Wednesday 30 September 2009
Girlz With Gunz # 82 (Back to the beginning!)
One of Australia's best-known young female artists, Hazel Dooney posed for a series of study photographs in the desert near Lake Eyre, Australia, in 2001 The photographs were later be used to create a series of large, high gloss enamel paintings that were exhibited around the country, a year later. The works can be seen here and the study photos here.
This is where it all began exactly one year ago today!
Quickly followed by this...
(So you can see that Ms Dooney and I go way back LOL!)
This is where it all began exactly one year ago today!
Quickly followed by this...
(So you can see that Ms Dooney and I go way back LOL!)
Tuesday 29 September 2009
New band (and song) for Thom Yorke
The steady flow of recent Thom Yorke news continues with an exciting new development. Yorke has posted on Radiohead's blog that he has started a new band to perform his solo material. The band (pictured above) consists of himself, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck/R.E.M. drummer Joey Waronker, percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco, and... Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. Yes, Flea.
Two shows have been scheduled for the as-yet-unnamed band: October 4 and 5 at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. Thom writes, "the set will not be very long cuz ..well ...we haven't got that much material yet!"
The only question is: will Flea keep his shirt on?
Get the full info here.
Get the full info here.
He has also contributed a cover of Marc Mulcahy's 'All For The Best' for the album 'Ciao My Shining star' which also includes Mercury Rev, Dinosaur Jr, The National and Michael Stipe amongst others covering songs written by Mulcahy.The proceeds from the album are to help him bring up his twin daughters following the sudden tragic death of his wife, Melissa, in 2008.
Fela Live! (1971)
Rare early footage (shot by Ginger Baker) featuring Fela & Afrika 70 performing in the rainy southeastern town of Calabar, shortly after the the Nigerian civil war.
Simply astonishing!
(Thanx Don)
Simply astonishing!
(Thanx Don)
Spanish imprint Vampi Soul has reissued three new Afrobeat and Highlife music collections, available in the U.S. through Light in the Attic distribution. These three releases add to the label’s growing catalog of Latin, African, and South American classic soul, rock, and psychedelic pop titles.Their first offering is a stunner: Fela Kuti’s Lagos Baby: 1963 – 1969, issued as both a double-CD or three-LP set, plus a bonus 10” single. The collection features early recordings by Fela Ransome-Kuti and the Koola Lobitos (his band before he formed Egypt 70) that blend Highlife, jazz, soul, and other influences to form the sound he later popularized as Afrobeat. These recordings are licensed from The Fela Kuti Estate and Premier Records, with liner notes by African specialist Max Reinhardt and artwork by Victor Aparicio. The bonus vinyl 10" captures Fela’s "Afro Beat On Stage, recorded Live at the Afro Spot" performance, with original artwork and liner notes.
Vampi Soul’s Highlife Time! collection recounts the formation of West Africa’s signature jazz-pop dance music during an era of rapid post-colonial change. The hybrid style is as celebratory as the historical time itself, featuring rollicking guitars, blazing horns, and intricate vocal harmonies. The two-disc or three-LP set features Highlife legends like Accra, Roy Chicago, Rex Lawson, and Dr. Victor Olaiya. If Fela’s Afrobeat is all you know about West African music, this is a natural next step. To quote the Vampi Soul crew: “Highlife became the soundtrack for a [continent] freeing itself from the shackles of an empire.”
The third Vampi Soul reissue, Afrobeat Nirvana, is a collection of late '50s to late '80s West African sounds, featuring established names like Tony Allen, Orlando Julius, and Fela himself, as well as more obscure West African musicians like Fred Fisher and Opotopo.
Spanish imprint Vampi Soul has also reissued three new Afrobeat and Highlife music collections, available in the U.S. through Light in the Attic distribution. These three releases add to the label’s growing catalog of Latin, African, and South American classic soul, rock, and psychedelic pop titles.
Their first offering is a stunner: Fela Kuti’s Lagos Baby: 1963 – 1969, issued as both a double-CD or three-LP set, plus a bonus 10” single. The collection features early recordings by Fela Ransome-Kuti and the Koola Lobitos (his band before he formed Egypt 70) that blend Highlife, jazz, soul, and other influences to form the sound he later popularized as Afrobeat. These recordings are licensed from The Fela Kuti Estate and Premier Records, with liner notes by African specialist Max Reinhardt and artwork by Victor Aparicio. The bonus vinyl 10" captures Fela’s "Afro Beat On Stage, recorded Live at the Afro Spot" performance, with original artwork and liner notes.
Vampi Soul’s Highlife Time! collection recounts the formation of West Africa’s signature jazz-pop dance music during an era of rapid post-colonial change. The hybrid style is as celebratory as the historical time itself, featuring rollicking guitars, blazing horns, and intricate vocal harmonies. The two-disc or three-LP set features Highlife legends like Accra, Roy Chicago, Rex Lawson, and Dr. Victor Olaiya. If Fela’s Afrobeat is all you know about West African music, this is a natural next step. To quote the Vampi Soul crew: “Highlife became the soundtrack for a [continent] freeing itself from the shackles of an empire.”
