted, high-flying soar. Propelled through the air from beginning to end, the album deploys its riffage with such streamlined efficiency it takes several listens to notice the spiraling melody adorned with synth staccato in “Whiteout Conditions,” the raw guitar blasts dotting the steady bassline in “Darling Shade,” the way the chorus in “Colosseums” swells up anthemically only to clamp down on itself hard, all achieving grace and ease that belies the frustrations expressed in song.

The depth of their defeatism reveals the limits of their musical world; the collapse of their own particular tradition doesn’t mean the collapse of all music. It’s hard to fault said defeatism as a critic who has made criticisms of indie-rock similar to those the band repeats and turns on itself. No collapse of tradition prevents genre obsessives from assembling records into elegant, hummable, distinct pop shapes. Come for the hooks and stay for a scary, inchoate sense of political urgency.

Alt-J: Relaxer (Infectious/Atlantic)

Caring about indie consensus in 2017 means pondering bands who mistake eccentricity for notability and consider divergence from received form reasonable evidence for talent. After two passable albums on which they defined their own amateurish, electronic, mechanized, folkish sound, the English experimental rockers here tweak that sound several steps over the edge in accordance with the above two misconceptions, and the whimsy is just too much to bear.

There’s no denying their originality — no other band assembles slithering acoustic guitar strings and antiseptic keyboard hum into such hushed, mesmerizing, immaculately interlocking clockwork ticky-tock. They demonstrate excellently how admirable attempts to create new sonic templates often produce labored ones. Theoretically, the organic and electronic elements would click into a striking musical contraption, a hissing, chirping metal machine cobbled together from moving parts, spinning reassuringly around the coffee table; indeed, “Matilda” and “Fitzpleasure” from their first album exemplify this ideal. There’s a calming quality to it, as the charm of the mechanical elements overlaps with the relaxed, brushed folk guitar. To accentuate the prettiness on the current album, they slow down the tempos, sing more breathily, foreground the painstakingly strummed or plucked acoustic riffs, and generally dilute each element until they attenuate the wires running through the machine, and the whole thing unravels into a pile of gears,poles,snapped strings, and smaller contraptions themselves unraveling. The record that emerges from the mess, at once wispy, whispery, and robotic, struggles to associate attenuated sound with attenuated emotion. The one upbeat exception sticks out awkwardly: “Hit Me Like That Snare,” as crazed a sex-rocker as you’re likely to hear this year. Its tinny guitar chug comes as a relief.

Given music this tightly sprung, make sure not to hit the quick release. Provided the parts haven’t rusted over, I await the day they reassemble their gadgetry.

Charly Bliss: Guppy (Barsuk)

The question’s been asked a billion times: given a billion practically identical young punkish bands, why the hell does this one sound so special? There’s often no answer; hear enough such bands and ask the question often enough, and a healthy respect for the gods of arbitrariness emerges. That Charly Bliss’s brand of power punk should delight so makes no sense, and delights for that too.

Despite their sunny cheer, the pop-punk tag sits uneasily on them. The tempos are too frantic, the rumbling guitar roar too distorted, the mix too dirty. This is more like Grimes singing for Roomrunner — scrawny messy energetic whomp meets Eva Hendricks, whose squeaky, sugary scream abrades at this moment in history like no electric guitar will. Positing a dialectic between girly vocalist and tough band would be too facile, reliant on a spuriously gendered equivalence between guitar noise and macho defiance. It’s the musical juxtaposition that thrills, as Hendricks and the electric riffage press similar buttons in the mind’s ear. As for the guitars, she and Spencer Fox rip out harsh, fuzzy, clanky power chords as if throwing a smokescreen in front of the frenetic pounding beat hot on their tails. Sweet melodies shake out the dirt from their hair before turning back on themselves in perfect feelgood resolution (“Black Hole”); others get halfway there and rub their dissonance in your face (“Westermarck”). Stylistically and technologically, the album could easily have come out in the ‘90s, but I like them better in our modern age — you can hear how much they adore a form passed down and refined through history. That’s their secret.

