Category: music
Melting pot
A resident of England, who spends much of his time in Nova Scotia working on Seaside’s rural high-speed Internet project, writes from Tel Aviv, where he is attending a wedding:
An Irish fiddle band is providing the music for the wedding. The band members are all Israelis. I was chatting with one of them, and he asked what I did. I told him about Seaside and spending half my life in Canada.
“I’m going to Canada in the autumn,” he said. “I’m going somewhere called Cape Breton, for a festival called Celtic Colours.”
So a Londoner visiting Israel meets an Israeli playing in an Irish fiddle band, and what do they have in common? Cape Breton and the Celtic Colours International Festival, of course.
Pomplamoose
Two weeks ago, Contrarian featured a exceptionally funny and creative YouTube video by two dorky techno musicians from Leeds, comprising two-thirds of the Brett Domino Trio. I didn’t say so at the time, but these guys strike me as worthy 2010 inheritors of the 1960s folk revival. They make their own music, using an assortment of real and pseudo instruments. They exemplify the indie knack for using the Internet to bypass industry middlemen en route to fans (and, potentially, a living).
Here, thanks to James Fallows, is a similar but even more successful YouTube group, Pomplamoose, covering the sublime Chordettes hit, Mr. Sandman:
Pomplamoose doesn’t have a record company or a publicist, and has never produced a CD, but some of their YouTube videos have been viewed four million times. They’re making a nice little living* selling MP3s on their website and on iTunes. In an interview with National Public Radio, bandmates Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn explained the rules underlying the genre.
“There’s no hidden sounds, there’s no lip-synching, there’s no overdubbing. What you see is what you hear,” Conte says. “Sometimes, there might be two or three Natalys harmonizing with herself, and then you’ll see those three videos juxtaposed together on the screen.”
“I guess I kinda don’t like how there’s such a pedestal for music culture and especially for band culture,” he says. “It just feels fake; it feels like smoke and mirrors. I feel like music doesn’t have to be like that. It can be something that’s very normal and very accessible.”
According to Dawn and Conte, the process of creating a song, shooting and editing a video, and posting it on YouTube only takes about a week. The duo buys mechanical licenses for all of its covers online, which is a quick and easy process.
“That’s the thing,” Dawn says. “People think that all of these things have to be done by geniuses behind huge desks or at the top of skyscrapers, but you can just go online and do it yourself.”
“If you can’t just do … the production, the instruments and everything all by yourself, then you do need help. That’s something that labels are really good at,” Dawn says. “If, for example, you’re somebody who writes songs, like Lady Gaga, and you need everything that’s gonna make you Lady Gaga, YouTube’s not gonna be able to do that. You need a big fat label. But if you’re just a band, I don’t think we’re in an era anymore where you need that sort of major backing.”
–
* It can’t have hurt that Toyota tapped Pomlamoose’s Sandman cover for an Avalon ad.
Two dweebs from Leeds
Brett Domino and Steven Peavis use a variety of electronic folk instruments to perform a medley of Justin Timberlake tunes:
Featured instruments include Stylophone Beatbox, DigiDrummer Lite on the iPod Touch, Kazoo, Thumb Piano, Shaker, Stylophone, Cowbell, Recorder, Ukulele, Theremin, Spoons, and Roland AX-Synth.
Via: Andrew Sullivan.
Crowdsourcing art
Chris Milk, who has directed videos for Kanye West, U2, Courtney Love, and Barack Obama, is assembling a few thousand volunteers to complete an animated music video for Ain’t No Grave, title track of the last album Johnny Cash recorded.
The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to use custom drawing tools to create the 1,368 frames in the 2 minute, 51 second, video. Since more than one artist will end up submitting artwork for each frame, the video will look different each time it’s played. Writes Milk:
Strung together and relayed in sequence, your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the legendary Man in Black.
Didn’t I make you feel?
Theresa Malenfant takes another little piece of Halifax’s heart at Bearly’s Friday night.
Right string, wrong yo-yo.
At the Northside Tavern in Atlanta, Georgia, last night, bartender Cory Gillen was showing off his Atlanta Thrashers tattoo as the Trashers’ game with the Florida Panthers played on the TV above.
The Thrashers won, 2-1, on a Rich Peverley shootout goal, just in time for the tavern’s main act, the gravelly voiced, 69(?)-year-old, Beverly “Guitar” Watkins (below), “a pyrotechnic guitar maven whose searing, ballistic attacks on the guitar have become allegorical tales within the blues community.”
In the late ‘fifties, Watkins played with the band “Dr. Feelgood, The Interns, and The Nurse,” who recorded the single called, Right String But The Wrong Yo-Yo.
Backing Watkins last night was the Northside’s house band, fronted by Danny “Mudcat” Dudeck.
Frank MacDonald’s baseball song
Frank MacDonald also sent us a song he wrote “many years ago.”
“There has never been a musician I could interest in it,” he writes. “Not being a singer myself, I converted into a talking blues that I entertain myself with from time to time in the car, As a old Brooklyn Dodger fan, you may enjoy it. As a Cleveland fan my chances to enjoy things have been few and far between since 1954.”
SANDLOT KID
He lived on a park bench, reading baseball box scores
And paid his way doing odd and end chores.
But he loved to remember when baseball was magic,
And said, “What happened to baseball was tragic.”
But from the deep center seats, he still coached every game
And cheered a good play, while adding, “It still not the same.”
And he’d go on about what it used to be like
When ball payers were ball players and a strike was a strikeChorus:
He was the sandlot kid, dreaming things he never did,
A Triple A player without major league flair
Who grew old in a slum, happy to be a bleacher bum
Who loved every game he took in,
and died wishing the Dodgers would move back to BrooklynHe’d talk to strangers over his coffee cup
About players that he’d met on their way up
“Duke and Mickey and Peewee and Stan
All thought I coulda been a big league utility man
He remembered their names, though they all forgot his
And he kept them alive from that time until this
At a Little League game, everyone stared when he roared
“Hang in there, kid, you look just like Whitey Ford!”When the team was working out, he sat alone in the stands
He’d been tagged out trying to score on his plans
Just a tired old man in a battered baseball cap
A might-have-been waiting his turn at the bat
And yesterday, yes he’d of gone to the game
But he was tired and glad it was called by rain
And he lay down with an illness that never healed
And left a sad little note, saying “Bury me in Ebbet’s Field.[Chorus]
A load of Minglewood
L to R: Bassist Fred Lavery, guitarist Dave McKeough, and old time rocker Matt Mainglewood, testing the limits of the iPhone's flashless camera.
A decidedly graying crowd of hardcore Matt Minglewood fans packed the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club over the weekend for the latest in Colleen MacDonald’s Load of Wood music nights.
Minglewood was joined by some of Cape Breton’s best loved session musicians, including Fred Lavery on bass, Dave McKeough on guitar, Ian Aker on sax, Kenny Boone on mouth harp, and James Munroe on trombone.
To receive e-mail notification of these occasional (and mercifully early – 6 to 10 p.m.!) sessions, email loadofmusic [at] gmail.com.
A day at the office
Five talented office workers with questionable taste in music:
