Music

We watched A Private Life in the theatre yesterday, a fine, funny and intriguing French film set in Paris with a solid Jodie Foster as protagonist. But I’m here for the closing piece of the soundtrack, the one you hear over the end credits: Don’t Go To Strangers, by JJ Cale. I immediately reached for Shazam while Serena looked it up on Spotify. Now I’m spending this whole Sunday morning listening and reading about the artist and the Tulsa sound movement he originated. Despite his reticence and all-around low profile, he was no small feat and inspired many a great artist in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Just to get your bearings, he’s the original author of Cocaine later brought to fame by Eric Clapton. ...

I reluctantly admit that it was Spotify’s Discover Weekly that let me discover Flea’s new solo single, A Plea. It’s jazz, and it’s beautiful. There are echoes of Fela Kuti and Sun Ra in it or, well, that was my first thought. The lyrics may sound naive at first, but they’re not. Instead, they strike me as lucid and match my general feeling about what’s going on lately, the risks we’re taking as a society, and what we should do to move beyond and improve ourselves. The video is 100% Flea, and it’s adorable (it is directed by his daughter). ...

Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. [..] In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airports was created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself. ...

Last night we went to Bologna1 to see La Niña in concert, a birthday present from the kids to Serena. She loves this artist, whom I didn’t really know before last night. The concert was very nice, even though, not knowing her, I was initially confused, I think by the local folk festival atmosphere, if such a thing exists. It took me a few minutes to understand what I was looking at and what I was listening to. ...

It is impossible to tell the story of electronic music without examining the pioneering beats, grooves, and performance aesthetics of Dusseldorf’s Kraftwerk and its founding member, Florian Schneider. Formed in 1970, the band brought an experimental approach to pop music, resulting in some of the most innovative and commercially successful electronic albums of the mid-1970s into the 1980s: Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine, and Computer World. The Florian Schneider Collection is the first auction to feature a comprehensive collection of items from Florian’s personal life and career, providing a tantalizing glimpse at his and Kraftwerk’s often-enigmatic musical processes. The sale features over 450 lots of stage- and studio-played instruments and gear, clothing, artwork and furniture from Florian’s home and studios (as well as from Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Studio), bicycles, Kraftwerk memorabilia, and Florian’s extensive collection of historic woodwind and brass instruments (flutes, clarinets, oboes, saxophones, horns, tubas, and one-of-a-kind oddities). ...

In 2001, The Cure released Greatest Hits, the compilation with which they ended their contract with Fiction Records. The first edition of the anthology was accompanied by Acoustic Hits, an acoustic reinterpretation of the band’s hits, including Boys Don’t Cry, Friday I’m in Love, A Forest, Just Like Heaven, Lullaby, and Lovesong, one of the simplest and greatest love songs of all time (just listen to the bass line). The bonus disc was not reissued until 2017 and has only recently landed on streaming platforms. ...

Calibro 35’s Exploration, their latest album that I have just purchased, supremely fits and redefines the instrumental jazz-funk genre, adding a firm pinch of “vintage futurism,” as they call it. We were born with our heads facing forward and our eyes looking backward toward the future and the past. We have always struggled more with the present. A review that makes them justice and includes a concise yet well-done listening guide is on Far Out. ...

Inspired by the historic Dahomey Amazons and founded by three of the biggest powerhouses in African music, Mamani Keïta, Mariam Doumbia, and Oumou Sangare, Les Amazones d’Afrique have been using their voices to advocate for women’s rights since their 2017 debut. The group has never shied away from mashing up tradition and technology. Still, on Musow Dance, with the endlessly inventive production of Jacknife Lee, they lean heavily into an almost entirely electronic sound, turning up the energy several notches with booming 808s, dramatic synth slides, and bursts of vintage disco. But none of these additions ever overshadow the true soul of the music, instead amplifying the already formidable voices of Les Amazones d’Afrique’s ever-evolving lineup (source). ...

Lately, I have become increasingly interested in sound. Of the short films I shoot while hiking, for example, I’ve noticed that I’m primarily interested in their sounds. Footsteps on the ground, birds singing, wind rustling through leaves, things like that. During my motorcycle ride across Europe, I caught myself recording a walk with the Memo app on my iPhone. Listening to it allows me to reconstruct a sharp and surprisingly clear memory of that early morning, just out of the tent at Shelsley Walsh. My interest in sounds is not new; I’ve written about the Field Recordings podcast for example, but lately, I’ve become more aware of the importance of sound memory. During my daily early morning walk, I happen to listen to audiobooks or podcasts with the AirPods Pro, but there is always a lot of friction; I have to force myself into putting them on and, usually, after half an hour or so it is a great relief to take them off and listen to the world around me again (the jury is still out on whether I should leave my AirPods at home or not.) ...

I have been following Cowboy Bebop on Netflix (the anime, not the spinoff TV series). The opening is a visual and musical marvel; I’m enthralled by it. The show’s soundtrack is a unique blend of jazz (big band hard bop, mainly), blues, and a bit of rock, which I’ve never seen before in anime and probably in movies. Even episode titles pay tribute to jazz, blues and rock tracks. We have “Valtz for Venus,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “My Funny Valentine,” and stuff like that. Adorable. Episodes may appear rambling and superficial at first glance, but they are far from that. They strike a perfect balance between comedy and thought-provoking, often philosophical themes. ...