I hope they don’t maintain such ebullient crunch forever — it would wear thin — but for at least the length of an album, it galvanizes. Here’s another riddle: do the songs themselves express joy, or were they just so happy to have written these songs that the joy springs from the performance?

The post Trapped by Tropes: Spoon, The New Pornographers, Alt-J, Charly Bliss appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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soundcheckentertainment · 8 years ago

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The Writes of Spring tour brought Hawksley Workman, Amelia Curran, Donovan Woods and Tim Baker to Canada’s National Arts centre for their fourth stop, of a nine stop tour. It was a wonderfully laid back night full of innuendos, hockey talk and awkward giggles!

The Writes of Spring: Official Tour Poster by Renée Doiron

Going into The Writes of Spring, I had very little in terms of expectations. I was essentially going in blind, and I loved it! I wish I could attend every concert with no expectations and a very limited knowledge on the artists. This allowed me to appreciate every moment and be mesmerized by the music.

The artists performed four songs each, taking turns down the line.

Hawksley Workman

Hawksley kicked off the night by playing host and MC, introducing the other three singer-songwriters, and telling us all that if at any point we didn’t like what they were presenting, to listen to the exit signs and walk out. He even marvelled at how, here in Ottawa, our signs have arrows, ensuring we know exactly where to exit.

He couldn’t believe how many people were there (the theatre was practically full!) and kept reiterating that we had no good reason to be here – no one likes songwriters. Boy, did we ever prove him wrong! The crowd was engaged the entire night. Between Hawksley’s humour and the music, everyone was hanging on for the next word or note that would be fed to them. Having never attended a songwriting style show before, I was especially impressed.

After finishing telling us all we were crazy for coming out to see silly little songwriters, Hawksley proceeded to comment on Ottawa’s state of constant construction. Claiming that he’s impressed we all made it. Not simply from a lack of interest standpoint, but because of all the “circuitous paths” one had to endure to find the entrance. He even compared it to having to run the Terry Fox run just to make it in on time, showing up sweaty and out of breath, and coughing a little because of a cold.

Hawksley Workman by Renée Doiron

As can be seen, Hawksley kicked the Writes of Spring off immediately with some good natured humour and jokes at his own expense. It wasn’t long, however, until his jokes took a slightly … darker … turn. When observing and interacting with the crowd, Hawksley noticed 4 seats empty in the front row. He metaphorically referred to those seats as being the empty space in your mouth you’d tongue as a kid after losing a tooth. Even though it was small, your attention is constantly drawn to the gap. Now of course, regardless of the crowd, a statement such as tonguing the gap will bring some snickers throughout the audience. Hawksley quickly picked up on this, and proceeded to call out Ottawa on its randy, hot, and unrequited hyper sex vibe. As if asking us to prove his point, when he sang about an ignition and a key, he was greeted by giggles and titters throughout.

Hawksley Workman was not afraid to stop a song and try something new, he interacted with the crowd constantly, and clearly fed off their energy. He was constantly playing with his vocal abilities, showing his incredible range and different styles. He entertained us with songs, both new and old, although he apologized profusely for singing the new stuff. Claiming that new songs should be saved for those you really trust to tell you they’re crap, and not pulled out in concert. This was a tiny jab at Tim Baker, who started with something new. Hawksley felt the need to tease the kid.

The song that Hawksley performed that resonated the most with me, was Birds in Train Stations. It was a sweet song, with a funny tone, that was relatable. He pointed out the cheesy lines midway through the song, which only added to the experience for me.

Amelia Curran

Amelia Curran by Renée Doiron

After Hawklsey Workman’s first song, it was Amelia Curran’s turn to dazzle us all. She started by walking up to the mic and giggling. You could tell that she was one of those people who embraced their awkwardness. Often introducing her songs with something to the effect of: K, I’m gonna sing now. This was a breath of fresh air because it made her seem real. She was relatable, in that she wasn’t super scripted, and she was just overall very sweet. She started things off with a lulling ballad and I was immediately drawn in. Her voice was so soulful and her passion just emanated through the music.

