supplies!
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008Pleasantly surprised that a local store - Scarboro Music, at Vic Park and Kingston has autoharp strings.
It also has a very fine old Dobson banjo for $1500.
Posts Tagged ‘music’
smalle fowles maken melodye
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
2U
Friday, March 14th, 2008You know that if you play How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb backwards, you hear Bono giving complete and easy to follow instructions on how to build one?
best of 2007
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007I said I’d bend the rules a bit, but here’s the ten best albums I heard this year, in alphabetical order:
- The Aliens — Astronomy For Dogs: add a Lone Pigeon to a few remaining Betas, and the result is funkiness. This album has more earworms than is safe. They are even better live.
- Animal Collective — Strawberry Jam: I pretty much have to be alone and sitting down to listen to this. For Reverend Green especially; it’s all involuntary limb movements, sinuses exploding with joy (this probably doesn’t happen to you, I hope), and ullulating Oo oo weeuh yeh … ee yeh yeh etc for me. Other Animals didn’t do so badly either this year: Panda Bear’s Person Pitch was joyful, and even the bafflingly backwards Pullhair Rubeye from Avey and Kría had something.
- Colleen — The Golden Morning Breaks (2005): very sparse but beautiful notes. I’ll Read You a Story is the sound that angels make.
- A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble: featuring magyar madness, crafty cimbalom, and the only piece of bagpipe music that won’t make you want to hack your ears off with a meat cleaver. It’s doubly nice that it features Zach Condon actually playing with his heroes, rather than just trying to sound like them.
- Ideal Free Distribution: lush 60s rhythm and harmonies, with a ton of mellotron laid on top. Poppy enough that no-one I’ve played it to doesn’t like it.
- Dan Jones and The Squids — Totally Human: Dan has clearly listened to a lot of both Robyn Hitchcock and The Minutemen, and has come up with a noisy but thoughtful album, which we play all the time.
- Old Man Luedecke — Hinterland (2006): merge sly alt.country lyrics with pretty clawhammer banjo, and you’ve got the Old Man. Bonus points for coupling the words “oracular bent” in a song, and getting away with it, too.
- Ken Reaume — Four Horses: Ken quite modestly compares himself to Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. He’s easily the equal of both. Beautiful fingerpicking and whispered confessional lyrics.
- Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter — Like, Love, Lust, & The Open Halls of the Soul: you’ll fall for Jesse’s world-weary lisp and the drawling psych guitar. I did (and unfortunately discovered her other two albums, Reckless Burning and Oh My Girl, are almost identical. Oh well; very good, but very samey).
- Porter Wagoner — Wagonmaster: if you’re gonna go, go out on a high note. That’s exactly what The Thin Man From West Plains did. It’s very straight country, but the decades of experience polish it brighter than rhinestones.
2007 contenders
Saturday, December 1st, 2007I’m going to play the blogger’s best of the year game differently this year, but I need to keep the rules roughly the same so that I am (for once) on the same planet. I’m going to choose ten best albums, but they’re what I discovered in 2007, not just those released in 2007.
