Recently, virtuoso Joshua Bell, a world renowned violinist, participated in an experiment to see how many people would stop and listen to him as an anonymous busker.

It’s an interesting read, although I have to admit that I felt too rushed to read the whole article in depth. (This is funny given the context.) Anyway, it’s an interesting story. Don’t miss clicking on the video or the complete audio link. It sounds just like a world famous violinist mixed with an audio recording of a busy subway station.

Thanks to Dean for the link.

 › music     2007-04-10 23:26   ...1 comment

Life is full. The last five days or so have been just a whirlwind of activity.

The story begins last thursday when Jen and I checked out the Alan Jabbour and Ken Perlman concert at Rasputin’s. It was a full house, not surprising given the high profile of Jabbour (former director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in the states), and Ken Perlman’s banjo prowess. The concert went very nicely, and I stayed for an hour or so afterwards talking to Dean.

Jabbour played many numbers by his mentor Henry Reed. Perlman backed him up, and the material was mostly old-time American tunes. Southern tunes to us. Perlman did one excellent solo in his “melodic clawhammer” style (in which he plays cape-breton-style violin parts on his banjo).

Both performers were consummate musicians and the evening was thoroughly enjoyable.

This concert also set the stage for the people we were going to be hanging out with all weekend. With three folk concerts in three nights we were just getting started.

 › music     2005-11-14 23:09   ...0 comments

I attended the East Village Opera Company’s Ottawa performance tonight at the Alumni Theatre at Carleton University. Although I am truly ignorant of opera, I felt like I just had to write a review of the performance.

This concert was a bit of an Ottawa homecoming for several members of this band, including the co-founders: Peter Kiesewalter and Tyley Ross. An eleven member ensemble (string quartet, two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and male and female vocalists), their mission is to blend rock with opera. At this point, says the band’s website, the only way to fuse these two forms is to embrace both “the pomposity of rock and the pomposity of opera.” The band sets out to deliver big showstoppers of opera, with a driving rock backing.

This is a fabulous (if not totally original) idea, and it should have been a fabulous performance.

Tyley’s vocal performance was outstanding, and the band’s arrangements were fresh, driving, invigorating, and pleasurably loud. The female vocalist, while not quite a soprano match to Tyley’s effortless high-tenor range, was enjoyably forceful, belting out classics from Carmen and other operas, and singing a couple of duets with Tylee that were rockin. I found that she had a bit of trouble toning things down for the quieter numbers, but hey - this show was not about the quieter numbers!

The string section seemed to have good arrangements, played with vivacity. The lead guitarist and bassist could have been from Spinal Tap - and that’s good in my books. Awesome twiddly screaming guitar solos complemented the driving rock drums and rhythm guitar.

And now it all starts to fall apart. This performance was totally marred by the inept technical staff. This is one band, ladies and gentlemen, that badly badly badly needs to tour with their own sound and lighting technicians.

You may have noticed that I haven’t commented on Kiesewalter’s playing. That’s because it was totally inaudible for the entire evening (except for one 10 second solo). The string section, except during their solos, might as well have been having drinks out back. The female vocalist had a few pitch problems, and in my books that translates to: lousy monitors.

And the lighting technican: damn it, we learned in high school tech club that flashing the lights to the beat of the music looks like… well… high school tech club. It’s the kind of thing you do once, then determine never to do again. This is because lamps are not instant-on instant-off devices; you can’t flash them multiple times a second. When you press the switch there is a delay before you see the light, which means that if you press the switches in time to the music the lights flash NOT in time with the music. This is very distracting to the audience during a rock-infused heavy beat concert. Plus, as you might guess from the phrase “Alumni Theatre at the university” the band was not blessed with thrilling lamps in this venue. Changing the color on the rear cyclorama 4 times a second for 10 minutes looks stupid.