My favourite performance by Amelia was her song The Mistress. She introduced it by saying that everything in this song is true, except for the title. After that, she sang a hauntingly beautiful tune that drew you in, and you just had to close your eyes to appreciate.

Donovan Woods

Donovan Woods by Renée Doiron

Once Curran’s first song was over, it was Donovan Woods’ turn to capture us all with his humour and punchy, straight-to-the-point, style. His first interaction with the audience was to tell us that Tim McGraw has tiny jeans. Woods then proceeded to tell a story of how once, when he had travelled to Nashville, he was writing with McGraw in his home. Donovan couldn’t believe the smallness of Tim’s pants, coupled with the vastness of the couch where he was sitting. He said “It was literally the smallest pair of jeans on the biggest couch you’ve ever seen”. This story had the audience laughing and also seemed to install some respect in everyone. They realized that you must be talented if you’re sitting on McGraw’s couch, songwriting with the respected country artist.

Woods’ voice was not what I would have expected, although still incredible! He sang very close to mic and created this, almost hum, with every note he sang. His style and music was by far my favourite, but this could very well be because I am a country fan and his sound was very country-esque. This could also be because he appealed to my inner Canadian girl and referenced hockey.

Donovan was telling a story of how his song, Put on Cologne, came to be. Explaining that his friend Frasier experienced heartbreak in Cologne, Germany. And how Frasier wasn’t too thrilled that Woods had written a song about it. But hey, artists got to do their art, right Donovan? And this song paid off for Donovan when Erik Karlsson (of the Ottawa Senators), with his dreamy long hair, once tweeted at Woods about this song. Woods couldn’t believe that famous hockey players listened to his sappy love folk songs.

After this revelation, Hawksley had to tell the story about when Mike Bossy sent him a signed jersey. Bossy sent the jersey with a note to tell Workman that he did not shoot it wide, contrary to what was stated in his song Warhol’s Portraits of Gretzky. He mused over the fact that, while Bossy did send him a reply, he had yet to hear anything from Gretzky. Maybe the Writes of Spring will be your chance Hawksley! Gretzky can finally know how pretty bloody sexy that portrait really is.

Tim Baker

Tim Baker of Hey Rosetta! by Renée Doiron

The final artist we heard from, before the order repeated itself was Tim Baker, from Hey Rosetta!. Although we had seen some samplings of his piano abilities when Hawksley asked him for a solo, we hadn’t heard much from the singer songwriter. Tim was a ball of energy, who was clearly passionate about, not only his music but the other three artists’ music as well. He had a quick laugh and wasn’t afraid to try new things in front of the audience, usually in the form of some free style on the piano. Tim Baker showed his diverse artistic abilities, playing the piano, guitar and hitting us with his vocals flawlessly.

My favourite Tim moment is when he was describing the song Welcome. Baker explained that the inspiration hit when talking to his friend’s unborn child. Tim was embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t until telling this story to another friend, that he was made aware that you’re not supposed to talk to pregnant bellies. He didn’t know that most women do not enjoy having their bellies spoken to. Although, I think we can all agree to forgive him, as the result was Hey Rosetta!’s beautifully sad song Welcome.

Overall, the night was a great success! Full of belly laughs and misty eyes, the Writes of Spring brought us through a plethora of emotions and finished us off on a high note. For the encore, all four artists came back on stage to perform the Traveling Wilbury’s Handle With Care.

To learn more about these artists, visit: Hawksley Workman here, Amelia Curran here, Donovan Woods here and Tim Baker here.

