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nw7us · 3 years ago

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A Short History of My Shortwave/Ham Interests and Activities

When I was about eight years old, I got a hold of my parent's Sony Multiband Portable radio. The following picture is an image of that model. It has four bands: FM, AM, LW, SW.

I soon discovered that the SW selection held very strange and somewhat exotic sounds and stations. As you might have guessed from above, SW stands for Shortwave--which describes the size of the radio wave used to transmit the signal that the radio can tune and listen in on. (and the other three bands are: LW, for Longwave--those frequencies below 530 kHz; MW, for Mediumwave which is what is used in the domestic broadcast band between 530 kHz and 1750 kHz or so; FM (frequency modulation), the popular band of radio spectrum that everyone seems to enjoy, with music, talk, and other formats). The receiver only receives the Amplitude Modulation (AM) modulation mode, for the LW, MW, and SW bands.

As I began to discover the wide variety of signals--not only odd, interesting noises and pops, whistles, and alien-like sounds, but also a great variety of radio stations from all parts of the world--I became deeply interested in the technical aspects of what made this little radio achieve such great magic.

These exotic signals fascinated me. Some of the signals I could understand, as they were International Broadcast stations from foreign countries--stations like the BBC, Radio South Africa, Radio Moscow, Radio Nederland, and the Deutsche Welle. Many of these stations had English broadcasts, but others were in other languages, which I did not understand.

It seemed very magical that the BBC (England), RSA (Radio South Africa), !CBC (Radio Canada International), Radio Australia, and so many more exotic stations, could be heard by me in the middle of Montana's Rocky Mountains. Hearing these signals lured me into listening and learning more about Shortwave Listening to the point that I was hooked for life.

Other signals were (as I came to learn, later in life) Morse code, RTTY (Radio Teletype), or, time signals. Every day, I would sneak that radio out to a nearby large field, extend the telescoping antenna, and start tuning around to explore what I could discover.

There were nights I would listen to that radio from underneath the bed covers, hoping not to be noticed by my parents. But I heard so many things that I just had to explore as much as I could.

Within the first year, I discovered WWV, and heard the hourly solar and terrestrial activity reports. I was about eight years of age, and never heard of sunspots, or geomagnetic anythings. But, Skylab was just deployed, and I read about the artificial eclipse that they used to study the Sun.

With the excitement over Skylab, and my new-found fascination with Shortwave and the Sun, I began to ask librarians for books on these topics. I even got ahold of library-loaned scientific journals on Sun science, which revealed a lot about sunspots, and more. Thus was born in me a life-long passion for Space Weather and radio wave propagation--even now, I write about space weather and radio propagation in several magazines.

US Army Signal Corps

After a number of years and after graduating from High School, I entered the US Army. I became a 31M, known as the Multichannel Communications Equipment Operator. But I had a chance to do more than just that MOS. I also worked with TACSAT/STACOM (Satellite), Troposcatter, Microwave, and HF radio modes and equipment, as well as programming and using computers (I’ve been programming computers since 1983, and work now as a senior software engineer).

After being trained as a 31M at Fort Gordon, Georgia, I was stationed in Germany. While in the field for many months at a time, I ended up making rhombic antennas, inverted-V dipoles, and other great HF wire antenna configurations.

I received two Army Achievement Medals for my efforts at helping my unit accomplish its mission. I was instrumental in engineering a communications network that they had been attempting to secure for many years. In addition, I created an SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) manual including the use of Antenna and HF equipment to aid in engineering the communications network.

Connecticut

After spending a few years in Germany, I was finished in the military, and moved to Connecticut. I was hired by The Travelers as a programmer/analyst, and found out that my team leader was an Amateur Radio operator.

It was a natural progression for me to end up (finally!) licensed as a Novice-class amateur radio operator! The same year, I upgraded to the Coded Technician class. At that time, there was no such thing as a Technician Plus and No-Code Technician. There was just a Technician, which required 5 wpm code, and the Technician written element. My assigned, first call sign (as issued by the FCC after I passed the test elements) was, KA1VGL.

I loved getting on the transceiver (a Kenwood TS-520S that I bought from my co-worker), and doing CW Morse code, as well as 10 meter voice! The solar cycle was at a peak (this was 1989). I talked to the whole world on 10 meters Single Side Band (specifically, Upper Side Band, USB). I think I worked 67 countries! I was really excited! I also operated Morse code using CW (continuous wave modulation).

Montana

After a bit of time in Connecticut, I moved to Montana. I drove up to Canada, and then over to the Great Lakes, then made my way back into the States and over to Montana. I had a 10 meter rig (Radio Shack's HTX-100), and talked again, all over the world from the car!

The trip included days when the Aurora (Northern Lights; Aurora Borealis) was active, and I could see them while being near the Great Lakes. Stations were active on 10 meters all night long, at times, during this trip! It was a very excellent experience. (And the Canadian Hams extended a lot of hospitality.)

After settling down in Forsyth, Montana, I setup my radio shack with an end-fed long wire for most bands, and a vertical for 10 meters. I notified the FCC that I had a new address and location, and that I needed a new call sign to reflect my location. My first call, KA1VGL, was issued for the ‘1′ call area. Montana is in the 7 call area. Call areas (or districts) are geographical areas in the United States, numbered from 0 to 9.

The FCC issued me my new call as, N7PMS. Since I was in Montana, I became known as "November Seven, Pesky Montana Skunk." Better than other names... PMS.. caused a lot of conversation among the ham groups I visited on 75 Meters, for instance. The first 20 minutes would just be jokes about me and my call sign. It grew tiresome. I became aware of the amateur radio vanity call sign option offered by the FCC. I figured I would upgrade to a higher class (by passing code and written test elements), and then request a vanity call sign, just to get away from the N7PMS stigmatized call sign.

Washington

After about a year in Montana, I decided that I should head out to the state of Washington. My brother convinced me that there were more job opportunities. This was at the end of the Gulf War, and the economy was a bit slow, making it rough in Montana. My brother who was stationed in Washington (he was still in the US Army) told me that I ought to come to Washington as I might have a chance to work at Microsoft, or something along these lines (eventually, I did work with Microsoft).

Initially, I relocated to Olympia, the capitol city of Washington State. While in Olympia, on April 23, 1998, I upgraded to the Advanced amateur radio class. I also passed my 20 wpm code element for the Amateur Extra.

In June of 1998, I passed the written for Amateur Extra. I was very happy to finally obtain the Amateur Extra class license, as now I had access to the entire ham radio bands across the entire radio spectrum! It is great to be able to have use of all the radio frequencies assigned to the Ham Radio hobby.

On June 2, 1998, the FCC granted me a new Vanity Call. I was assigned, NW7US. This is a vanity call sign, one which I requested. I chose it to reflect that part of the United States that I really loved: From Montana to Alaska, and Washington, this new call sign reflects that I am in the North West area of the 7 call district, in the United States.

Right after the upgrade to Extra, I took a job with a start-up Internet company in Seattle, called, Greatergood.com and I was the primary Web Master and Programmer/Analyst during the first year or so. I relocated to the First Hill area in Seattle, just adjacent to downtown Seattle, but up the hill.

I spent a year working in downtown Seattle, but also working HF with my Outbacker portable antenna, and a Kenwood TS-830S, and an Icom IC-756 Pro II, and an Icom IC-706MKIIG, from my studio apartment on First Hill.

While I lived in Seattle, in a multi-floor apartment building, the antenna farm was mostly an Outbacker Marine (two section) mobile/portable vertical antenna, without the WARC bands, or one of five resonated Hustler mobile antennas. They are comparable in performance on 20 meters and higher. But on 80 and 40 Meters, the Hustlers seemed to perform just a bit better. However, I tended to use the Outbacker in the apartment setting more often due to its easier operation with my limited ground radial situation. On the car, I tended to favor the Hustlers. Occasionally, I used (you'll love this) my patio railing , and the trim around my apartment. I was on the fifth floor apartment (top floor) with a great view of the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington.

