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Melingo's newest

 

From The Jazz Breakfast:

Tom Waits doesn’t release much these days, Paolo Conte is hardly more productive, and while Leonard Cohen is touring to rebuild his pension he doesn’t write an awful lot of new stuff. So thank heavens for Daniel Melingo. And he whistles too!

Actually Melingo is considerably younger than Conte and Cohen and even Waits is nearly a decade his senior. But Melingo sounds and feels older – or rather he acts older than he is, which makes sense because he is an actor as well as a singer, and as adept as Waits at creating a character in music which, for all I know, is nothing like the man himself.

The Argentinian’s new album features mainly his own music but the lyrics come from a variety of sources, from various poets, including Evaristo Carriego, from Palermo, the 80-year-old Luis Alposta and from Federico Garcia Lorca. The style moves in and out of tango and the blues, and, like Waits and Conte and Cohen, sounds timeless.

Over rich layerings of bandoneon, guitars, strings, charango and horns, Melingo’s smoke-drenched tone and frail vibrato give the impression of a tough man harbouring all kinds of vulnerabilities, and living in the dark, passionate, criminal corners of a city somewhere between 1910 and 1965. In addition to his hypnotic vocals, Melingo also plays at various times clarinet, prepared piano, electric guitar, synthesiser, vibraphone and bass clarinet.

It’s a terrific album – his strongest yet, I think – with the kind of depths I’ll be investigating for years to come.

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Robert Henke's Fragile Territories

Fragile Territories from Robert Henke on Vimeo.

Interview with Robert Henke (Monolake)

 

Interview with Monolake (Robert Henke) at Secret Thirteen:

Q-Your music is very technologically based. How do you find the balance between technology and emotion? Do you feel that they sometimes contradict each other?

A-No. I come from a strong engineering background and for me there’s a lot of beauty in machines. There’s beautiful machines and not so beautiful machines, but if you look at an old clockwork or at a steam engine, or at an amazing supercomputer or some optic instruments, a great watch – all these things are really, really beautiful pieces of engineering and engineering is not just logic. There are so many artistic decisions to be made: which materials to choose, which colours to choose. You always have questions of design in there, too. A beautiful music instrument is as much a piece of engineering as a piece of art. For me, working with computers or technology is not just a rational process. I find this a very strange construction, this whole idea that technology has nothing to do with emotions – that’s not true. An organ pipe is technology, a guitar string is technology, a grand piano is technology, that’s all technology, research and science. Mixing colours for painting – that’s science, that’s chemistry. There’s so much science in art anyway. So we are constantly using science to create beauty, it’s a normal part of a process.

Q-The last two albums by Monolake were concept pieces based on your evolving novel having some post-apocalyptic and dystopian undertones. What is the status of the story at the moment? Are you going to publish it? And when can we expect the third part of the trilogy?

A-Currently, I’m working on a different project, but I didn’t forget to finish the trilogy. I don’t know when I’m going to do it, but I definitely plan to do it. The text exists, so I pretty much know how the third part is supposed to be. I’m not sure anymore if I will publish the big text. I decided it’s not good enough to be published as a whole, but it’s nice to have it for my own. At present, I’m just too much focused on my new work and I don’t know when I will find time to do the last piece of these three albums. But I want to do that, so someday it will appear.

Q-Could you tell us more about this new work?

A- It’s my Lumière project. A mad attempt to create a new type of audiovisual performance show based on using laser for the generation of moving images and deriving most of the sonic aspects from the very same processes that also create the visual side. I am working very hard on it, and it seems that this will keep me busy for the next few years. There is a lot to discover and I am just at the very beginning.

More

 

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Ambivalence of the World Cup

From The New Yorker World Cup Blog:

Let me guess. A day after Cristiano Ronaldo’s last-minute wonder pass denied Team U.S.A. a guaranteed place in the last sixteen at the World Cup, you are still feeling a little bit deflated. It just wasn’t fair, was it?