More photos by Renée Doiron from Writes of Spring

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Tim Baker of Hey Rosetta! by Renée Doiron

NAC Theatre pre-show

Swag

The Writes of Spring: Official Tour Poster by Renée Doiron

Hawksley Workman by Renée Doiron

Amelia Curran by Renée Doiron

Donovan Woods by Renée Doiron

Hawksley Workman by Renée Doiron

Writes of Spring’s Hawksley Workman Brings an Unrequited Hyper Sex Vibe to Ottawa The Writes of Spring tour brought Hawksley Workman, Amelia Curran, Donovan Woods and Tim Baker to Canada's National Arts centre for their fourth stop, of a nine stop tour.

#Amelia Curran #DONOVAN WOODS #Hawksley Workman #NAC #National Arts Centre #Ottawa #Tim Baker #Writes of Spring

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djrelentless · 8 years ago

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“Black Like Me: What It Means To Be African-American To Me”

June 28, 2015 at 6:21am

There's an old saying that I learned a long time ago back in Florida. "I like my racism out in the open." Meaning that in the south (and I know most don't consider Florida the south, but…it is), racists are very clear and you can spot them immediately. Any black person from the south can spot a good ol' boy who hates niggers from ten paces. It's not that obvious or clear once you travel to the north. Racism can be dressed up in kindness and double talk where it can be missed and even forgiven.

Trying to explain this to black people who did not grow up in the south can be very difficult. They often believe they know the experience of Confederate Flag realness, but really have no idea at all. The textbook meaning of racism only skims the surface of how deep the hatred and entitlement runs in their veins. You are taught from the very beginning that you are not as good as a white person. You are made to feel like you are second class and white people will always be in charge and more important (at least this was my experience growing up in the 70s). It seems there's this "academically black" way of thinking about racism and I tend to question it.

So, I recently watched an HBO documentary called "Southern Rites". What was supposed to be a story about a desegregated prom turned into two stories. One about a white man shooting a black boy and the other was about a black man who wanted to be the first black sheriff of his small town. Both stories were controversial. Both had interesting details, but the first story had the most complicated twists.

What would you do if you were disabled and in bed, awakened by a strange noise and the lingering smell of marijuana? You have a gun because you're an older person and you feel like you need protection for you and your teenaged daughter. Then you get up to investigate. You discover that there are two boys in your house. You order them to get dressed and go sit on the couch. Words are exchanged and the boys make a break for the door. You fire one shot (perhaps to scare them). One of the boys lunges towards you. You fire a second shot. The guy is hit. Both male figures make it out of the house. You follow in pursuit and fire more shots but you don't hit either again. The injured one falls. You call 911 and describe what happen and tell them to send someone.

Now….let's erase color and race from this situation. For this instance, let's think about this neutrally. Let's just make it about the facts of the case. Let's just say these are just people…..everyday people. The back story of this situation is that the daughter of the awakened man invited the two boys over for a hook-up. The boys hid their car across the street from the man's house. The man was sentenced one year for the death of the boy. Now…I'm not sure one year is sufficient for the taking of a life, but I definitely don't believe that this man was in the wrong in this situation.

Now….let's come back to reality and the people of this day and age. Let's explain that the daughter of this white man is a biracial child of a niece that he adopted. So, it doesn't seem to me that race plays a big part in why this man shot this black boy in his home.

The other story of the black sheriff pretty much went as I expected it to. He lost to the more affluent and powerful white candidate. Mysteriously after being told he was ahead by about 251 votes, he lost by 100 votes when it was all said and done. The really interesting thing about this documentary was showing these two stories side by side. I'm not sure if the filmmaker wanted to create this obvious look at how the race card is played, but I definitely saw it. Watching how race determined the outcome of both stories really makes you examine how you would react and what would you have done?

My unpopular opinion about when the race card is used and becomes a mentality makes me a bit of an outcast. I often ask the question what was so-and-so doing when the cops stopped them? I often ask why was someone asked to leave a bar or club? I often ask was there a criminal record for so-and-so when this person was being chased? These are the questions that aren't being asked. Yes…. there are bad racist cops out there. Yes, there black men being racially profiled and killed for no reason at all. Injustices are happening all over the world everyday.