So these are my contenders:
- A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble — A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hangár Ensemble
- Air — Pocket Symphony
- Akron/Family — Love Is Simple
- Akron/Family — Meek Warrior (2006)
- Animal Collective — Strawberry Jam
- Architecture In Helsinki — Places Like This
- Avey Tare & Kría Brekkan — Pullhair Rubeye
- Bees — Octopus
- Beirut — The Flying Club Cup
- Black Lips — Good Bad Not Evil
- Bonnie Russell and the Russell Family — Mountain Dulcimer Galax Style (1995)
- Bright Eyes — Cassadaga
- Caribou — Andorra
- Cathy Fink — Banjo Talkin’
- Colleen — The Golden Morning Breaks (2005)
- Dan Jones and The Squids — Totally Human
- Devendra Banhart — Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
- Dock Boggs — His Folkways Years (1963-1968) (1998)
- Donovan — Barabajagal (1969)
- Donovan — Hurdy Gurdy Man (1968)
- Donovan — Mellow Yellow (1967)
- Donovan — Sunshine Superman (1966)
- Enoch Kent — I’m a Rover (2006)
- Erynn Marshall & Chris Coole — Meet Me In The Music
- Feist — The Reminder
- Fountains of Wayne — Traffic and Weather
- Fred Spek’s Camp Combo — Rock Paper Scissors (2006)
- Grinderman — Grinderman
- Hamish Imlach — Cod Liver Oil & Orange Juice (2006)
- Howe Gelb — ‘Sno Angel Like You (2006)
- Ideal Free Distribution — Ideal Free Distribution
- Jeffrey Frederick & the Clamtones — The Resurrection of Spiders in the Moonlight
- Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter — Like Love, Lust, & The Open Halls of the Soul
- Joanna Newsom — Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band EP
- John Fahey — The Best Of John Fahey Vol. 2 1964-1983 (2004)
- Johnny Cash — American I & II
- Judee Sill — Judee Sill (2006)
- Ken Reaume — Four Horses
- Kevin Drew — Spirit If…
- Kilby Snow — Kilby Snow: Country Songs and Tunes with Autoharp
- Kimberley Rew — Ridgeway (2006)
- Marissa Nadler — Songs III: Bird On The Water
- Michael Hurley — First Songs (1964)
- Mimi & Richard Fariña — Vanguard Visionaries - Mimi & Richard Fariña
- Monica Grabin — Continental Village
- Neil Young — Harvest (1972)
- Of Montreal — Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
- Okkervil River — The Stage Names
- Old Man Luedecke — Hinterland (2006)
- Otha Turner — Everybody Hollerin’ Goat (1998)
- Panda Bear — Person Pitch
- Po’ Girl — Home to You
- Porter Wagoner — Wagonmaster
- Radiohead — In Rainbows
- Ragged But Right — Down Harmony Road
- Robert Force & Albert d’Ossché — Tiger Dreams
- Sons of the Never Wrong — Nuthatch Suite (2005)
- Stew — Guest Host (2000)
- The Aliens — Astronomy For Dogs
- The Apples in Stereo — New Magnetic Wonder
- The Arcade Fire — Neon Bible
- The Besnard Lakes — The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse
- The Carter Family — The Carter Family 1927-1934 (2001)
- The Foggy Hogtown Boys — Pigtown Fling
- The Harvey Girls — The Wild Farewell (2005)
- The High Water Marks — Polar
- The Houseplants — Livingroom
- The Hylozoists — La Fin du Monde (2006)
- The Icicles — Arrivals & Departures
- The Ladybug Transistor — Can’t Wait Another Day
- The Negro Problem — Post Minstrel Syndrome (2002)
- The Polyphonic Spree — The Fragile Army
- The Soft Machine — The Soft Machine (1968)
- The Unicorns — Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? (2003)
- They Might Be Giants — The Else
- Tiger Lillies (with Kronos Quartet) — The Gorey End (2003)
- Uncle Dave Macon — Classic Sides
- Various Artists — Skiffle - The Best Of (2006)
- Various Artists — The Old Time Banjo Festival
- Vashti Bunyan — Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind
- Wendy Arrowsmith — Now Then…?
- Wilco — Sky Blue Sky
- Willie Nelson — Red Headed Stranger (1975)
(Before you freak out at the number of CDs I bought, I do subscribe to emusic, so a bunch of these were MP3 only.)
oh and i went to high school with him too
Friday, October 19th, 2007now this is a live music photoblog: rahimlive.
as tents
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007Whoa, the Camp Combo rocked Mitzi’s Sister - in fact, they are still rocking it, as I had to head back home.
Nichol brought his enormous Leslie speaker which added to the ‘jazzeh’ sound of the evening. It was worth lugging it down.
Update: Fred Spek was kind enough to let me post the recording online:
Fred Spek’s Camp Combo - Mitzi’s Sister, Toronto - 2007-10-16 (early set).
easily amused
Saturday, August 4th, 2007I’m in Cambridge, at the Mill Race Folk Festival. The weather’s great, it’s a good event (just saw Enoch Kent [!]), but what’s really holding my attention are a number of big fish with orange tails rootling about on the riverbed of the Grand. They’re leaving pleasing silt trails.
