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This is Your Brain on Music
Photos and Text by Jessica Chriesman
What NOT To Do With Your Instrument
From cracked.com
5 Pieces of Junk That Turned Out to be Invaluable Artifacts
By:Jake Slocum May 15, 2009
#5. The $800,000 Stradivarius Violin
Lost:
Have you ever sat your coffee on top of your car, intending to grab it before you get behind the wheel, only to forget about it? Then you go driving off and it falls onto the road somewhere while you stare confused at your empty cup holder?
What would you say is the worst possible scenario for something like that? Other than, say, leaving your newborn infant up there?
Caroline's Corner: How to Hold a Violin or Viola and Play the Eggs Song
Caroline Nordlund, Director of Scrollworks and violin teacher, explains how to stand and how to hold a violin. She also demonstrates how to play the Eggs song on the violin (Ants on viola and cello).
Featured Secret Stages Artists: Lydia Loveless from Columbus, Ohio
Scrollworks is the official charity for Secret Stages Walking Music Festival in Birmingham, Alabama on May 11-12, 2012. We will be featuring here in our Sessions section some of the artists that are scheduled to perform. You can buy tickets to the festival here.
Featured Secret Stages Artists: Shovels and Rope from Charleston, South Carolina
Scrollworks is the official charity for Secret Stages Walking Music Festival in Birmingham, Alabama on May 11-12, 2012. We will be featuring here in our Sessions section some of the artists that are scheduled to perform. You can buy tickets to the festival here.
“Shovels & Rope songs are songs about loving through poverty, when people are all torn up and stressed to the maximum, when “it was all we could do to keep a nail in the floor.” It’s virtuous love and resilience, and it’s fashioned after the way those in Nashville used to write ballads and duets – where there was just as much pain as there was happiness. They are songs filled with mercy, mistakes, fire and the sort of genuine compassion that cannot be swept away or buried.”
Husband and wife duo of Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent playing outlaw country and avant-garde folk americana. In 2011 alone, the pair were direct support to Hayes Carll, Jason Isbell, Felice Brothers, Justin Townes Earle and Butch Walker touring all across the US doing 200+ shows.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Less is more. Make it work with what you’ve got. 2 Guitars, a junkyard drum kit harvested from an actual garbage heap and adorned with tambourines, flowers and kitchen rags. A handful of harmonicas, voices, and above all.. songs. Shovels & Rope prefer to keep it simple. They have cleverly managed to take 3 separate recording projects and combine them into 1 cohesive, folk rock, sloppy tonk, harmonized, loose but tight, streamlined audience killing machine.
Michael Trent (Texas/Colorado) has just released his second solo album entitled “The Winner”, and Cary Ann Hearst (Mississippi/Tennessee) is about to release her second record “Lions & Lambs”. Together hey have one duo release entitled “Shovels & Rope” which came out in 2008 and are currently working on the follow up “Shovels & Rope V.2″ in their house, van, and backyard. At the shows, expect to hear a little something from any or all of these releases while the duo switch instruments and share lead vocal duties. Also prepare to rethink your definition of a live rock band.
Featured Secret Stages Artists: The Deep Dark Woods from Saskatoon, Canada
Scrollworks is the official charity for Secret Stages Walking Music Festival in Birmingham, Alabama on May 11-12, 2012. We will be featuring here in our Sessions section some of the artists that are scheduled to perform. You can buy tickets to the festival here.
“The timeless sound of the aptly named “The Deep Dark Woods” belongs to the depressing winters of the north. Pulsing with human warmth, these original songs echo through the lonesome night. Ryan Boldt’s plainspoken lyrics offer a strong but gentle tone which understates poetry, oftentimes as startling as hot blood in fresh snow. Despite the dark themes, the heaviness never overwhelms the music’s playfulness. An utterly fun rhythm section, brilliant guitar work, and eerily rich harmonies drive the songs. One could easily be forgiven for mistaking their songs as treasures of decades past.”
Chills climb spines when sound is given room to unfurl. The Deep Dark Woods’ unflinching pursuit of steadiness between decadence and minimalism is guided at every turn by their intuitive ability to balance grit, clarity, drive and restraint with a sure focus on experimentation.