The obvious question is what circumstances brought these black men to commit crimes or behave disorderly? Perhaps the absence of a positive male figure in their early lives? The constant oppression and poverty that most black men have to endure? And because we can't all be sports figures or rappers, what are the main images that black males are forced fed through the media and television? And the vicious cycle of racism, prison and fathering more children just seems to keep the black man in his place and in the stereotype.

So, it's no wonder that black people from the south know and understand the ways of the confederate flag oh so well. It is a tough habit to break when you have been conditioned from a child, but it can be done. I didn't know any better or any different until I left Tampa, Florida. New York City was definitely a great place to get my bearings and learn the other side of being black in America. And going to Europe really put everything in perspective. It always cracks me up when I listen to blacks from other places than the United States speak about American Black Culture. They have some interested ideas of what it means to be black in America and what blacks in America are really like. If you go by music videos and television shows I'm sure you would think that most black men have some seedy past with drug dealing and have kids all over the place. Black women are always angry and feisty with a quick comeback. Sure there are many black families in the middle class, but what we are shown and fixated on are the ones who are "keeping real" and dropping the word "nigger" in every other sentence. Why? Because in my opinion this is the new oppression. Let's glorify the latest "ghetto fabulous" and call it entertainment.

When I shared my opinion about this documentary on facebook, a black female friend chimed in with this post "You say some shit sometimes, I just can't with you." I inquired what bothered her and gave an example of how black people cheered when O.J. Simpson got off on a technicality (just as Norman Neesmith did) except I believe O.J. was a murder. She replied "What the hell does that have to do with this? You're need to be extraordinary negro is kinda ridiculous." When she recounted watching the documentary she recalled the Justin Patterson (the boy who died) as being shot while he was running from the man's house. But the truth was that Justin was shot inside the house. I pointed out that this would be a classic example of "Stand Your Ground" (even though this was in Georgia, not Florida). I guess the comparison of Neesmith's case to the Zimmerman's case in the death of Trayvon Martin offended this reader. Her last post ended with "It's embarrassing and sad for me to see you talk this shit but it's your page and your opinion.Thanks for always being so clear about where you stand so no one has to wonder." (as if I were wrong for questioning what were the circumstances that this boy got shot).

Many probably wonder why I share my opinions and blogs online. I do it because I hope that perhaps a different perspective might lead to some different thinking. Maybe ideas will be exchanged and people can learn from another experience than their own. Lord knows I have learned plenty by some of the discussions I have had online. Being an American who married a Canadian I have a really different experience in Canada than the black people who were born here or immigrated from somewhere else. So, many assume that I think like they do because we share the same skin color or we both identify as black. But the truth is that my experiences have made me who I am. Just as each person's experiences makes them who they are. I've been spit at, rocks thrown at me and called "nigger" from a moving car while walking down the street. How many black people in Canada today have had this experience. I have spoken about watching my grandmother getting spit on in a grocery store and she couldn't do anything about it. The humiliation and shame that was on her face haunts me to this day. That's generations of racism.

So, with all this talk of removing the confederate flag from the state capital building in South Carolina. I'm sure many people of all colors are wondering how can these black people live in a town where they have a constant reminders of their place in society (with streets named after confederate generals and that damn flag everywhere). I guess the same question could be asked of all those white folks who live in the mid-west where tornadoes are very common. If you don't know any other life than you don't know any better. You accept your life and you live.

It seems unconceivable that in 2015 there would be a white woman pretending and passing for black. Rachel Dolezal gave the classic movie "Pinky" a new twist and reboot. The idea that a white woman could not only pass for black but also become the president of the NAACP of Spokane, Washington just seems like a movie script or something. But you cain't write this shit! Most say that this is the ultimate cultural appropriation, but is this a sign of the times that some white people have changed their views of black people? I mean…I remember about a decade ago there was the term "wigger". I wasn't thrilled about it, but than again I have many issues with the use of the word "nigger" in today's youth lexicon anyway. Because I am a DJ I am forced to deal with Hip Hop lyrics and white people on a daily basis.