Using this compromise antenna configuration, I talked to Russian stations, over the North Pole, and many other stations around the world. It is amazing what one can do! Of course, I had to use the MFJ-1026 Noise Cancelling Phase Unit to cancel out the high noise I had there.

The Journey of DXing Since First Hill in Seattle

Eventually, I moved from First Hill, Seattle, to the Olympic Peninsula, to the small town of Brinnon, on the Hood Canal. There were many very tall trees, and I used them to raise a true wire antenna farm. I had dipoles for 160 Meters, and a fan dipole for 80 Meters through 10 Meters. OUr house was actually a tree house!

That was a fair place from which to chase DX stations, but I was located in a canyon. Thus in three directions, I had challenges due to the mountains blocking any low-angle take off of my radio signals. And, I could equally not hear signals that stations in Seattle could hear and work without any problem.

It was then that I started to write the monthly column on space weather and radio propagation, in CQ Amateur Radio Magazine, Popular Communications magazine, and CQ VHF magazine.

I also continued working on the oldest continuing non-governmental space weather and radio propagation website. I continue running that, to this day (started in the mid-1990s).

After a few years living there in Brinnon (where I remotely worked for Microsoft), I decided to use my savings and moved back to Montana, start a computer business, and buy a home with some land for antenna projects. Relocating to the Bitterroot Valley, I put up a nice 160-Meter doublet, and with an amplifier, worked many countries as I chased the DX.

A year into the new location, and the Internet bubble burst. The housing market crashed. The economy was in a very bad shape, and the unemployment in my area of Montana climbed to 30-some percent as mills closed down! Even the county ran out of money and laid off a third of all personnel (closing the Juvenile Detention facility, down-sizing every department, and so on).

I high-tailed it to Nebraska. Omaha had one of the lowest unemployment figures, so it seemed a good choice. I found a programming job, and settled down. Overall, I worked in several software programming companies in Omaha, while enjoying DXing from the suburbs using a SEA automatic antenna tuner and a random length of wire (about 100 feet).

A number of years later, I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. At our new home, I used the same antenna as used in Omaha. I worked at two different companies while living in Lincoln, including TD Ameritrade. I crafted software for many different tasks and systems. But, I also continued my radio journey.

For the sake of family, after Covid hit and it was possible to work remotely, I moved to Ohio. Here in Ohio, I have a 220-foot doublet antenna, fed by a 450-ohm ladder line, connected to the rig through a balun and a run of 50-ohm coax. I have increased my DXCC to over 200 confirmed countries, as I write this entry in my blog. My plan is to build a two-wavelength 160-Meter horizontal loop, raised up to about 80 or 90 feet.

My current transceiver is the Icom IC-7610. What a great radio! I can hear stations that are very weak, and actually work them! The current doublet is working quite well, and I have no local noise problem.

Check out the QSO Today interview in which I was asked about my journey, and my passion for space weather and radio propagation. It is Episode 184, with host Eric Guth, 4Z1UG: https://www.qsotoday.com/podcasts/nw7us

Check out the Rain Report interviews, too. I will update this blog entry when those interview segments are posted on line later in December, 2021. The host is Hap Holly.

Stay Tuned to the Blog, to hear more about my journey, and about space weather. Thank you for being a friend. I hope to chat with you on shortwave, on some ham band, using some mode!

73 de NW7US dit dit

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girlactionfigure · 4 years ago

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Conductor of Dachau

Gave the musicians a reason to live

Herbert Zipper was a conductor and composer who founded a secret orchestra at Dachau, and wrote a song that became an anthem for death camp inmates.

Born in 1904 to an affluent Jewish family in Vienna, Herbert was a musical prodigy who studied at the prestigious Vienna Music Academy with the great composer Richard Strauss. He found employment as a conductor and composer for cabaret shows.

Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and immediately started persecuting Jewish citizens. Herbert was arrested that year and sent by the SS to Dachau, where he became a “horse,” pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with heavy rocks for 12 hours a day. One of the most talented composers in Europe was doing the work of an animal.

Herbert was not the only music man in Dachau. All the Jewish members of the Munich Philharmonic – comprising most of the orchestra – were also incarcerated there. Herbert enlisted the other musicians in an audacious, even insane, plan. They would make instruments and create an orchestra, right there at Dachau.

How could anybody create musical instruments in a concentration camp? They combed the camp for discarded pieces of wood and metal and fashioned eleven primitive yet functional instruments. At least one guard helped the musicians; Herbert requested a piece of wire for a string instrument, and later found it under his pillow.

Herbert’s Dachau orchestra performed concerts for the other inmates every Sunday, in an outhouse. It’s hard to imagine the experience of listening to sublime music in a filthy environment, while knowing they could be all killed for their participation. Herbert said that the concerts were not for entertainment, but rather to bring purpose and even a bit of normalcy back to their lives.

Noted playwright Jura Soyfer, an old friend of Herbert’s from his cabaret days, was also at Dachau. Together they wrote “Dachaulied” (Dachau song), with Herbert composing the haunting music in his head and Jura penning the sad, sardonic lyrics inspired by the concentration camp motto “Work will make you free.” They thought that writing the song would help them maintain some dignity in an atmosphere of constant humiliation and demonization. Herbert deliberately made the song difficult to learn, so that his fellow inmates would have to use all of their concentration and thereby mentally escape from their horrific surroundings. Amazingly, the Nazis never discovered the secret orchestra.

At the end of 1938, Herbert and Jura were transferred to Buchenwald where they taught other inmates the Dachau song. Soon after, Jura died of typhus at age 26, and Herbert lovingly prepared his body for burial. At this time Hitler hadn’t yet began to implement his “Final Solution” to kill all the Jews, which started in 1941. Herbert’s father Emil was in London, desperately trying to get a visa for Herbert and his two brothers to escape Austria. Miraculously, Emil was able to secure his sons’ release from Buchenwald, and they joined him in Paris on March 16, 1939.

During all this time, Herbert’s fiancee, dancer Trudl Dubsky, was working in Manila, in the Philippines. She recommended him for the job of conductor of the Manila Symphony Orchestra, and he was hired, traveling there in September, 1939. Herbert and Trudl were married on October 1. Although it wasn’t a world-class orchestra at the time, Herbert enjoyed working with the Manila Orchestra and under his leadership it improved dramatically. Life was good for Herbert and Trudl until January 1942, when the Japanese army invaded the Philippines and occupied Manila. It was a brutal occupation and once again Herbert was arrested, this time for refusing to conduct the orchestra for Japanese military officers. He was incarcerated and harshly interrogated for four months before being released. For the next three years Herbert and Trudl survived hand-to-mouth, owning no belongings and traveling frequently in search of safe haven in a country at war.

The most difficult period was the Battle of Manila in early 1945. More than once the building where they took shelter was bombed by the Japanese artillery and they escaped with only seconds to spare. In the end of February they were living with hundreds of other displaced people in a seven-story building in Manila that had neither electricity or water. Herbert volunteered to get water every day, a dangerous and difficult undertaking. On the early morning of February 26, 1945, Herbert was on his water run when he saw an opportunity to reach the American front line, and he rushed across a battle field to do it. While there he received a crucial piece of information: the apartment building where he was staying was due to be bombed by the Allies within fifteen minutes! Herbert desperately explained that 800-1000 civilians were inside the building! Due to his pleas, the bombardment was delayed for 45 minutes, giving him just enough time to get back to the building and rescue everyone inside including Trudl.

Until Japan was defeated on September 2, 1945, Herbert worked secretly for the American army under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, transmitting valuable information about Japanese shipping schedules by shortwave radio. When Japan finally surrendered, Herbert organized and conducted a concert of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, a goal he’d set during the darkest hours at Dachau. The concert was performed in a bombed-out church.

Herbert and Trudl immigrated to America in 1946, joining the rest of his family. He co-founded and conducted the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, and organized another orchestra especially to give free concerts for public school children. Students called Herbert, who had no children of his own, “Papa Z.” For the rest of his life he volunteered and supported arts education for young people.