Winter Hours (2009), caught critics’ ears across the country. The album, a solemn ode to darker themes of seclusion and detachment, could yet warm even the bottomless, frozen nights of hometown Saskatoon, SK. With Winter Hours, The Deep Dark Woods won Best Roots Group at the 2009 Western Canadian Music Awards, and Ensemble of the Year at the 2009 Canadian Folk Music Awards. The band also had the runaway winner in CBC’s Great Canadian Songquest with “Charlie’s (Is Coming Down)”, a song about Good Time Charlie’s in Regina.
The Deep Dark Woods frame their music with subtle orchestration; songs are trimmed with minimal embellishments of banjo, piano, with subtle mellotron flutters. Drummer and multi-instrumentalist Lucas Goetz’s layers heartbreaking arches of pedal steel under the clarity and warmth of Ryan Boldt’s voice. Newest member, organ-player Geoff Hilhorst furnishes the songs’ edges with slurred polyphonies, while surefooted, danceable basslines and rich second vocals belong to Chris Mason. Burke Barlow’s clarion guitar tone and lead lines are focused and impeccable.
Their new album, The Place I Left Behind, finds continuity in themes of temporal and geographic alienation, neglected inward trails, and the scars of abandoned intimacies. The album opens with a song about Saskatoon’s rougher edges. “West Side Street” is a study in contrasts – finespun vocals and a gently rolling melody cushion the gloomy story. “The Place I Left Behind” is loosely based on an old folk standard. Gorgeously morose, the title track confirms that The Deep Dark Woods capture lonesome yearning at its loveliest. “Sugar Mama” is a sweet and lively invitation to tap toes and shake off the blues; a seeming coming-of-age story is treated with playful banjo and an airy gait.
A rainstorm over the desert of modern music, The Place I Left Behind offers murder ballads alongside scrappy rockers, lovesick hymnals and slow-dance waltzes. The album illuminates folk traditions without stripping the shadows of roots music history – The Deep Dark Woods wake the ghosts of Appalachia with their prairie gothic pyre-side tales. The Place I Left Behind echoes with traces of time and space that are never fully abandoned or forgotten.
Featured Secret Stages Artists: Lambchop
Scrollworks is the official charity for Secret Stages Walking Music Festival in Birmingham, Alabama on May 11-12, 2012. We will be featuring here in our Sessions section some of the artists that are scheduled to perform. You can buy tickets to the festival here.
It’s a different world that Lambchop inhabit from the one into which they first emerged, but they are now a vital part of its landscape. Unyielding to the vagaries of fashion, working entirely on their own terms and responding purely to their artistic muse, they have earned the considerable respect they now command. Lambchop continue to stand proud, a subtly altered but solid landmark in Nashville’s ever-changing scenery. Long may they remain so.
It’s been nearly two decades since Lambchop released its first album, at the time pronouncing itself “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band.” Provocative it may have been, but the description made sense: at the heart of all that ruckus was a band at once defying and embracing the musical legacy of its hometown. Since then, Lambchop has evolved into an accomplished ensemble, adding palpable depth and substance to singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Wagner’s songs—and the band sounds as commanding as ever on its 11th album, Mr. M, a collection of meditations on love and loss and the detritus of everyday existence.
Recorded at Mark Nevers’s Nashville Beech House studio cum bungalow and dedicated to Vic Chesnutt, Mr. M includes the usual core of musicians- Scott Martin (drums), Matt Swanson (bass), Ryan Norris (guitar, organ), Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar) and guests include original co-founder Jonathan Marx, delightful Cortney Tidwell (who shared vocals on 2010’s KORT project) and fiddler Billy Contreras (who has worked with all from Charlie Louvin to Laura Cantrell) – and with spectacular string arrangements shared between Peter Stopschinski and Mason Neely, it stretches out sonically as promised. (Incidentally the paintings, thickly layered black and white portraits forming a series called Beautillion Millitaire 2000, feature on the album sleeve and throughout the full artwork).
The core of the music remains the cyclical picking of Wagner’s guitar and the soft, warm croaking of his voice. The songs are spacious, even dreamy, as on the Countrypolitan instrumental “Gar,” while the lyrics and titles are rich with allusions, some of them obvious, others seemingly unknowable.
Lambchop - Give It from Merge Records on Vimeo.
Alan Lomax's Extensive Archive of Folk Recordings Now Available Online Free
Thousands of recordings made by folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1940's to the 1990's are now available online for free through Cultural Equity, a non-profit founded by Lomax.
"Lomax recorded a staggering amount of folk music. He worked from the 1930s to the '90s, and traveled from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia."