I found it really interesting that the filmmaker chose to interview Daniella (the biracial adopted daughter) last. It was tough watching the pain in Justin's parents' eyes when they talked about their son. It was kinda weird listening to the mother of Justin's child talking about what a good father he was when he was out at 3 AM to hook up with another girl on the night he died. And listening to Daniella talk about the necklace that Justin gave her and how her father is really a teddy bear in personality really showed the complexities of being biracial in the south. When she said that she believes that her father would have gotten a longer sentence if he were black just about summed up the entire southern black experience.

All I know is that if we are going to take the step towards fixing race relations in the United States, we need to pause and think about the other side. Talk about your relationship with other races. Are you open to having relationships with other races (be it friends or something more intimate)? Then how many different races do you interact with on a daily basis? The beauty of a city like New York is that you are kinda forced to be around as many different races and cultures everyday. And I actually loved that. Plus you just never knew who you might meet. There's a whole wide world out there. Why limit yourself to just your neighborhood?

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ricardosousalemos · 8 years ago

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Neil Young: Trans

It’s the end of the world. The sky is an ominous shade of red, and the air is thick with poisonous fumes. Some people are silhouetted with an eerie glow while others are dying of radiation poisoning. “It shoulda been me that died,” Neil Young says, riding a bike alongside actor Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn shrugs him off, and the two make plans for the evening. Tomorrow may never come, but tonight they’ll take their dates to the drive-in, where Tamblyn begs Neil not to play his ukulele or to sing “in that high squeaky voice.” So goes the opening scene of the 1982 film Human Highway, an apocalyptic comedy written and directed by Neil Young under his long-standing nom de plume Bernard Shakey. It’s a muddled and paranoid work, filled with forced slapstick humor and wild jams with Devo. In one scene, the members of the Ohio new wave group haul toxic waste in a flatbed truck down a lonesome highway. “I don’t know what’s going on in the world today,” Devo’s Booji Boy says to himself as images of skulls flash across his bandmates’ faces, “People don’t seem to care about their fellow man.”

This is where Neil Young’s head was at the top of the ’80s. Human Highway—Young’s third picture, following the psychedelic Journey Through the Past and his quasi-concert film Rust Never Sleeps—shares a title with a song from 1978’s Comes a Time. “Take my head, and change my mind,” he sang in its chorus, “How could people get so unkind?.” With its gentle acoustic guitars and fantasies of misty mountains, “Human Highway” plays like a eulogy to a specific type of Neil Young song. The Canadian hippie who sings in a high squeaky voice about packin’ it in and buyin’ a pick-up is only one side of Young. In fact, a decade into his solo career, Neil Young had developed a reputation more like an actor, someone remembered more for the parts he played than the unifying presence behind them all. After Comes a Time, he stepped away from his role as a ’70s folk singer, with 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps introducing a decade of restless exploration. The world was getting meaner, and Neil Young was tired of being typecast as merely an observer: He wanted to take part in the madness.

Although they both speak to the increasingly uneasy state of Young’s mind, “Human Highway,” the song, never appears in Human Highway, the film. Instead, the movie is mostly soundtracked by a record called Trans, released that same year. In the film, Young gets into character by contorting his face, wearing a pair of dorky glasses, and slapping motor oil on his cheeks. On Trans, he transforms himself by setting his songs in a distant future and filtering his voice through a variety of synthesizers, most notably (and infamously) a vocoder. The warped new wave of Trans suits the movie’s otherworldly (if endearingly chintzy) backdrops. You believe that this is the music that would play in the film’s shoddy roadside diner, where Dennis Hopper cooks sausage patties and swats at radioactive, laser-pointer flies. In fact, the movie might be the best context to hear Trans—an album that’s often treated more like a symbol (for artistic reinvention, for failed experimentation, for creative self-sabotage) than an actual entry in a body of work characterized by prolificacy and versatility.