Herbert was close friends with poet Langston Hughes and they collaborated on an opera together, “Barrier.” Trudl worked as a ballet tacher. They moved to Chicago in 1953, where Herbert founded the Music Center of the North Shore, and then to Los Angeles, where Herbert directed the School of Performing Arts at USC.

Interviewed by a Los Angeles Times reporter at the end of his life, Herbert said “We have to see the world as it is, but we have to think about what the world could be. That’s what the arts are about.”

Herbert is the subject of a biography, “Dachau Song: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper,” and a documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award. His beloved wife Trudl died of lung cancer in 1976. He continued his music for two more decades, conducting his last concert in 1996. Herbert Zipper died in Santa Monica in 1997.

For inspiring concentration camp inmates and inner-city schoolchildren with his music, and for saving hundreds of lives during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, we honor Herbert Zipper as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Lyrics of Dachau Song:

Barbed wire fraught with death surrounds our world

On which a merciless heaven visits frost and sunburn.

Far from us are all joys, far our home, far the women

When mute we march to work, thousands in the gray dawn.

But we learned the Dachau motto and it made us hard as steel.

Be a man, comrade, remain human comrade

Do good work, pitch in, comrade

Because work, work will make you free!

Accidental Talmudist

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dustedmagazine · 3 years ago

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The Gilgamanians—Escape From Dark Matter (Pink Palace)

Escape from Dark Matter by The GILGAMANIANS

Who are the Gilgamanians? That all depends on your source of information. The first of five stories printed in the booklet that accompanies Escape From Dark Matter declares that on a “remote planet in a galaxy far away, the scrappy scientists of Gilgamesh Island™ are hunched over a receiver made from floating space junk on which they pick up mysterious radio signals.” In short, they are the audience of this recording. But if you read the names on the back of the digipak, they are shortwave radio operator Don Meckley and percussionist Michael Zerang, the generators of this CD’s enigmatic emissions.

Meckley and Zerang are longtime figures on Chicago’s sound and music fringes. During the 1980s and 1990s, they were, with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Scanlan, members of Liof Munimula. The trio gigged frequently in Chicago and around the United States. The space occupied by its instrumentation–which included guitar, violin, cornet, 42-piece percussion rig, invented instruments, radios, and a 40-foot-tall radio antenna–was as remarkable as its music, which was way ahead of the electro-acoustic wave. After 15 years, its members went their separate ways. Meckley concentrated on his art and education, Zerang took his skills as an improviser around the world and Scanlan moved to Florida, where he died in a nursing home in 2018, after a period of incapacity resulting from a physical assault. News of his death impelled Zerang and Meckley to reunite, with pared-down equipment, at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio in 2020, resulting in the album under consideration.

Escape from Dark Matter comprises five improvised musical performances, and each corresponds to a piece of prose written by Carl Watson. Watson’s writing ponders how the broadcast output by present-day earth might be experienced by non-terrestrial listeners, and the first track, “Don’t Call Me, I Have Nothing To Say,” imparts such an experience. Voices so thoroughly mulched that only their cadence can be recognized bob on a surface of static and hums, while yelping and squawking noises that might issue either from Meckley’s Grundig Satellit 650 International or Zerang’s collection of things one can rub and whack gives the piece a highly animalistic quality. Is that a bird call, a lonely puppy or is your antenna just glad to see me?

Elsewhere, the sound sources are easier to separate. Zerang scrapes all manner of mayhem from his drum heads and sparingly grounds the action with single beats on a tom, while Meckley shifts adroitly from distorted chatter to between-station sounds. While some background in human audio activities of the past century might help to contextualize the music’s strangeness, you don’t need to be from a distant star to find this stuff alien. But wherever you’re from, Escape from Dark Matter will take you somewhere you have not been.

Bill Meyer

#dusted magazine #album review #bill meyer #gilgamanians #pink palace #don meckley #michael zerang #daniel scanlan #liof munimula #electroacoustic improvisation #carl watson #escape from dark matter #Grundig Satellit 650 International radio

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blackkudos · 5 years ago

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Taj Mahal

Henry Saint Clair Fredericks (born May 17, 1942), who uses the stage name Taj Mahal, is an American blues musician, a singer-songwriter and film composer who plays the guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, and many other instruments. He often incorporates elements of world music into his works and has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his more than 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, and the South Pacific.

Early life

Born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, Jr. on May 17, 1942, in Harlem, New York, Mahal grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was raised in a musical environment; his mother was a member of a local gospel choir and his father was an Afro-Caribbean jazz arranger and piano player. His family owned a shortwave radio which received music broadcasts from around the world, exposing him at an early age to world music. Early in childhood he recognized the stark differences between the popular music of his day and the music that was played in his home. He also became interested in jazz, enjoying the works of musicians such as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson. His parents came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, instilling in their son a sense of pride in his Caribbean and African ancestry through their stories.

Because his father was a musician, his house was frequently the host of other musicians from the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. His father, Henry Saint Clair Fredericks Sr., was called "The Genius" by Ella Fitzgerald before starting his family. Early on, Henry Jr. developed an interest in African music, which he studied assiduously as a young man. His parents also encouraged him to pursue music, starting him out with classical piano lessons. He also studied the clarinet, trombone and harmonica. When Mahal was eleven his father was killed in an accident at his own construction company, crushed by a tractor when it flipped over. This was an extremely traumatic experience for the boy.

Mahal's mother later remarried. His stepfather owned a guitar which Taj began using at age 13 or 14, receiving his first lessons from a new neighbor from North Carolina of his own age who played acoustic blues guitar. His name was Lynwood Perry, the nephew of the famous bluesman Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. In high school Mahal sang in a doo-wop group.

For some time Mahal thought of pursuing farming over music. He had developed a passion for farming that nearly rivaled his love of music—coming to work on a farm first at age 16. It was a dairy farm in Palmer, Massachusetts, not far from Springfield. By age nineteen he had become farm foreman, getting up a bit after 4:00 a.m. and running the place. "I milked anywhere between thirty-five and seventy cows a day. I clipped udders. I grew corn. I grew Tennessee redtop clover. Alfalfa." Mahal believes in growing one's own food, saying, "You have a whole generation of kids who think everything comes out of a box and a can, and they don't know you can grow most of your food." Because of his personal support of the family farm, Mahal regularly performs at Farm Aid concerts.

Taj Mahal, his stage name, came to him in dreams about Gandhi, India, and social tolerance. He started using it in 1959 or 1961—around the same time he began attending the University of Massachusetts. Despite having attended a vocational agriculture school, becoming a member of the National FFA Organization, and majoring in animal husbandry and minoring in veterinary science and agronomy, Mahal decided to take the route of music instead of farming. In college he led a rhythm and blues band called Taj Mahal & The Elektras and, before heading for the U.S. West Coast, he was also part of a duo with Jessie Lee Kincaid.

Career

In 1964 he moved to Santa Monica, California, and formed Rising Sons with fellow blues rock musician Ry Cooder and Jessie Lee Kincaid, landing a record deal with Columbia Records soon after. The group was one of the first interracial bands of the period, which likely made them commercially unviable. An album was never released (though a single was) and the band soon broke up, though Legacy Records did release The Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder in 1992 with material from that period. During this time Mahal was working with others, musicians like Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Muddy Waters. Mahal stayed with Columbia after the Rising Sons to begin his solo career, releasing the self-titled Taj Mahal and The Natch'l Blues in 1968, and Giant Step/De Old Folks at Home with Kiowa session musician Jesse Ed Davis from Oklahoma, who played guitar and piano in 1969. During this time he and Cooder worked with the Rolling Stones, with whom he has performed at various times throughout his career. In 1968, he performed in the film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. He recorded a total of twelve albums for Columbia from the late 1960s into the 1970s. His work of the 1970s was especially important, in that his releases began incorporating West Indian and Caribbean music, jazz and reggae into the mix. In 1972, he acted in and wrote the film score for the movie Sounder, which starred Cicely Tyson. He reprised his role and returned as composer in the sequel, Part 2, Sounder.

