New music
graeme.thomson
I am talking to Toumani Diabaté on a phone line into Bamako that, as he explains with an audible shrug, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. He was due in London a couple of weeks ago to promote Ali & Toumani, his album of duets with the late, great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, but was struck down with malaria at the eleventh hour. It rather puts the standard rock star bleating about "stress and exhaustion" to shame. “At the last minute I had packed my suitcase but I started to vomit and malaria came, it was really bad,” he says. “Thank God, thank God, today I’m getting better." Read more ...
howard.male
On a new CD compilation from Strut Records out this week, Next Stop... Soweto, we’re back in Soweto in the 1960s and 1970s and it's the dark, dark days of apartheid; an era in which it was actually against the law for a black South African to even be a musician, and live music was banned from most public places in black areas. There were also no cinemas, bars, hotels, shopping centres or electricity and death was an everyday fact of life. Yet only fifteen miles away, white Johannesburg’s skyscrapers glistened; an affront to the asbestos roofed, poverty-steeped insult to human dignity that was Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
When I last met Nitin Sawhney, I’d heard that he was a whizz at mental arithmetic. I asked him, perhaps impertinently, what was 91 times 94? “8,827,” he relied, quick as a flash. Several hours later, I worked out he was probably right. “Vedic mathematics,” he said. What I can say about last night’s performance was there was some interesting mathematics going on. Some time signatures rubbed friskily against others in certain scenes in ways a mathematician would love. The score had an enormous facility. But a question we have to confront is - imagine this said in the voice of Carrie from Sex Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Our ongoing series celebrating musicians’ birthdays. This week’s include Lou Reed, in action in a stupendous version of "Venus in Furs" with the Velvet Underground, Chopin played by the wonderful Martha Argerich, archive footage of Miriam Makeba, Brian Jones and bottle-neck blues maestro, Furry Lewis. Videos below.2 March 1942: Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, performing "Venus in Furs". Definitive proof that, contrary to speculation elsewhere on the site, you don't need more than three chords to make great music?
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Here' s Lou being contrary as ever, and Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's CD selection is headed up by extraordinary albums from modern folkist Chris Wood, a startling come-back from Gil Scott-Heron and pretenders to the New Rave throne New Young Pony Club. Among the new releases we have the late Johnny Cash, Krystle Warren, Midlake, John Hiatt, Frightened Rabbit and ex-e.s.t bassist Dan Berglund. The compilation of the month is from Soweto and there's a fabulous tango soundtrack. A veritable audio feast. Our reviewers are Russ Coffey, Peter Culshaw, Thomas H Green, Howard Male, Marcus O'Dair, Neil Spencer, Sue Steward, Adam Sweeting and Graeme Thomson Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The past might be a foreign country but sometimes they don't do things so differently there. Two decades ago I found myself backstage at Wembley Arena discussing music with one of MC Hammer's rubber-limbed dancers, nicknamed No Bones. Who was his favourite band? A bunch of geeky white Brits called Depeche Mode, who, I discovered, were a huge influence on the Detroit Techno scene. Twenty years on it is payback time. Detroit Techno is now a huge influence on another group of geeky white Brits, Hot Chip.Their fourth album, One Life Stand, draws heavily on Derrick May's turbo-charged orchestrated Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The blogs are alive with the sound of Thom Yorke of Radiohead's new band, which he told us today had the name Atoms For Peace. "It seemed bleedin' obvious," said Yorke of the name on the Radiohead website Dead Air Space. Nerdy, pacifist, retro, ironical: the name ticks all the boxes. An antique phrase of "super-group", once used to describe bands like Blind Faith, has been dusted down to describe the band which includes Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck drummer Joey Waronker, bassist Flea and percussionist Mauro Refesco. "Atoms For Peace" was also a song on Yorke's solo record, The Read more ...
joe.muggs
Two London clubs currently appear to be under threat. The Ministry of Sound, one of the most successful brands in club music's history, is kicking up a fuss because new housing block planned opposite it may make it vulnerable to noise complaints. Meanwhile, rumours have flown around over the last 48 hours that police are lobbying Hackney Council against Plastic People in Shoreditch whose licence is currently under review for reasons of “prevention of crime and disorder and public nuisance basis”.It's funny that these two have become news at the same time, as you could not find two more Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A new report from Freemuse, the organisation which campaigns against music censorship, describes the oppression of heavy metal musicians in numerous countries. From the underground to the mainstream, heavy metal is a global phenomenon attracting millions of fans – but along the way it has gained many enemies too. “Long-haired music”, as it has been described in Malaysia and China, has been banned by both governments.In several Middle Eastern countries, both musicians and fans have been arrested and accused of devil worship. Heavy metal continues to be banned from radio and Read more ...
sue.steward
Latin Music USA is a long-overdue exploration of the Latino influence on American popular music. The four-part BBC Four Friday-night series zooms in on the bicultural American populations rooted in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico, but living in their original entry points, Miami, New York, LA and the Tex-Mex border. The series examines the lifestyles and politics behind the music and their impact in the US beyond Spanish-speaking neighbourhoods. “Each programme looks and feels different, matching the cultures,” explains the London director, Jeremy Marre. In the early days, the Cubans and Puerto Read more ...
howard.male
Here’s a deceptively simple question. What is African music? Does a band make African music simply by dint of the fact they come from Africa? One of last night’s three African Soul Rebels acts was South Africa’s Kalahari Surfers. Ensconced behind a table’s worth of laptops and other gismos, they made subtly menacing, dubby rock with an early '80s slant. And in fact they did it rather well, conjuring memories of Gang of Four and their ilk.Warrick Sony, the band’s vocalist looked and sounded a little like Billy Bragg, and his fractured, edgy guitar work was involving. There was even one moment Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week’s birthday videos include guitarists Andrés Segovia playing a fandango, Japanese heavy metal hero Akira Takasaki and George Harrison. Then there’s Johnny Cash and murdered Afghan singer Nusrat Parsa. It's also the birthday of the mighty Handel. Videos below.
21 February 1893: Andrés Segovia plays Frederico Moreno Torroba’s Suite Castellana Fandango.
22 February 1961: Akira Takasaki is the metal guitarist’s guru as a member of the top Japanese band Loudness. Here he shows his impressive axe credentials.
26 February 1932: The Man in Black, Johnny Cash, sings “Ring of Fire” from a Read more ...