Part of what makes Neil Young’s discography so rewarding for new listeners is that it’s filled with great entry points: the classic rock radio staples with more depth than you imagined (After the Goldrush, Harvest); the intimate passages that, even after all these years, feel like uncovered secrets (Tonight’s the Night, On the Beach); and the bizarre left-turns like Trans that inspire cult fandom just for existing. And while Trans sits comfortably along with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait in a lineage of puzzling-if-fascinating failures, its mythology is only part of the appeal. Reed and Dylan always felt like provocateurs—for Dylan, even finding Jesus felt like a means of snapping back at critics. But Young’s transformations have always felt less divisive, more natural and earnest and instinctual. Even when he followed Trans with Everybody’s Rockin’, a slight collection of anti-capitalist rockabilly songs, he held the latter record in high esteem: “As good as Tonight's The Night, as far as I'm concerned,” he’s said.

Young has made similar claims about Trans. “This is one of my favorites,” he said grimly, holding the album art to the camera during a 2012 interview, “If you listen to this now, it makes a lot more sense than it did then.” Even if Trans is still confusing, it’s a point well taken. In the context of Young’s discography—rich with remakes and sequels, major reunions and minor pet projects—Trans has only grown more triumphant and singular as it’s aged. He would do new wave again, he’d mess with his voice some more, and he’d even return to the idea of full-on concept albums. But he would never make anything quite so conceptually confrontational—a challenge to even his most ardent followers’ understanding of what a Neil Young album sounds like. “If I build something up, I have to systematically tear it right down,” he’s said, referring to his penchant for moving quickly from one project to another, carrying with him few traces of the previous work. It’s remarkable, then, that Trans—an album ostensibly designed to “tear down” a specific image of Neil Young—ends up standing for exactly what’s great about him.

Like so many of Neil Young’s albums, Trans is filled with mysteries and unanswered questions (Why is his 1967 Buffalo Springfield song “Mr. Soul” on here? Why is a track called “If You Got Love” listed in the lyric sheet but not on the actual album?) It’s hard to think of an artist with as many classic albums who has wrestled so constantly against the medium: even his canonized work has a raw, unfinished quality to it. “If anything is wrong, then it’s down to the mixing,” he’s said about Trans, “We had a lot of technical problems on that record.” Fittingly, much of Trans concerns man’s fight against technology. A song called “Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)” details a team of rogue computers robbing a bank, with Young’s voice zapped down to a digital squelch. In “We R in Control,” a choir of robots lists the aspects of daily life—traffic lights, the FBI, even the flow of air—in which humans no longer have a say. Thematically, these songs—with their dystopian images of a world run by screens and numbers, where humans have everything at their fingertips but remain unhappy—have aged pretty well.

It’s the sound of the record that makes it more of an ’80s relic. No matter what format you listen to the album on (and it’s still never been released on CD in the U.S.), you feel as though you’re hearing it from the tape deck of a passing car. Even with longtime collaborators like producer David Briggs, guitarist Ben Keith, and drummer Ralph Molina, these songs sound very little like Young’s timeless ’70s work. The goofier, beat-centric tracks from his previous release, 1981’s shaky Re-ac-tor, certainly set a precedent. But despite its reputation for being aggressive and inscrutable, Trans is, at its heart, a pop record. It’s filled with hooks and beats and synths informed equally by krautrock and MTV. In “Sample and Hold,” guitarist Nils Lofgren—whose solos added an element of bluesy desperation to Tonight’s the Night but would soon light up football stadiums on Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. tour—points to future hits like Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science.” When the Trans Band played “Sample and Hold” during the album’s comically over-the-top tour—an endeavor that Young claims in Jimmy McDonough's authorized biography Shakey lost him $750,000 (“And we sold out every show,” he adds)—Neil and Nils stalk the stage with rock star charisma, trading solos and bleating into their talkboxes. In the sweet, melodic “Transformer Man,” Neil’s vocoder actually adds an element of purity to his voice, as layers of wordless choruses shower him. Listening to these songs, it’s not impossible to imagine that Trans could have maybe, possibly, in another world, been a pop hit.