In 1976 Mahal left Columbia and signed with Warner Bros. Records, recording three albums for them. One of these was another film score for 1977's Brothers; the album shares the same name. After his time with Warner Bros., he struggled to find another record contract, this being the era of heavy metal and disco music.

Stalled in his career, he decided to move to Kauai, Hawaii in 1981 and soon formed the Hula Blues Band. Originally just a group of guys getting together for fishing and a good time, the band soon began performing regularly and touring. He remained somewhat concealed from most eyes while working out of Hawaii throughout most of the 1980s before recording Taj in 1988 for Gramavision. This started a comeback of sorts for him, recording both for Gramavision and Hannibal Records during this time.

In the 1990s Mahal became deeply involved in supporting the nonprofit Music Maker Relief Foundation. As of 2019, he was still on the Foundation's advisory board.

In the 1990s he was on the Private Music label, releasing albums full of blues, pop, R&B and rock. He did collaborative works both with Eric Clapton and Etta James.

In 1998, in collaboration with renowned songwriter David Forman, producer Rick Chertoff and musicians Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nile, Joan Osborne, Rob Hyman, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm of the Band, and the Chieftains, he performed on the Americana album Largo based on the music of Antonín Dvořák.

In 1997 he won Best Contemporary Blues Album for Señor Blues at the Grammy Awards, followed by another Grammy for Shoutin' in Key in 2000. He performed the theme song to the children's television show Peep and the Big Wide World, which began broadcast in 2004.

In 2002, Mahal appeared on the Red Hot Organization's compilation album Red Hot and Riot in tribute to Nigerian afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. The Paul Heck produced album was widely acclaimed, and all proceeds from the record were donated to AIDS charities.

Taj Mahal contributed to Olmecha Supreme's 2006 album 'hedfoneresonance'. The Wellington-based group led by Mahal's son Imon Starr (Ahmen Mahal) also featured Deva Mahal on vocals.

Mahal partnered up with Keb' Mo' to release a joint album TajMo on May 5, 2017. The album has some guest appearances by Bonnie Raitt, Joe Walsh, Sheila E., and Lizz Wright, and has six original compositions and five covers, from artists and bands like John Mayer and The Who.

In 2013, Mahal appeared in the documentary film 'The Byrd Who Flew Alone', produced by Four Suns Productions. The film was about Gene Clark, one of the original Byrds, who was a friend of Mahal for many years.

In June 2017, Mahal appeared in the award-winning documentary film The American Epic Sessions, directed by Bernard MacMahon, recording Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere" on the first electrical sound recording system from the 1920s. Mahal appeared throughout the accompanying documentary series American Epic, commenting on the 1920s rural recording artists who had a profound influence on American music and on him personally.

Musical style

Mahal leads with his thumb and middle finger when fingerpicking, rather than with his index finger as the majority of guitar players do. "I play with a flatpick," he says, "when I do a lot of blues leads." Early in his musical career Mahal studied the various styles of his favorite blues singers, including musicians like Jimmy Reed, Son House, Sleepy John Estes, Big Mama Thornton, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, and Sonny Terry. He describes his hanging out at clubs like Club 47 in Massachusetts and Ash Grove in Los Angeles as "basic building blocks in the development of his music." Considered to be a scholar of blues music, his studies of ethnomusicology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst would come to introduce him further to the folk music of the Caribbean and West Africa. Over time he incorporated more and more African roots music into his musical palette, embracing elements of reggae, calypso, jazz, zydeco, R&B, gospel music, and the country blues—each of which having "served as the foundation of his unique sound." According to The Rough Guide to Rock, "It has been said that Taj Mahal was one of the first major artists, if not the very first one, to pursue the possibilities of world music. Even the blues he was playing in the early 70s – Recycling The Blues & Other Related Stuff (1972), Mo' Roots (1974) – showed an aptitude for spicing the mix with flavours that always kept him a yard or so distant from being an out-and-out blues performer." Concerning his voice, author David Evans writes that Mahal has "an extraordinary voice that ranges from gruff and gritty to smooth and sultry."

Taj Mahal believes that his 1999 album Kulanjan, which features him playing with the kora master of Mali's Griot tradition Toumani Diabate, "embodies his musical and cultural spirit arriving full circle." To him it was an experience that allowed him to reconnect with his African heritage, striking him with a sense of coming home. He even changed his name to Dadi Kouyate, the first jali name, to drive this point home. Speaking of the experience and demonstrating the breadth of his eclecticism, he has said:

The microphones are listening in on a conversation between a 350-year-old orphan and its long-lost birth parents. I've got so much other music to play. But the point is that after recording with these Africans, basically if I don't play guitar for the rest of my life, that's fine with me....With Kulanjan, I think that Afro-Americans have the opportunity to not only see the instruments and the musicians, but they also see more about their culture and recognize the faces, the walks, the hands, the voices, and the sounds that are not the blues. Afro-American audiences had their eyes really opened for the first time. This was exciting for them to make this connection and pay a little more attention to this music than before.

Taj Mahal has said he prefers to do outdoor performances, saying: "The music was designed for people to move, and it's a bit difficult after a while to have people sitting like they're watching television. That's why I like to play outdoor festivals-because people will just dance. Theatre audiences need to ask themselves: 'What the hell is going on? We're asking these musicians to come and perform and then we sit there and draw all the energy out of the air.' That's why after a while I need a rest. It's too much of a drain. Often I don't allow that. I just play to the goddess of music-and I know she's dancing."

Mahal has been quoted as saying, "Eighty-one percent of the kids listening to rap were not black kids. Once there was a tremendous amount of money involved in it ... they totally moved it over to a material side. It just went off to a terrible direction. ...You can listen to my music from front to back, and you don't ever hear me moaning and crying about how bad you done treated me. I think that style of blues and that type of tone was something that happened as a result of many white people feeling very, very guilty about what went down."

Awards

Taj Mahal has received three Grammy Awards (ten nominations) over his career.

1997 (Grammy Award) Best Contemporary Blues Album for Señor Blues

2000 (Grammy Award) Best Contemporary Blues Album for Shoutin' in Key

2006 (Blues Music Awards) Historical Album of the Year for The Essential Taj Mahal

2008 (Grammy Nomination) Best Contemporary Blues Album for Maestro

2018 (Grammy Award) Best Contemporary Blues Album for TajMo

On February 8, 2006 Taj Mahal was designated the official Blues Artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

In March 2006, Taj Mahal, along with his sister, the late Carole Fredericks, received the Foreign Language Advocacy Award from the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in recognition of their commitment to shine a spotlight on the vast potential of music to foster genuine intercultural communication.

On May 22, 2011, Taj Mahal received an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He also made brief remarks and performed three songs. A video of the performance can be found online.

In 2014, Taj Mahal received the Americana Music Association's Lifetime Achievement award.