Casper and the Cookies Live at the Tranzac, 2007-05-03
Friday, May 18th, 2007I’ve uploaded Casper and the Cookies Live at Tranzac on 2007-05-03 to archive.org. Doesn’t look as if mp3 conversion is working yet, so I guess I’ll do that for now.
every day, but not everyday
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007I contributed today’s music for the 365 Days Project: 365 Days #136 - Daniel Aliangana - From Eldoret to Sighthill (which previously lived here and here).
my guitar teacher can climb through a tennis racquet, yours can’t
Saturday, May 12th, 2007I went to The Friendly Rich Show for the first time last night, and my mind capsized completely. I’d seen Friendly Rich & The Lollipop People before, but never as their full-on, prank-calling, burlesque-puppeting avant-cabaret show.
The Lollipop People are incredibly tight as a band, which must be hard when you’ve got a harpsichord, a bassoon, a full concert harp, and a banjo (binga-banga in Rich-speak) in the mix. I put it down to skilled musicians having fun, and Rich’s excellent direction.
The show is run by Soot, the almost wordless but entirely malicious stage manager. He grumbles his way from musical number, to animal trick show, to song, to prank call. Last night’s call was to order pizza from Pizza Pizza, and they didn’t take it too well. Nichol S. Robertson did indeed climb through a tennis racquet.
Last night’s show was a little different, in that they performed Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition (complete with Hammond and turntables). What was a lot more different was, while they were playing, a naked man in a wild man mask set fire to his, um, self. That’s gotta smart.
They’re playing again at the Tranzac on the last Friday of June. You should be there. It’s exactly like nothing else!
Pullhair Rubeye
Thursday, April 26th, 2007I really like Avey Tare & Kria Brekkan’s album, but I’m not sure if I’m playing it forwards or backwards.
music for and by molluscs
Saturday, March 10th, 2007Dan Jones & The Squids‘ new album Totally Human is out now - yay!
Casper and The Cookies - Lee’s Palace, Toronto - 20 February 2007
Sunday, February 25th, 2007Casper and The Cookies - Lee’s Palace, Toronto - 20 February 2007
It was Jason’s birthday …
- Sid from Central Park
- Kiss a Friend
- Barking in the Garden of Ill Repute
- Neo Dada Hey Day
- Sea Fingers
- Kroetenwanderung
- The Optimist’s Credo
- My Heart is in my Head
- Learn How to Disappear
- Hey Mr. Superstar
- Sweet Pea
If you must stream these, here are the playlists: m3u | xspf.
Update: this show is now available on the Internet Archive: Details: Casper and the Cookies Live at Lee’s Palace on 2007-02-20.
spiff with a silent X
Sunday, February 18th, 2007I’ve been playing with XSPF, mostly so I can use the XSPF Web Music Player. There’s a Perl API for working with XSPF (XML::XSPF) which works well, but is extremely short on documentation.
Creating a playlist with XML::XSPF is pretty logical: create a new track object for each new track, then feed an array of these tracks into the playlist object. It took me a couple of hours of fiddling about (and much use of Data::Dumper::Simple, the plain man’s guide to tortuous data structures) to find that out.
The end result is this:
id32xspf - create XSPF playlist to stdout from a list of MP3s with ID3v2 tags.
It’s intended for use on a local directory of MP3s, which will subsequently be uploaded to a website. It uses MP3::Info to do the tag work.
It has some limitations:
- every file must have ID3v2 tags.
- it doesn’t handle file:// locations at all well, as their syntax is system-dependent. You’ll probably have to use the –urlbase option. For example, for Unix systems for local files in the current directory, I find -u file://`pwd`/ works well.
- it doesn’t include track numbers, as I didn’t know that XSPF supported them.
- it doesn’t create track artwork links, as this isn’t included in ID3 data.
One slightly amusing caveat about the XSPF Web Music Player is that it doesn’t understand the rate of some of lame’s more amusing VBR presets. If you feed it files from the voice preset (56kbit, mono, resampled to 32000Hz), the results sound like Pinky & Perky …
From Eldoret to Sighthill (to Toronto)
Sunday, December 17th, 2006Daniel Aliangana is a medical technologist from Eldoret, Kenya. In 1994–95 he was studying at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, and living in the apartment blocks in nearby Sighthill. He recorded these tracks in his spare time, and gave me a tape before he left for Kenya.