All that hard work after handing Portugal the gift of an early lead. The U.S. team was playing, quite possibly, its best game ever. The midfielder Jermaine Jones scored a thumping equalizer from outside the penalty box, and, in the eighty-first minute, the center forward Clint Dempsey bundled a go-ahead goal over the line. Portugal was done, or so it appeared. Cristiano Ronaldo, recently voted the best player in the world, was nowhere to be seen, and Chris Wondolowski, who substituted for Dempsey late in the match, repeatedly ran the ball into the Portugal corner flag—a classic time-wasting maneuver. The five minutes of time added for injuries and stoppages were almost up. In the Arena Amazonia, in the sweltering city of Manaus, twenty-thousand-plus Americans had their eyes fixed on the referee, urging him to blow the final whistle. Then Michael Bradley, who had played a great game, lost the ball in midfield. It went out to Ronaldo on the right wing. He looked up and curled in a cross that eluded the U.S. defense, and—no, no, this couldn’t be happening!—his colleague Silvestre Varela, racing from the center circle, headed it into the net with the last touch of the game.

In the chichi French café where I had been watching the second half with my two young daughters, there were groans and howls of astonishment. Fifteen minutes earlier, when Dempsey scored, the joint had been rocking to chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” Now there was a dejected silence. I explained to my elder daughter, who earlier had colored in her own U.S. flag, that, no, Team U.S.A. hadn’t lost; and, no, it hadn’t been knocked out of the tournament. To the contrary, it had performed magnificently, and it still had a very good chance of qualifying for the final stages.

I didn’t bother explaining that the World Cup is like that: it builds you up and lets you down, warping your judgment. Now that America has finally embraced this quadrennial exercise in fanatical but largely peaceful nationalism, our kids and their friends will have plenty of chances to experience it for themselves: the highs, the lows, and the bits in between.

For that, surely, is the lasting message of Sunday’s game. Americans, like practically everybody else, have gone a little World Cup crazy. As a lifelong soccer nut, and a naturalized American citizen, I welcome this development—and readily admit that I didn’t see it coming. Like most U.S. soccer fans, I’ve been conditioned to think of the sport as a minority interest. Twenty years ago, when the World Cup was held in the United States, it attracted big crowds, and Team U.S.A. played well, progressing from the group stage before losing to Brazil, the eventual winner. But the mainstream media, and most of the population, treated the event as a curiosity rather than as something to get exercised about. Now, although the tournament is being held three thousand miles away, things are different.

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El Txef A's New LP

 

From Nothing but Hope and Passion:

You can’t deny a certain movement in electronic dance music that likes to include more soul, feeling and musicality into its recipe. Less BPM and more substance. A strange but effective counter movement to the ever euphoric American EDM-movement. Spanish producer Aitor Etxebarria and his alter ego EL_TXEF_A are experts on this territory. In the past years his acclaimed tracks and reworks gained him more and more attention. And 2012′s debut album Slow Dancing In A Burning Room was an acclaimed way of combining grooving beats with a gentle musical environment. The follow-up We Walked Home Together takes the idea one step further.

One thing becomes clear on the record: Etxebarria is not standing still and he’s certainly not interested in sticking to just one genre. We Walked Home Together takes the idea of EL_TXEF_A even further away from the dancefloor. It’s a brave and ambitious combination of slow grooving beats, down tempo, ambient-like electronic landscapes and other experiments. But just like on Slow Dancing In A Burning Room, Etxebarria managed to create a homogeneous record that is more driven by its coherent feeling than specific hits. It’s an atmosphere of melancholia and longing, that goes hand in hand with certain introspection.

One of the key factors of this construct remains the gentle piano play of the producer. Opener A Heart For Two is relaxing entrance into the world of EL_TXEF_A. The following title-track puts the piano on top of a smooth beat and combines everything with tender and almost Thom Yorke-like vocals. There’s a lot to discover on We Walked Home Together. BOARDS OF CANADA-like ambient structures (0730), bubbling electronica with cryptic spoken word messages (Every Day Is Blue Monday, a collaboration with MEGGY from Berlin-based label SUOL) and tender guitar play (You Left Us In The Physical World). A dancefloor-focussed groove comes into play from time to time but mostly remains subtle. The hypnotic Chaim Of Planet Earth marks a well-placed exception here, reminding a bit of THE FIELD.

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Interview with Peruvian singer and dancer, Rosa Guzman

 

Interview by Carlos Santos Becerra at Tradicion y Peru

Nueva Sangre-Sounds of the Peruvian Andes

A sweet collection of Peruvian guitar music from the Andean highlands that captures the clear rhythmic essence from this special place in the world. Sayariy Procucciones is building a library of regional music from native Peru.