Discography

Albums

1968 – Taj Mahal

1968 – The Natch'l Blues

1969 – Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home

1971 – Happy Just to Be Like I Am

1972 – Recycling The Blues & Other Related Stuff

1972 – Sounder (original soundtrack)

1973 – Oooh So Good 'n Blues

1974 – Mo' Roots

1975 – Music Keeps Me Together

1976 – Satisfied 'n Tickled Too

1976 – Music Fuh Ya'

1977 – Brothers

1977 – Evolution

1987 – Taj

1988 – Shake Sugaree

1991 – Mule Bone

1991 – Like Never Before

1993 – Dancing the Blues

1995 – Mumtaz Mahal (with V.M. Bhatt and N. Ravikiran)

1996 – Phantom Blues

1997 – Señor Blues

1998 – Sacred Island AKA Hula Blues (with The Hula Blues Band)

1999 – Blue Light Boogie

1999 – Kulanjan (with Toumani Diabaté)

2001 – Hanapepe Dream (with The Hula Blues Band)

2005 – Mkutano Meets the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar

2008 – Maestro

2014 – Talkin' Christmas (with Blind Boys of Alabama)

2016 – Labor of Love

2017 – TajMo (with Keb' Mo')

Live albums

1971 – The Real Thing

1972 – Recycling The Blues & Other Related Stuff

1972 – Big Sur Festival - One Hand Clapping

1979 – Live & Direct

1990 – Live at Ronnie Scott's

1996 – An Evening of Acoustic Music

2000 – Shoutin' in Key

2004 – Live Catch

2015 – Taj Mahal & The Hula Blues Band: Live From Kauai

Compilation albums

1980 – Going Home

1981 – The Best of Taj Mahal, Volume 1 (Columbia)

1992 – Taj's Blues

1993 – World Music

1998 – In Progress & In Motion: 1965-1998

1999 – Blue Light Boogie

2000 – The Best of Taj Mahal

2000 – The Best of the Private Years

2001 – Sing a Happy Song: The Warner Bros. Recordings

2003 – Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues – Taj Mahal

2003 – Blues with a Feeling: The Very Best of Taj Mahal

2005 – The Essential Taj Mahal

2012 – Hidden Treasures of Taj Mahal

Various artists featuring Taj Mahal

1968 – The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus

1968 – The Rock Machine Turns You On

1970 – Fill Your Head With Rock

1985 – Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed

1990 – The Hot Spot – original soundtrack

1991 – Vol Pour Sidney – one title only, other tracks by Charlie Watts, Elvin Jones, Pepsi, The Lonely Bears, Lee Konitz and others.

1992 – Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder

1992 – Smilin' Island of Song by Cedella Marley Booker and Taj Mahal.

1993 – The Source by Ali Farka Touré (World Circuit WCD030; Hannibal 1375)

1993 – Peace Is the World Smiling

1997 – Follow the Drinking Gourd

1997 – Shakin' a Tailfeather

1998 – Scrapple – original soundtrack

1998 – Largo

1999 – Hippity Hop

2001 – "Strut" – with Jimmy Smith on his album Dot Com Blues

2002 – Jools Holland's Big Band Rhythm & Blues (Rhino) – contributing his version of "Outskirts of Town"

2002 – Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Volume III – Lead vocals on Fishin' Blues, and lead in and first verse of the title track, with Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Alison Krauss, Doc Watson

2004 – Musicmakers with Taj Mahal (Music Maker 49)

2004 – Etta Baker with Taj Mahal (Music Maker 50)

2007 – Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino (Vanguard) – contributing his version of "My Girl Josephine"

2007 – Le Cœur d'un homme by Johnny Hallyday – duet on "T'Aimer si mal", written by French best-selling novelist Marc Levy

2009 – American Horizon – with Los Cenzontles, David Hidalgo

2011 – Play The Blues Live From Lincoln Jazz Center – with Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton, playing on "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "Corrine, Corrina"

2013 – "Poye 2" – with Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba on their album Jama Ko

2013 – "Winding Down" – with Sammy Hagar, Dave Zirbel, John Cuniberti, Mona Gnader, Vic Johnson on the album Sammy Hagar & Friends

2013 – Divided & United: The Songs of the Civil War – with a version of "Down by the Riverside"

2015 – "How Can a Poor Boy?" – with Van Morrison on his album Re-working the Catalogue

2017 – Music from The American Epic Sessions: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – contributing his version of "High Water Everywhere"

Filmography

Live DVDs

2002 – Live at Ronnie Scott's 1988

2006 – Taj Mahal/Phantom Blues Band Live at St. Lucia

2011 – Play The Blues Live From Lincoln Jazz Center – with Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton, playing on "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "Corrine, Corrina"

Movies

1972 – Sounder – as Ike

1977 – Brothers

1991 – Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

1996 – The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus

1998 – Outside Ozona

1998 – Six Days, Seven Nights

1998 – Blues Brothers 2000

1998 – Scrapple

2000 – Songcatcher

2002 – Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

2017 – American Epic

2017 – The American Epic Sessions

TV Shows

1977 - Saturday Night Live: Episode 048 Performer: Musical Guest

1985 - Theme song from Star Wars: Ewoks

1992 – New WKRP in Cincinnati – Moss Dies as himself

1999 – Party of Five – Fillmore Street as himself

2003 – Arthur – Big Horns George as himself

2004 – Theme song from Peep and the Big Wide World

#05/17

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vslumbrs · 5 years ago

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Czukay was born in 24 March 1938 in the Free City of Danzig, from which his family was expelled after World War II. Due to the turmoil of the war, Czukay's primary education was limited. One pivotal early experience, however, was working, when still a teenager, at a radio repair-shop, where he became fond of the aural qualities of radio broadcasts (anticipating his use of shortwave radio broadcasts as musical elements) and became familiar with the rudiments of electrical repair and engineering.[5]

Czukay studied music under Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1963 to 1966[6] and then worked for a while as a music teacher. Initially Czukay had little interest in rock music, but this changed when a student played him the Beatles' 1967 song "I Am the Walrus", a 1967 psychedelic rock single with an unusual musical structure and blasts of AM radio noise.[7] This opened his ears to music by rock experimentalists such as The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa.[7]

Czukay co-founded Can in 1968. He played bass guitar and performed most of the recording and engineering for the group. Rosko Gee, former bassist of the British band Traffic, joined the band in 1977, with Czukay handling only tapes and sound effects on album Saw Delight, his final LP with the group before departing for a solo career.[8]

After his departure from Can, Czukay recorded several albums. One of his trademarks was the use of shortwave radio sounds and his early pioneering of sampling,[9] in those days involving the painstaking cutting and splicing of magnetic tapes. He would tape-record various sounds and snippets from shortwave and incorporate them into his compositions. He also used shortwave as a live, interactive musical instrument (such as on 1991's Radio Wave Surfer), a method of composition he termed "radio painting". Czukay also stated "If you want to make something new, you shouldn't think too far beyond one certain idea".[10]

Czukay collaborated with a considerable number of musicians, notably a series of albums with Jah Wobble and David Sylvian,[6] two younger British musicians who shared his interest in blending pop music with experimental recording and sampling techniques. Other collaborators include U.N.K.L.E., Brian Eno, Eurythmics, and German Neue Deutsche Welle band Trio.[8]

In 2009, after a problematic time with the record company that had been gradually re-releasing his albums on CD, Czukay began a new collaboration with the Claremont 56 record label,[11] releasing vinyl-only remixes of tracks from earlier albums, as well as some new recordings. This approach changed Czukay's plans for his back catalogue, so that the original albums Der Osten ist Rot (1984), Rome Remains Rome (1987) and Moving Pictures (1993) are no longer being reissued (in the case of Moving Pictures, because the master tapes have degraded beyond repair).[12] Instead, most of the tracks are being remade and newly organized as limited edition vinyl releases.

In 2018 it was announced that Czukay's work was collected a new retrospective box set, Cinema, which would include both classic and unreleased material from his solo career. The five-disc set, to be released in March, would will also include many of his best-known collaborations, including those with Eno, Wobble, Sylvian and Stockhausen, as well as never-before-released material.[13]

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spaceintruderdetector · 2 years ago

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shortwave radio duo

improvisation for two shortwave radio at gallary Chifuriguri sendai, Miyagi JAPAN. Miki Naoe and Minoru Koike play the shortwave radio as musical instruments.

#shortwave radio #shortwave #radio #Miki Naoe #Minoru Koike #experimental music

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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years ago

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20 Years of Wilco’s Most Enduring Statement

BY JORDAN MAINZER

The version of Wilco that made Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was vastly different from the band that came both before and after it, and not just in lineup or even aesthetic. Wilco’s approach to the album, which is now celebrating its 20th anniversary of retail release, was deliberate, yet inventive, yielding what remains their most sonically and lyrically sophisticated work to date.