The sound guy murdered the music all night. The biggest travesty, however, occurred during the encore… a brilliant disco arrangement of Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci. I heard this played on the radio in the lead up to the concert and it is unstoppable. (At least I thought it was unstoppable.) The annoying sound technician didn’t bother turning up the rhythm guitar, which has the characteristic disco off-beat. Thus, we heard a kind of lopsided shuffle. The result: an audience that gave an ovation to the first part of the performance stayed seated after their killer number. The fault was certainly not with the musicians folks, shitty sound guy spoils the day.

What I most want to do during these concerts is push the sound guy out of the way and take over. It’s not rocket science, folks, all you need to do is listen and watch. Do you see the piano player’s fingers moving? If so, and you do not hear the piano, something is very wrong. Does the singer sound like he is in a wooden box? If so, better use those tone controls!

Bands should insist on sound guys who are either musicians themselves, or have a demonstrated musical ear. After all, what use is brilliant writing if it’s lost in the wiring?

 › music     2005-11-06 23:41   ...0 comments

One thing I would like to start doing is recording concerts for the radio. I think it would be cool to not just promote concerts in advance, but also to follow up on them.

Of course, this means asking artists for permission to record. This is a mite stressful for me. I thought one upcoming concert would be great for that. I asked the band. They said yes. I was happy. However, I have now discovered that they are on a double bill and it is a festival benefit. So now I have two other groups to ask regarding this one event. Phew.

Anyway (for any audio geeks) my plan is to record using a Studio Projects LSD2. It’s a stereo microphone (2 mics in one box) and looks pretty groovy. Plus, I have been saving my Christmas and birthday money, as well as my SlimBatteryMonitor donations and DateTree license fees for a project like this. That means that I can almost afford this mic. (Particularly since everyone seems to sell it far below the manufacturer’s suggested price.)

I’ll be renting a mic stand and a preamp if this concert goes ahead. Those will have to wait for later purchase.

I really hope everyone says yes…

 › music     2005-10-28 09:49   ...0 comments

… I learned from English Folk Songs? Yes says Jim MacDonald in his posting Folksongs are your friends.

Here’s a snippet off the front:

It goes on. It’s long but funny. It’s here.

 › music     2005-09-10 23:22   ...1 comment

The federal cabinet has decided not to overturn the CRTC’s bad decision.

This is not a good thing. In the words of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting: “This is a black day. In effect, the Americans have won.”

 › music     2005-09-09 22:42   ...0 comments

This just in from nurd_grrl:

The Final Countdown

As she says (and I concur with the sentiment): If you can make it to the guitar solo, you’re a better person than I. Forgive me. I know not what I have done. Actually I do know full well what I have done, but forgive me anyways?

 › music     2005-08-08 12:05   ...1 comment

Sat in the library at Carleton this afternoon and decided to have a closer listen to a song that May and Dan put me on to during their last visit. It’s by Imogen Heap and it’s called Hide and Seek.

So I listened to it a few times and then decided to put it on single-song repeat for a while to kind of figure it out. I listened to it for quite a while in the background as I reviewed data and made graphs. I checked the iTunes play count and it was 23 by the time I turned it off (93 minutes or so). So you could say that I extensively checked it out I guess.

Needless to say it is a very compelling track. Not exactly ‘cross-format focused for airplay success’ but something along the lines of what Negativland had in mind when they described a song that had been designed. I don’t know if Imogen Heap did design it, but that’s the effect I get. And I must say that I am not using ‘design’ in a pejorative sense at all. It’s a small miracle of craftsmanship.

The song itself is just over four minutes. And it’s almost impossible to pin down something that it is like. Not because it is totally unlike anything you’ve heard before, but because it is self-contradictory in so many ways. That, I believe, is one reason it is so fascinating.

The song is solo voice accompanied by rich vocorder harmonies. This makes it immediately reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave. After this point, though, we have to start into the contradictions if we want to discuss this song any more.

