Mid-Year Playlist

The following songs were all released this year, all on full-length LP’s. The exception, however, is the track “You and I,” which features Richard Hawley accompanied by The Arctic Monkeys (listed here as The Death Ramps)–a collaboration which I hope will yield more. Some of these songs appear on albums I’ve reviewed here already; the… More

The Art of Making, Alma Flamenca

“Pieces of wood, love, knowledge and 299 hours of work, condensed in a 3 minute film.” Director & VFX – Spiros Rasidakis, Dimitris Ladopoulos Director of photography – Nikos Mexis Editing – Yiannis Kostavaras Sound Design – Nikos Tsines Guitarist & Composer – Edsart Udo De Haes Guitar Maker – Vassilis Lazarides lazarides.com via Deep… More

Dreadful Impressions: Dictaphone’s “Poems From A Rooftop”

Dictaphones became  popular circa 1910, through the Columbia Gramophone Company, as a way of transcribing speech.  Using wax cylinders, which by this point had been replaced by disc technology for most sound recording, these devices, resembling elaborate hookahs, were the last vestiges of Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary discoveries in sound fidelity.  Some still claim that… More

RPM Challenge 2012 Part II

The RPM Challenge continues.  Into the second week and I’ve got five unnamed rough tracks.  I’m unclear exactly how things are shaping up, as I’m too in the middle of it to get a clear sense of direction.  I do notice a piano-driven impulse on these, and I’m enjoying some experimentation with mini-moog.  I got in… More

RPM Challenge 2012

Each year musicians from around the world challenge one another to compose and record an album’s worth of material (10 songs or 35 minutes of music) in the month of February (this being a leap year, we get an extra day).  This is not a competition, but rather a community effort to push ourselves into… More

Ain’t None Bad As Tom Waits

A friend of mine who’ll remain unnamed often tells a Waits story (most likely apocryphal, as if there were any other kind of Waits story)  worth re-telling: This friend, see, is coming off a bender in LA–uncertain, for instance, of how he’d arrived in LA in the first place.  He is certain only that someone has… More