If you’re unaware of the record’s context, Sam Jones’ 2002 documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco details the lore and history behind it. Early on in its recording, Wilco replaced drummer Ken Coomer with Glenn Kotche. Jeff Tweedy and the late Jay Bennett were clashing, famously arguing over small elements in the album, like what should constitute the 10-second transition between “Ashes of American Flags” and “Heavy Metal Drummer”. Tweedy was suffering from migraines. And eventually, the band’s record label at the time, Reprise, a division of Warner Music Group, heard the record and thought it would be career killing, subsequently dropping Wilco. Of course, Wilco--eerily originally supposed to release the album, which contained a different set of twin towers on its cover, on 9/11--would stream the album for free on their website a week later and eventually get picked up by another Warner subsidiary, Nonesuch.

This month, in celebration of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s 20th anniversary, Wilco played five nights at New York’s United Palace Theatre and three at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. Each night’s schedule was purportedly pretty similar: a string quartet introducing the show, a full album play with that quartet and a horn section, followed by an encore of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era rarities and some older fan favorites. Friday night in Chicago, after the quartet--The Magnificent Strings as opposed to the Aizuri Quartet in NYC--played lines from “Reservations”, “War on War”, “Pot Kettle Black”, and “Poor Places”, Tweedy came from behind the curtain to turn on an old radio. It was an immediate reference to the album’s backstory: the title Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was taken from a series of letters in the phonetic alphabet Tweedy heard on The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, and a sample of the spoken title is prominently featured in “Poor Places”. (To add to Wilco’s YHF-related woes, The Conet Project’s record label, Irdial-Discs, would sue Wilco for copyright infringement, which reached an out-of-court settlement.) The curtain lifted to reveal upside-down, minimal columns resembling the Marina City towers. The band launched into “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”, all of the studio album’s pristine effects in hand, even the high-pitched note that led into “Kamera”.

Everything, from the effects to the actual acoustic playing of the songs, was on point, faithful to the album. “Kamera”, which has seen bouncier, power-chord heavy arrangements in recent years, was the sly, subdued version from the record. Tweedy’s rolling acoustic guitars and Kotche’s military march drums popped up on “Radio Cure”. That infamous chopped piano and drum machine from “Ashes of American Flags” into “Heavy Metal Drummer” made its way into the performance, as did the stop-start lawnmower guitars of “I’m The Man Who Loves You” and the coda of “Reservations”. And yes, just like on Colbert the other night, during “Poor Places”, Tweedy pumped his fist with every stab of feedback, as the words “yankee hotel foxtrot” repeated.

Let’s talk about the remarkable “Reservations”, one of the only times I’ve ever seen Tweedy on stage not accompanied by an instrument. Of all the lines on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, “I’ve got reservations about so many things / But not about you,” is, to me, the most resonant, applicable when directed to a loving partner or practiced craft, moving as long as we continue to occupy the hell world that surrounds us. In between verses, a guitar-less Tweedy awkwardly stood and swayed, those reservations showing. But as always, he’s as sure as ever about art and music.

It’s this sureness that allows Tweedy the strength to revisit an album that’s a classic but that also is inseparable from a fraught time in Tweedy’s, Wilco’s, and American history. He thanked the crowd for “being that quiet for that long on a Friday night”, The Magnificent Strings, the horn section, and album mixer Jim O’ Rourke by covering a song the band learned from his record collection, Bill Fay’s “Be Not So Fearful”. But hearing Tweedy acknowledge Bennett’s influence on the band so publicly was the olive branch everyone was waiting for, and Wilco truly did it by performing their favorite songs they wrote with him in the band. Summerteeth’s wonderfully epic “Pieholden Suite”--a multitudinous Bennett-influenced tune if there ever was one, with everything from banjo to synthesizers--was a clear precursor to the complex arrangements of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. They played a few deep cuts, “Cars Can’t Escape” and “The Good Part”, (which first surfaced on 2014 rarities compilation Alpha Mike Foxtrot), and More Like the Moon’s cha cha “A Magazine Called Sunset”. In introducing “The Good Part”, Tweedy said, “This is one of the songs we sent Warner Bros., and their response was, “It gets worse every time.” The beloved A Ghost Is Born tune “Hummingbird”, a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot outtake, was one of three “regulars” in the encore, along with rousing Being There jams “Monday” and “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”, the part of the night that was more a celebration than anything.

In September, Wilco will release 7 special reissues of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the most in-depth a Super Deluxe version with a remaster, outtakes and demos, the band’s full interview on Sound Opinions a week after 9/11, and a live concert. I won’t give too much away, but I’ll say this: It’s not going to change your opinion about how great the original album is, and that’s a good thing. While the reissue doesn’t necessarily contain essential alternative versions of the songs, it further illuminates the band’s creative process in ways Jones’ documentary doesn’t. For an album as deep as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that’s more than you can ask for. When Jeff Tweedy joked, “See you in 20 years!” towards the end of the band’s Friday set, I thought to myself that the idea isn’t as ludicrous as it sounds. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will provoke and inspire, and while its history will stay the same, its story will always grow along with us.

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snackpointcharlie · 3 years ago

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Snackpoint Charlie: worldly music for wearying times, live on the radio every first and third Wednesday from 10PM-midnight EDT on WGXC 90.7-FM in New York’s Hudson Valley and archived afterwards at WGXC.org. Our latest audio rochambeau is now in the podcast archive at https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/4dgab5

Art: “Surrender” by Giorgio Ajello https://www.instagram.com/giorgioajello/ https://twitter.com/GiorgioAjello

Snackpoint Charlie - Transmission 073 - 2021.08.18 PLAYLIST

1) Baligh Hamdi - “Chaka Chico” from INSTRUMENTAL MODAL POP OF 1970'S EGYPT https://sublime-frequencies.bandcamp.com/album/instrumental-modal-pop-of-1970s-egypt

2) Ahmad Zahir - “Yar Az Ma Judaye Maikunad” from AFGHAN MUSIC ALBUM 10 https://www.afghan123.com/

3) “Zahir Hawayda (1977 Afghanistan)” from GOOD LISTENER - VOLUME 2 https://goodlisteners.bandcamp.com

(underbed throughout:) Pinetop Gherkins - “Avante-Garters”

4) Ramone - “Soul Reggae Prisonnier” from SOUL REGGAE PRISONNIER / BAL SOUKI SOUKI https://lesdisquesbongojoe.bandcamp.com/album/soul-reggae-prisonnier-bal-souki-souki

5) ดิอิมพอสซิเบิ้ล (The Impossibles) - “ไหนว่าจะจ (Why)” from เป็นไปไม่ได้ (PEN PAI MAI DAI [IMPOSSIBLE]) https://monrakplengthai.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-impossibles-pen-pai-mai-dai.html https://www.discogs.com/artist/1056958-The-Impossibles-3

6) Arthur Lyman - “‘Imi Au Ia ‘Oe (King's Serenade)” from ISLAND VIBES https://arthurlyman.bandcamp.com

7) Nora Orlandi - “A Doppia Faccia” from A DOPPIA FACCIA https://www.discogs.com/Nora-Orlandi-A-Doppia-Faccia/release/14869649

8) Ghosts of the Moog - “(unknown)” https://soundcloud.com/magicteapotrecords/sets/ghosts-of-the-moog-unknown https://soundcloud.com/magicteapotrecords/ghosts-of-the-moog-1-unknown-south-american-synth-porn-197x

9) Kostas Bezos and the White Birds - “Πάμε στη Χονολουλού (Let's Go To Honolulu)” from KOSTAS BEZOS AND THE WHITE BIRDS https://olvidorecords.bandcamp.com/album/kostas-bezos-and-the-white-birds

10) Jenks "Tex" Carman - “Hillbilly Hula” from CHIPPEHA! THE ESSENTIAL DIXIE COWBOY (1947-1957) https://www.discogs.com/Jenks-Tex-Carman-Chippeha-The-Essential-Dixie-Cowboy-1947-1957/release/1213303

11) Makoto Kubota - “Cowboy Datta Koro (When I Was a Cowboy)” from DIXIE FEVER https://wewantsounds.bandcamp.com/album/dixie-fever