The third Vampi Soul reissue, Afrobeat Nirvana, is a collection of late '50s to late '80s West African sounds, featuring established names like Tony Allen, Orlando Julius, and Fela himself, as well as more obscure West African musicians like Fred Fisher and Opotopo.
Just under an hour of Fela in concert!
"I don't know it must have been the roses..."
Richard Hell
Oscar Rodriguez Lopez
Why?Roses certainly seem to be in bloom in the record label design world at the moment it would appear.
Album review of the year
There is a sense in which fans of Ian Brown are the Bilderberg Group of rock. They are a large, shadowy organisation. No one outside their mysterious ranks really understands their actions or motives, but it’s clear they wield considerable influence: enough at least to keep the former Stone Roses frontman thriving in the music business. His career has survived incarceration, accusations of homophobia and the oft-mentioned but incontrovertible fact that, away from the dulcifying technologies of the recording studio, his voice sounds less like something you’d actually pay money to listen to than something you’d deploy to stop ships crashing into Lizard Point in poor visibility. On several occasions over the last decade, the present writer has attempted to go undercover, infiltrating their meetings at the Brixton Academy and the Southampton Guildhall, observing their participation in baffling occult rituals, including cheering wildly as Brown sets about a Stone Roses classic with the blunt instrument of his larynx, leaving She Bangs the Drums or I Wanna Be Adored lying insensible in intensive care, with a doctor by its bedside sadly shaking his head and offering grief counselling to its relatives. They appear to be having the time of their lives, but if you are not of their number, you reel away from an Ian Brown gig as you would from an unprovoked assault in a Yates’s Wine Lodge: shaken, confused, unable to work out what possessed you to go in there in the first place.
So perhaps the answer to his appeal lies in his albums, of which My Way – his sixth – is a pretty representative example. While in the Stone Roses, Ian Brown wrote – or at least co-wrote – songs of a swaggering perfection. After the Stone Roses split, he started writing songs like a man who’d never actually heard a song before: My Star, Dolphins Were Monkeys. It’s hard not think something was lost, but a certain naive charm was difficult to dispute. So it proves here. Opening track Stellify sets out his current musical stall, which is nothing if not idiosyncratic: an odd mid-tempo house thud, topped off with electronics and jangling pub piano. The melody ambles along, weirdly recalling the Grange Hill theme, before a vast horn section crashes into view as unexpectedly as a flying cartoon sausage on a fork. It’s a peculiar sonic cocktail on which to base an album, although the most peculiar thing about it might be that it works: on the ebullient Just Like You and the gorgeous lope of Laugh Now.
Elsewhere, there’s a song called Own Brain. As its lyrics helpfully point out, this is an anagram of Ian Brown. You somehow imagine it came about after agonised writing sessions in which he churned out songs called things like Wino Barn and I Warn Nob, but there’s something weirdly gripping about the resulting breakbeat clatter.
Not all of his idiosyncracies are as charming. He wastes the album’s loveliest melody on Always Remember Me, another unedifying comparison of his fortunes with those of John Squire: there’s something about Brown’s endless harping on this topic that recalls the guy who spends the evening loudly informing friends that his ex means nothing to him, then goes home and cries in a candlelit room wallpapered with her pictures. We once more encounter his unique brand of protest song, on which Brown expresses an utterly inarguable point in such a clumsily hectoring way that you immediately feel impelled to start arguing with it: “Save us from warmongers who bring on Armageddon! Save us from all those whose eyes are closed to the plight of the African child!” he bellowed on 2007’s The World Is Yours, causing at least one listener to frantically try to formulate a case in favour of warmongers who bring on Armageddon. This time, it’s a gloomily portentous song called The Crowning of the Poor, which socks it to “zillionaires” and leaves you fighting the urge to demand City bonuses be increased a hundredfold with immediate effect.
It ends with So High, a pastiche of classic southern soul. Given that southern soul is entirely predicated on the singers’ ability to convey raw emotion through the incredible power of their voice, you might reasonably assume that it’s a genre slightly out of Brown’s reach, even if he had the most powerful dulcifying studio technologies known to man at his disposal. But reasonable assumptions count for nothing in the world of Ian Brown: he just ploughs through it, with the reckless abandon of a man piloting a battered Datsun in a banger race. As with the rest of My Way, highlights and lowlights alike, you listen to it struggling to think of anyone else who would do this. And perhaps that’s the secret of the most mysterious continuing success story in rock.
New AIR album...
You can listen to 'Love 2' online for approx the next 24 hours by going
Bonus: Audio
How Does It Make You Feel? (Adrian Sherwood Remix)
How Does It Make You Feel? (Adrian Sherwood Remix)
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