But that world is in a galaxy far from this one. While the critical reception to Trans was not nearly as harsh as legend would have you think (Rolling Stone compared it to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy; Robert Christgau gave it a higher mark than Harvest), it was a commercial dud—a rough start for the fledgling Geffen Records label, who also released Joni Mitchell’s adult contemporary turn Wild Things Run Fast the same year. Trans wasn’t the album that convinced David Geffen to sue Neil Young for making uncharacteristic records—that would be its follow-ups Everybody’s Rockin’ and Old Ways, the country record that plays like a made-for-TV adaptation of Harvest. But the idea had to be floating through David Geffen’s head when he first heard this record. At once Young’s coldest sounding album and his most vulnerable, Trans makes its flaws immediately apparent as soon as you press play—from the murky production to the mixed-bag tracklist.

When you listen to Trans, you’re really only hearing two-thirds of it. Only six of the album’s nine songs were intended for the actual project. The other three came from a different album entirely, one that concerned young love and ancient civilizations. It was to be titled Island in the Sun, and Geffen Records quickly steered him away from the concept. Album opener “Little Thing Called Love” stems from those sessions, and it’s the record’s clearest connection to Young’s more celebrated talents. Its chorus riffs on the title of one of his most beloved songs (“Only love,” he barks in a chipper tone, “Brings you the blues”) and the ensuing chord progression would eventually find a new home in the title track of 1992’s Harvest Moon. While demonstrating the fluidity of Neil’s catalog, the song also makes for a striking introduction in its own right: a singalong before the apocalypse, when human connection would become as archaic as LaserDisc copies of the Solo Trans live show are today.

The Island songs also help highlight a major theme of Trans: it’s an album about affection. At the start of the decade, Neil Young and his wife were enrolled in intensive therapy with their son Ben, who had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The program’s long hours slowed Young’s hectic work schedule and opened him up to writing about fatherhood. His struggles to communicate with his child and the technology that connected them inspired the lyrics of Trans and even informed the way he recorded his vocals: “You can’t understand the words, and I can’t understand my son’s words,” he explained in Shakey. In that context, Young’s naked voice in respective side-openers “Little Thing Called Love” and “Hold on to Your Love” represents the catharsis of an emotional breakthrough. You understand the words he wants you to understand—and most of them just say, “I love you.”

Even with Human Highway serving as a vehicle for the album, Trans was originally conceived with a different film project in mind. “I had a big concept,” Young said in Shakey, “All of the electronic-voice people were working in a hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do is teach this little baby to push a button.” That metaphor pops up a few times throughout the record, most squarely in “Transformer Man,” a song Young's openly dedicated to his son. “You run the show,” he sings to him, “Direct the action with the push of a button.” The Trans film might not have moved the album to the commercial heights Neil and Geffen imagined, but available evidence suggests that it would have at least made its digital world feel warmer, more grounded and productive—the qualities fans had come to expect from Young’s work. Instead, the songs would have to stand on their own, their meaning buried inside them, like a constellation of stars you have to connect based on your own perception.

Near the end of Human Highway, a concussed Young enters a long, inscrutable dream sequence in which he, among other things, gets bathed in milk, attends a desert ritual, and becomes a world-renowned rock star. When Russ Tamblyn wakes him, they celebrate the mere fact that he’s alive. For the film’s final 10 minutes, Neil lives with a newfound sense of purpose and ambition (“We could do it,” he says, “We could be rhythm and bluesers, we could go on the road!”). Even with the fiery explosion on its way to squash his dreams and reduce the world to a pile of ash, it’s a brighter ending than what Trans leaves us with. In the lost paradise of “Like an Inca,” Young envisions himself in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, crossing the bridge to the afterlife, at once happy and sad and totally alone. It’s a fitting finale for a heavy album, one whose only brief glimmers of hope come from our connection to one another. “I need you to let me know that there’s a heartbeat/Let it pound and pound,” Young sings in “Computer Age.” His voice is masked beyond recognition, but the pulse—steady and wild—is unmistakably his own.

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