12) ሃሎ ዳዌ / Halo Dawe - “አገተጋታ ሱታ ሚጊራ (Agetegata Suta Migira)” from ETHIO ROCK'N'ROLL - ORCHESTRAS & RHYTHM, FUZZ AND WAHWAH GUITAR IN ETHIOPIA & ERITREA, 70S & 80S https://ultraaanirecords.bandcamp.com/album/dj-mitmitta-ethio-rock-n-roll-mixtape https://www.mixcloud.com/mitmitta/ethio-rocknroll-orchestras-rhythm-and-fuzz-guitar-in-ethiopia-eritrea-70s-80s-side-a/

13) Prodip Dohutia & Madhumati Goswami - “Boroxar Nixate” from ASSAMESE SONGS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRt0eIAlvAo https://www.discogs.com/release/19791259 https://www.mixcloud.com/digginginindia/

14) Hoàng Oanh - “Ngày Sau Sẽ Ra Sao [How Will Tomorrow Turn Out]” from SAIGON ROCK & SOUL: VIETNAMESE CLASSIC TRACKS 1968-1974 https://sublime-frequencies.bandcamp.com/album/saigon-rock-soul-vietnamese-classic-tracks-1968-1974

Shortwave Follies including

15) (excerpt from) JAPAN IN SOUNDS (KYOTO) https://www.discogs.com/Unknown-Artist-Japan-In-Sounds-KYOTO/release/12467662

16) Lydia Carey - “Trash Collection,” “Banjo on Metro,” “Angrier Junk-Man,” and “Water Vendor” from THE SOUNDS OF MEXICO CITY REVEALED http://mexicocitystreets.com/2016/09/29/sounds-mexico-city-revealed/

17) KAADA - “It Must Have Been The Coffee” from CLOSING STATEMENTS https://mirakel.bandcamp.com/album/closing-statements incorporating 18) (excerpt from) DR. MICHAEL DEAN'S HYPNOSIS RECORD https://www.discogs.com/Dr-Michael-Dean-Dr-Michael-Deans-Hypnosis-Record/master/1307152

19) Rabbit Rules - “Jimbo Petty on the Moon (Lathe Cut Ver)” from JIMBO PETTY ON THE MOON https://rrrs.bandcamp.com/album/jimbo-petty-on-the-moon

20) Dr. Sadiq Fitrat Nashenas - “از غمت میروم (I Go Out of Grief [I Am Sad])” from از غمت میروم / اگر عشوه نمائی (I GO OUT OF GRIEF / IF YOU FLIRT) https://www.mixcloud.com/madsnimannjensen/the-lost-78s-45s-from-afghanistan-4/ https://www.discogs.com/%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B4%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B3-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%BA%D9%85%D8%AA-%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%B1%D9%88%D9%85-%D8%A7%DA%AF%D8%B1-%D8%B9%D8%B4%D9%88%D9%87-%D9%86%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A6%DB%8C/release/12953488 https://soundcloud.com/nashenas-official

21) Rabiab Watasin - “Happy Birthday” from THAI HAPPY BIRTHDAY SONGS

22) M. Zawari - “خليك هنا -ورده” https://soundcloud.com/m_zawari/0izx5ndd3fxs?in=dead-or-arai-yumi/sets/arab

#snackpointcharliewgxc #snackpointcharlieradio #radioforopenears #hellsdonuthouse #communityradio #freeformradio #outernational #hudsonvalley #globalmusic #worldmusic #globalbeat #wgxcradio #hudsonny #wgxc

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upalldown · 4 years ago

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_ds Pee AT STATES END!

Seventh studio album from the Canadian post-rock stalwarts produced by The Besnard Lakes guitarist Jace Lasek

8/13

For the entirety of its existence, the Canadian post-rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor has eschewed interviews, choosing instead to communicate collectively through terse, unsigned (and uncapitalized) statements.

“this record,” reads the one accompanying the band’s new album G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END, “is about all of us waiting for the end.”

The truth is, Godspeed’s entire body of work over the past three decades has felt like a prelude to an end—an end that feels closer than ever before. It is surely no coincidence, then, that G_d’s Pee arrives now, its 52 minutes stuffed with forbidding drones, symphonic despair, eerie found sounds and vast swaths of epic, instrumental rock befitting the apocalypse and whatever comes after.

It’s good to have this side of Godspeed back. Since returning from a seven-year hiatus in 2010, the enigmatic ensemble has been creeping ever-so-slowly toward more conventional presentations of its hulking music. For 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, the band ditched the complex, multi-movement suites of its most revered work in favor of standalone compositions (that still sometimes stretched beyond 20 minutes). On 2015’s Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, they reined in their songs and released their shortest album, clocking in at just over 40 minutes long. Then, when 2017’s Luciferian Towers came along, longtime fans were greeted with eight tracks averaging under six minutes each, plus a generous helping of memorable melodies. For this particular band, these were pop songs, relatively speaking—if a pop song can be titled “Bosses Hang,” at least.

Having zigged for a while, Godspeed zags (of course) on G_d’s Pee, bringing back some of the inscrutable elements that made the band so interesting in the first place. The 20-minute opening track—let’s call it “A Military Alphabet” because the full name is so long—surrounds a pair of heavy, anxious passages (“Job’s Lament” and “First of the Last Glaciers”) with cryptic spoken words from murky shortwave radio recordings, groaning stringed instruments and the unnerving pop of explosives. Together, these touches add a haunting quality that was in short supply on recent Godspeed releases.

The album’s other long track—“‘GOVERNMENT CAME’” for short—follows a similar formula, except this time, the mood is less aggressive, the strings are prettier and the crescendo collapses into static. Out of that static, then, comes “Cliffs Gaze / cliffs’ gaze at empty waters’ rise / ASHES TO SEA or NEARER TO THEE,” which spends the first half its eight-minute running time waking up, and the second half ascending into a triumphant lope that might just be the most hopeful-sounding four minutes in Godspeed’s catalog. Here, for a first-pumping moment, the band seems to outrun its feelings of anger, fear, disgust and disillusionment, and give in to the promise of a brighter future, no matter how distant that future may seem.

For those deeply steeped in Godspeed’s usual vibe, the sound and sentiment of “Cliffs Gaze” may feel like a hallucination, especially once it’s over. As if to reinforce the message of hope, the band follows it with a final, six-and-a-half-minute drone that sounds like the sun fighting to rise and shine over a callous and crumbling world. It’s called “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.),” and it’s glitchy and mournful and beautiful. But most of all, it’s heartening, because it feels like reassurance that Godspeed You! Black Emperor isn’t just here to soundtrack the end, but the new beginning, too.

youtube

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/godspeed-you-black-emperor/g-ds-pee-at-states-end-album-review/

#godspeed you! black emperor #g_ds pee at states end

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shootdatscreen · 8 years ago

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CASIO CK 200 (aka my most needed thing)

Probably one of the rarest boomboxes out there, this Casio surfaced briefly in 1985. It was their second effort to create a crossover musical intstrument/entertainment system, preceeded by their KX-101 a year earlier. This one has a simple look but don’t be fooled! The keyboard is feature-packed with percussion options and instrument selection. The radio is a three-bander, tuning AM, FM and shortwave. The system is light, compact and very portable. Imagine our happiness when we grabbed this one as “new old stock” at a local electronics shop, brand new in the box.

I WANT IT SO BAD

#gimme #casio #ck 200 #1985 #eighties #synth #boombox #vintage #hifi #need

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dustedmagazine · 3 years ago

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Reinier van Houdt — Mouths Without A Head (Discreet Editions)

Photo by Martijn van Hennik

Mouths Without A Head by Reinier Van Houdt

Mouths Without A Head responds to the complicated time in which it was made by seeking to vibrate in sympathy with a centuries-old collection of music, Prophetiae Sibyllarum (Sibylline Prophecies), that has a complicated relationship with time. Orlando Di Lasso’s Prophecies, which were published in 1600, are a cycle of choral works whose texts expressed visionary anticipation of Christ’s appearance a millennium and a half after the predicted events actually took place. Lasso’s works are much studied for his use of chromaticism (the use of tones outside of scales), which seems much closer to contemporary than Renaissance-era practice.