This is a real christmas tree kind of track. It is jammed full of tweaky effects, and is wildly inconsistent. One minute we have large concert hall reverb, the next the room is dead. There is exactly one industrial hammer sound in the 4 minutes. One minute we have bright (almost painful) treble-rich pop EQ, the next we have mid overload: muddy distorted vocorder. This inconsistency should make it really bad. It makes it really good.

The metre of the song is also contradictory. On a casual listen it seems to be what hymnodists would call ‘Particular Meter’. Meaning basically that the metre of the tune is custom-matched to the metre of the words; in other words it wouldn’t fit into the traditional scheme of having a book of tunes and a book of words and picking an appropriate pair. It also seems like it’s kind of ‘not in time’, very flowing, very expressive, and — while very rhythmic — totally irregular. That is how it sounds on a casual listen.

Now I have this thing that May and Dan will attest to that I hear songs in different metres than normal other people do. I thought perhaps it was just me when I began to hear the piece in 4… But I patiently counted out the whole track. It turns out that the casual listen I talked about in the last paragraph is wrong. The song of contraditions. The irregular metre is not the truth as the song is actually an extremely consistent 4/4 (roughly 120 bpm) from first beat to the rit at the end. It is heavily misbarred, which is another common quality of old american hymns. Misbarred songs have the metrical emphasis on the wrong beats. They are misleading because it sounds like you’re jamming a beat here and and stealing a beat there, but when you look at it closely they’re plain old 4/4 or whatever. Imogen’s singing is expressive for sure, and she pulls a couple of beats around, but that’s style. As Shelley once said, there’s writing and then there’s singing.

The thing is that even when you know it’s in 4, the song (particularly around the Hide and Seek part) just wants to be heard as expressive, free of metre, almost like the rhythmic but metreless cadenza in opera. Despite this and the relaxed performance, all the rests are counted. The production of the multiple vocorder tracks probably necessitated this.

Harmonically the track is sticking to its contradictory guns. We go from 2 voice wide open unschooled harmony to (I didn’t count) 4-5 voice crunchy close packed stuff that even gets jazzy. What kind of song is this anyway? No answers from the harmonic world… I almost want to write this song down to try to figure it out. (Unlikely to have time anytime soon though in case you were thinking of asking.)

Despite its massive harmonic structure for a pop song, it is begging for at least two more parts. I hear a deep bass (perhaps doubling some of her low notes), and there is definitely a descant super-high part in there. Actually she gives us 4 notes of the high part at one point, but I hear a lot more of it.

The thing is, if I put in all the things that I’m hearing in this track it would become a lumbering overstuffed mess. It seems to be precisely the things that are misssing that enable it to survive. The reason I said the song seemed ‘designed’ is that I find myself cued to “imagine in” these missing parts, and I think that’s another reason that it is so compelling.

In keeping with my “I never listen to the words” behaviours I haven’t commented on the poem, but it is clearly as varied as the tune. Each part of this song is over so fast — you kind of want it to keep going the way it was going for a few more verses. It’s almost as if there’s a whole album of music compressed into this one track if only you let your brain expand the verses of each section out… pretend you’re listening to five smoothly interconnected 30-second samples of songs and that’s kind of what this song does without sounding like it isn’t one song. So weird. So compelling.

The song can be had from the Interweb’s usual warez spots and the iTMS. But I think I’m going to buy this person’s album, just to see if this track was some kind of divine intervention or whether there’s more than four minutes of this kind of coolness.

 › music     2005-07-14 00:47   ...85 comments

We dropped off our keys at the old place tonight. Since I have got my iBook back I was able to record some of the lovely waterfall/space invaders music that our old fridge made. I have to filter out some of the compressor sound, but I think I got around 4-6 minutes of the good stuff. Hee!

On another note we saw a great acoustic guitar concert tonight. We bought two CDs.

 › music     2005-07-08 00:01   ...1 comment

I have been offered a co-host’s chair for a program I very much like on the local campus radio station.

The show plays folk music, and runs 1.5 hours per week on Sunday around lunchtime. I would likely do the show every second week.