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Surge Myths & other lies

From Consortium News:

A beloved myth of Official Washington – especially among Republicans, neocons and other supporters of the Iraq War – is the fable of the “successful surge,” how President George W. Bush’s heroic escalation of 30,000 troops in 2007 supposedly “won” that war; it then follows that the current Iraq disaster must be President Barack Obama’s fault.

The appeal of this myth should be obvious. Nearly every “important” person in the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media endorsed the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 — and such well-placed and well-paid people do not like to admit that their judgment was so bad that they should be disqualified from holding any responsible position forever.

Further, since almost no one who promoted this criminal and bloody enterprise was held accountable after Mission Accomplished wasn’t, these opinion leaders were still around in 2007 at the time of the “surge” and thus in a position to cite any positive trends as proof of “success.” Many are still around voicing their august opinions – the likes of Sen. John McCain, former Vice President Dick Cheney and neocon theorist Robert Kagan – so they still get to tell the rest of us how really great their judgment was.

On Wednesday, McCain fulminated from the Senate floor, accusing Obama of squandering the  “surge,” the success of which he deemed a “fact.” Cheney – along with his daughter Liz – accused the President of “securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.”

Kagan, who pushed for an invasion of Iraq as early as 1998, attacked Obama for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq — and not committing the U.S. military to the civil war in Syria. Kagan told the New York Times: “It’s striking how two policies driven by the same desire to avoid the use of military power are now converging to create this burgeoning disaster” in Iraq.

But the core of the neocon narrative is that the 2007 “surge” essentially “won” the war in Iraq and that an open-ended U.S. military occupation of Iraq would have kept a lid on the sectarian violence that has periodically ripped the country apart since Bush’s invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003.

There is much wrong about this narrative, including that it was Bush who signed the timeline for total U.S. withdrawal in 2008 and that the Iraqi government insisted that U.S. troops depart under that schedule at the end of 2011. But the greatest fallacy is to pretend that it was Bush’s “surge” that achieved the temporary lull in the sectarian violence and that it achieved its principal goal of resolving the Sunni-Shiite divisions.

Any serious analysis of what happened in Iraq in 2007-08 would trace the decline in Iraqi sectarian violence mostly to strategies that predated the “surge” and were implemented by the U.S. commanding generals in 2006, George Casey and John Abizaid, who wanted as small a U.S. “footprint” as possible to tamp down Iraqi nationalism.

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World Cup Day for Messi and Argentina

Colligan at An Die Musik

Vallejo Nocturno 2014-Colligan at An Die Musik

From the NYT:

One of the finer piano trio albums of 2013 —  released too late in the year, or on too small a label, to make a dent in the critics’ polls —  is George Colligan’s “The Endless Mysteries.” It’s a program of original compositions, most of them sensible and sturdy. And because it was recorded in a few hours with no rehearsal, it’s the product of rough-and-ready postbop expertise, rather than the lived experience of a steady band.

At least, not any band led by Mr. Colligan. A pianist of deep harmonic and rhythmic assurance, and sideman credits all over the map, he works here with the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. Each is a long-running member of another piano trio: Mr. Grenadier has been in both editions of the Brad Mehldau Trio, going back nearly 20 years; Mr. DeJohnette has spent the last 30 with Keith Jarrett.

Whatever the sum of all that experience is, Mr. Colligan made it work for him. Some of his pieces on “The Endless Mysteries” seem designed for these specific partners, especially Mr. DeJohnette, in whose band he has played. “Song for the Tarahumera,” a scrappy modal tune, becomes a roiling drum incantation. “Liam’s Lament,” a beautifully restrained ballad, features empathic rubato work by Mr. Grenadier. (It also features a theme played on melodica, an instrument that Mr. DeJohnette has favored on his own albums; I had to check to be sure that it was Mr. Colligan doing the playing.)

Mr. Colligan, who turns 44 next week, favors an earthy, assertive style, putting him in a lineage that includes McCoy Tyner, John Hicks and Mulgrew Miller. But he has other affinities, as he shows in a pair of spontaneous inventions provoked by the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which claimed the daughter of a friend and sometime band mate. “Thoughts of Ana” is a softly chiming solo reflection, with a touch that brings Mr. Jarrett to mind; it leads into “Outrage,” which borrows a page from the Cecil Taylor playbook.