Dutch musician / composer Reinier van Houdt, whose repertoire includes piano music by Michael Pisaro and Alvin Curran, as well as sideman gigs with Current 93, created Mouths Without A Head after being forced from the stage by the COVID pandemic. He began it by transferring Lasso’s hard to pin down stance vis-à-vis past, present and future to the relationship between speech and sound. It opens with swelling, wordless syllables, which disappear into the captured sound of the wind. Then, as the voice appears and vanishes, an acoustic guitar (played, like every other instrument on the record, by van Houdt), stitches an antique pattern that is patently incapable of confining that which it ostensibly accompanies. Piano and harp each take a crack at the job, and while none really seem to relate to the wordless utterances, the vocals, which are sourced from stutter therapy tapes and shortwave and numbers radio station broadcasts, grow ever less fixed. Creeping piano and flickering synthesizer passages manifest and then likewise vanish, blown aside by a ten-minute blast of stuttering electronics. In the home stretch, van Houdt’s piano seems to go out of phase with itself; the only clear message, it seems, is that nothing is stable or clear. I don’t know about you, but that’s how a lot of 2020 felt to me, and the sympathetic vibration between music and zeitgeist gives this album an impact far more forceful than one would expect, given the prevailing restraint of van Houdt’s playing.

Discreet Editions was instituted by Baroque musician Mara Winter and experimental musician Clara de Asís to find similarly sympathetic vibrations between early and late music. Mouths Without A Head is the label’s second release, and it augurs a refreshingly unpredictable dialogue between eras.

Bill Meyer

#reinier van houdt #mouths without a head #discreet editions #bill meyer #albumreview #dusted magazine #prophetiae sibyllarum #Orlando Di Lasso #electroacoustic composition

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theghostsalontapes · 8 years ago

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Pushing Off From Shore...

In June of 2016, my wife/bandmate Denny and I relocated from North Carolina (a lifetime home for Denny and a longtime home for myself) to Memphis, Tennessee. We renamed our musical project from Lost Trail to Nonconnah to reflect the move and begin anew with a fresh slate, and in honor of Memphis waterway Nonconnah Creek. We soon purchased a home on the outskirts of Memphis, in rural Fayette County, which came complete with a spacious former beauty salon attached to the garage. This was to become our new recording space, and to remark upon its former usage, we named it Ghost Salon. Now, in April of 2017, as we near the end of our first year of adjusting to new environs and friends, that space is ready for use. As I’ve said in interviews and in person, the new Nonconnah album is going to differ from Lost Trail’s work in a number of ways. Nonconnah will be more collaborative in spirit than Lost Trail, bringing in a number of musically-inclined (and maybe non-musically-inclined) friends from across the earth, but especially aiming to utilize the diverse musical community in Memphis as much as possible. The work will still be thoroughly experimental, but less hemmed-in by particulars of genre; ambient and drone are beautiful shades, but there’s many more colors to paint with. Most importantly, this is going to be a large-scale, long-form project. No more churning out endless streams of music like Robert Pollard on a meth bender. We’re taking the time to carefully craft what we do, and it will take years to get it right, probably with a host of leftovers to show for it. This is an ambitious project covering a huge number of themes and sub-themes, and it will incorporate many visuals and writings as well as a (surely lengthy) collection of music. I’ll expand on the feelings and moods behind the album as the recording comes together. Right now, it’s all a drifting haze of half-built comprehensions, and who knows where these sessions will take us? I hope to alter many of my ingrained work habits in this project, focusing more on the particulars of layering and mixing than in the past, using a wider array of instruments, and re-learning how to read notation as well as (hopefully) improve my piano and vocal skills. I’ve purchased a whiteboard for longhand idea scrawling, and I’m starting this blog as a way to document the minutiae of the album’s sessions as they come together (I’ve tried this before and not stuck with it, hopefully this time will be different). Denny will also be contributing more in the way of instruments themselves on this album, in addition to her field recording work. In many ways it’s still Lost Trail, but in many ways it isn’t. I think our best work is yet to come. So let’s begin. Today, 04/12/17, was the first day I spent a considerable amount of time in the studio. I had planned to start the recording process in earnest the previous week, but an unfortunate accident involving a pitcher of lemonade and my Macbook Air meant I was delayed while a replacement shipped to us. Now I’m working with an older Macbook Pro, which despite its age I’m enjoying much more than the Air (it’s more solidly built, with more memory and a DVD drive). Here’s hoping it survives these sessions. I spent today rebuilding my guitar pedalboard, a tedious but necessary task involving much yanking of velcro and untangling of wires. I have a good dozen or more pedals in addition to the ones now on the board, some of them ‘nicer’ than what I put in place today, but this is what I’m feeling is right for the beginning of this album (I’ll probably change everything in a month or so, anyway). For example, there’s considerable snobbery in the guitar pedal world concerning Behringer pedals, but they’re ample Boss clones as long as you use them gently, considerate of their cheap plastic housing. I had hoped to upgrade all my pedals earlier in the year, but life expenses got in the way. So it goes. I’m nothing if not an old pro at making do with what I have available on-hand, and I’m lucky to have a wealth of plug-ins on board, as well. As in the past, I’ll mostly be using GarageBand and Audacity for tracking, and my Zoom H2, in an effort to keep things simple. I’ll experiment with other DAWs as time goes on, though I’ve never liked being overwhelmed with options. The new signal chain follows... JHS Little Black Buffer>Raygun FX Super Fuzz Boy>Devi Ever Rocket Mangler>Behringer Ultra Feedback>Digitech Whammy Ricochet>Behringer Space Chorus>Boss Tera Echo>Boss PS3 Pitch-Shifter/Delay>Behringer Slow Motion>Digitech Element Multi-Effects>TC Electronic Flashback Delay>TC Electronic Polytune 2 Mini>Alesis Wedge Reverb Module>Digitech Jamman Stereo Looper I always use a number of accessories in my playing as well, such as a bottleneck slide, a flathead screwdriver, an E-bow, a violin bow, a broken computer speaker, various tape machines, a portable shortwave radio, and various toy laser guns. On this album I plan to play - electric guitar, acoustic guitar, classical guitar, banjo, dulcimer, glockenspiel, piano, accordion, harpsichord, chord organ, electric organ (I picked up a Baldwin Fun Machine not too long ago), drums, synthesizers, drum machine, music box, wine glasses, lap steel, Marxophone, melodica, violin, yerbonitsa, mandolin, hand percussion, bowed cymbal, bowed tape recorder (I built one myself), theremin and voice. Others, and Denny, will contribute these and other instruments. I’m going to mostly leave it in folks’ hands what they contribute. Though I own a number of guitars and amps, and plan to use them all, my main electric for this album will be my Reverend Ron Asheton signature, and my main amp will be my Roland Jazz Chorus 60. This is what I mostly use live lately, and I think it’s a setup that I’m comfortable creating with.

Before sleep tonight, I’m going to begin the long and arduous process of going back through my ‘demos’ folder and picking likely candidates to be fleshed out into full songs (this is also new for me, I’ve never demo’d for an album before). Since early July of 2015, I’ve been recording bits and ideas and rough demos with whatever instrument was on hand, wherever I found myself (a friend’s ukulele while house-sitting in Carrboro, NC, a broken piano by the side of the road in Snow Camp. NC). This, along with collected field recordings from the past nearly two years gathered by myself and Denny, has swelled into quite a gargantuan of .wavs. Now it’s time to parse strong ideas from weak; I hope I’m up to the task of judging these snippets. Tomorrow I plan to at least test out the new Apogee USB interface I picked up, and see if it’s as suitable for line-in recording as I hope. If I’m lucky, I may be able to find some time to begin proper recording before the end of the day. I’ll keep you posted as to my progress. Until then! ZC Listening to: Do Make Say Think - STUBBORN PERSISTENT ILLUSIONS, The Robot Ate Me - ON VACATION Reading: Stewart O’Nan - SNOW ANGELS (again) Watching: THE PATH, Hulu

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