I am very tempted to do this. Actually, I have practically decided to do this. The only two scary things are:

1) I would actually have to have something useful to say about this music. There are certainly people in town who know more about this music than I do…

2) I would likely do the occasional interview, which would require me to sound like a normal human while talking to ‘people of renown’.

I would have to figure out how to fit the preparation time into my schedule, and budget for CD purchasing. But it kinda sounds like it would be a good time, and I kinda think that I want to do it. So, panel of experts, does this sound stupid? Should I worry about my worries?

 › music     2005-03-15 00:31   ...4 comments

Woo hoo!

Today 50 Tracks played my audio email on air! (As part of the introduction to the second week of the 80s!)

And Shelagh Rogers and Jian Ghomeshi loved it on air:

JG: Here’s a cool thing. The first time on 50 tracks that we’ve received an audio email containing an MP3

plays MY EMAIL! ON AIR!

SR: That is phenomenal.
JG: The future of mail… an MP3.
SR: I really love that. That’s fantastic.

Some more exclamation points: !!!!

This is the third track of mine that has been played on a national CBC radio show. (The other two being from my Sacred Harp recording. They were played on two different episodes of The Roundup when it was hosted by Bill Richardson.)

 › music     2005-02-21 09:30   ...6 comments

Well, I’m not sure if 50 tracks is doing a second week on the eighties, but they’re almost done this week and I’m getting a bit concerned.

Rather than just send them an email, I felt they needed a taste of what I was pushing. Plus I’ve been wanting to try out Garage Band as a general purpose audio editor. So I made them this audio email (mp3).

I am sure that May has now slit her wrists. That is all.

 › music     2005-02-16 13:18   ...2 comments

In the style of Jen’s blog I present two links I’d like to be able to find in the future, and that I think some people on here would find very interesting reading.

Trevor, if you’re reading this you’ll find these enlightening I’m sure.

Without overstating my appreciation for the content in these pieces, I’d say that I absolutely agree with the techniques and sentiment expressed by the two authors.

Okay, so I’ve had 2 glasses of wine, and I’m a bit effusive here. Let’s get to the point.

Producing Sarah McLachlan, on Land and on Sea by Paul Tingen. This piece explains the process used by Pierre Marchand, Sarah’s recordist/producer, to get those fantastic sounds. Now his Merlin technology isn’t something I’ve experienced, and so it isn’t necessarily on that basis that I recommend the article, but more on the level of engagement of the technician with the music. I firmly believe that the only way a recording or an amplified performance is going to be convincing is by direct engagement of the technician with the process. By getting out of the booth into the room, and by taking on the role of an artist rather than a technician you will get the results that a pot-tweaker will only dream about. Live show after live show I watch the sound guy set the faders and then open the paper. Not so Pierre Marchand. Plus, the setting of his studio is positively idyllic.

Article number two, courtesy of Andrew, is Rip Rowan’s Over the Limit. A discussion about how you can take a great recording and utterly destroy it by essentially smashing the sound into an immovable barrier called 0 dB. The translation for regular folk: when you turn the volume up to 11 on a digital recorder it stops sounding good. So why are we turning it up?

 › music     2005-02-04 20:34   ...0 comments

Well, Jian Ghomeshi is doing 50 Tracks again. They are shopping for the top 50 Canadian tracks of the last 100 years. (Again this time it is slanted to the last 50 years really.)

We listened to it (11:00 EST) on this page at work today. And perhaps we will do so again? It’s fun to hear the songs get pitched by the panel of experts.

You can bet that Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, the Band, Rush, et alia will appear. But what about those other important Canadian acts? You can email them to nominate them… 50tracks@cbc.ca.

Here’s my (somewhat terse) email:

 › music     2005-01-21 12:44   ...8 comments

For those keeping track at home, Barkworth Green need to create a webpage performed last week at the Flying Cloud christmas concert. The event consisted in being part of a chorus to help lead the audience in some carols as well as one song of our own.