Daniel recorded these on a double cassette deck, carefully overlaying each track by recording live over the top. He used a classical guitar, an electronic keyboard, and some kitchen objects for percussion.
There are occasional harmonies which might have been provided by Catherine’s former flatmate Grace Achiya. Grace is also from Kenya, and it was through her that we got to know Daniel.
I don’t know where Daniel is these days, but there’s a Mr D. Aliangana listed as Chief Technician in the Department of Medical Physiology at Moi University in Eldoret. Wherever you are, Daniel, I hope you are well, and thanks for the music!
(originally linked from my music page.)
best of 2006
Friday, December 15th, 2006In no order you’d care to guess:
- The Information — Beck
- Awoo — Hidden Cameras
- The Optimist’s Club — Casper & the Cookies
- Cue Are Es Tea You — Mayor McCa
- The Sole Inhabitant — Thomas Dolby
- The Jig Is Up — Peter Stampfel
- Black Gold — King Biscuit Time
- Calico — Erynn Marshall
- Ys — Joanna Newsom
- Olé! Tarantula — Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3
- Cannibal Sea — The Essex Green
- Just Like The Fambly Cat — Grandaddy
- Back To The Web — Elf Power
- The Eraser — Thom Yorke
- The Crane Wife — The Decemberists
- either Tales of the Rat Fink Original Soundtrack or In Concert Vol. 1 — The Sadies
- The Way the Wind Blows — A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Discoveries of 2006: Karen Dalton, Nic Jones, Lee Hammons.
best o’ 2005
Wednesday, December 21st, 20052005 was a pretty good year for music, but you had to dig for it. My maximal list, in alphabetical order:
- A Hawk And A Hacksaw — Darkness At Noon
- Animal Collective — Feels
- Beck — Guero/Guerolito
- Bright Eyes — Digital Ash In a Digital Urn/I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
- Caribou — Marino Audio: yes, it’s a promo. A combination of the audio tracks from the Marino DVD release and the 2005 tour CD, I much prefer it to The Milk of Human Kindness.
- The Decemberists — Picaresque: I know all the hip kids had it as MP3s last year.
- Dressy Bessy — Electrified
- The Fruit Bats — Spelled in Bones: folk, with just the right tinge of bubblegum
- Malcolm Middleton — Into The Woods: anyone who can sing about the existential possibilities of Falkirk High station, and also about love & chips, is deep into the Scottish psyche.
- Of Montreal — The Sunlandic Twins
- Kate Rusby — The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly
- Sigur Rós — Takk …: and yet I still don’t know what they’re singing about.
- Sufjan Stevens — Illinois
- Teenage Fanclub — ManMade
- Vashti Bunyan — Lookaftering: don’t dismiss this as merely fey hippy nonsense; it’s beautiful fey hippy nonsense.
We like them, they like us:
- Dan Jones — Get Sounds Now: Catherine’s elementary school friend rocks out
- Lazerlove5 — Flicker Mask: fine funkiness from a fellow feg.
Excellent compilations from 2005:
- Ivor Cutler — An Elpee and Two Epees
- Charlie Poole & The Roots of Country Music — You Ain’t Talking to Me
Some excellent tracks, but not entirely memorable as albums:
- Devendra Banhart — Cripple Crow: I’m a Child is crazed genius, but lose the Spanish lounge music, eh?
- Eels — Blinking Lights And Other Revelations
- Jennifer Gentle — Valende: I Do Dream You is the perfect garage punk song.
- John Parish — Once Upon a Little Time
- Sleater-Kinney — The Woods
- Wolf Parade — Apologies to the Queen Mary: what was with the lumpen first few tracks?
Next year, look out for The Lollipop People’s We Need a New F-Word. I like their offensive avant-cabaret noise more than I should.
The Mayor McCa Experience
Thursday, June 24th, 2004Since I had no success/interest when I tried to torrent this show on sharingthegroove, I give you: Mayor McCa Live at Lee’s Palace, 18 June 2004.