At first we were going to do the dead wren song King, which is a traditional carol in England. However, we learned that it’s also an audience favorite and so we opted to pass on that as our own number.

Instead we did a Yorkshire Pub Carol from the Canadian Pub Caroler. The caroler was compiled by my friend Shelley Posen who is an excellent folklorist. The artist worked from photos on the cover, so the two featured people are myself and my friend Bob Ferguson. Anyway, having led Pub Caroling in Ottawa with Shelley this year I knew all the parts and taught them to May and Dan.

The song is a great contrast to all the happy positive major Christmas songs out there, as it is set in a minor key, and stems from a time when Christmas was (in Shelley’s words) a time for “repentance and moral re-dedication.”

Here’s the lyrics:

Come All You Worthy Christian Men

Anyway, we followed some morrismen who did an outrageous dance where they simulated a large brawl — in time! — with sticks. This gave us the opportunity to “teach them a lesson” with our song. It was fun.

 › music     2004-12-22 13:09   ...1 comment

Found this short article while looking for something else

 › music     2004-03-19 13:13   ...0 comments

Ears are happy. Today was a red letter day.

 › music     2004-02-28 20:27   ...0 comments

My Anthologie de la chanson Française has arrived! 14 cds of French folk music goodness.

I’m listening to the maritime cd right now (La mer, les ports et les marins) and it is exactly what I was hoping it would be: a french counterpart to my collection of English folk anthologies. The recordings are contemporary, by lots of different people, and the songs are great. Too often French folk music compilations consist of weird people singing the classics that have become children’s songs. This is not what is on these CDs… This anthology does not suck.

For those who recognize names, the musical direction on this project was by Marc Robine, Gabriel Yacoub and Emmanuel Pariselle.

Read the previous blog entry on this topic.

 › music     2004-02-09 11:29   ...0 comments

I’ve become interested in French folk songs. Having had this burning interest in anglo-folk for the last few years, it occurs to me that there must be french folk music too… Since I am French, I am thinking that it behooves me to actually find out about it.

I’ve combed the net looking for french folk links, and there’s surprisingly little out there on this. I finally stumbled upon a page with some links to recordings. The one that really caught my eye was L’anthologie de la chanson Française (see also the le Monde review on this page). This is a 14 cd box set, which shipped originally with a 928 page book (that I think I can order separately) which should be the most authoritative source imaginable. (I am crossing my fingers that it does not suck.)

Actually getting this has been a bit difficult. The company that produced it in 1994, EPM records in France, seems to be in the process of disappearing. Their website is gone, but in a fit of optimism I sent them an email and they replied!

Even though I grew up speaking French, it has always taken me a long time to write it. I’m getting a bit better at it recently, having written a few things to Parliant customers, and having exchanged some emails with this guy at EPM. Writing a formal letter required some more delving into reference material to get the proper form for a business letter in France, the form - and especially the “yours sincerely” equivalent being very important in such communications.

Here’s the letter, as finally sent this morning:

Ottawa, le 16 janvier 2004.

EPM
188 Bld Voltaire
75001 Paris
France

Monsieur,

Suite à notre entretien par courier électronique de cette semaine, veuillez recevoir cette lettre en guise de mon bon de commande pour votre coffret de 14 disques compactes: L’anthologie de la chanson française – La tradition.

J’ai hâte de reçevoir cet ensemble distingué de musique traditionnelle, et je vous félicite pour l’avoir produit.

Veuillez, s’il vous plaît, m’envoyer un coffret, au prix de €85.00, avec l’ajout de €25.00 comme frais de port. Prenez cette lettre signée comme mon autorisation pour un paiement sur my carte bancaire VISA avec numéro: 1234 1234 1234 1234 avec expiration à la fin de marsembre 2099 (13/99).

Je vous remerci de votre patience pendant notre correspondance par courrier électronique de la dernière semaine.

Veuillez recevoir, Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués.

Colin Henein

 › music     2004-01-16 11:31   ...1 comment