Google e Robert Moog

O google festeja hoje o 78º aniversário de Robert Moog, que fabricou o primeiro sintetizador. Eis o WP knowledge:

História

O primeiro Moog era monofônico (o que impossibilitava a criação de acordes) e precisava ser afinado constantemente, pois era analógico. Criou a empresa Moog Music Inc., na qual foram produzidos os sintetizadores utilizados por artistas comoWendy Carlos (na trilha sonora de Laranja Mecânica) e pelo grupo de rock progressivo Emerson, Lake & Palmer, pelo tecladista Keith Emerson. Lançou posteriormente o Minimoog, o mais vendido da empresa em todos os tempos. Inventou o Moog Taurus, um sintetizador para ser tocado com os pés, para ser utilizado como um contrabaixo, o Vocoder (ligado a um microfone, permitia alteração na voz), o Polymoog, de 1976, polifônico e que vinha com sons gravados de fábrica, e o Moog Liberation, teclado que permitia ser colocado no usuário como uma guitarra, além do Memorymoog, que permitia a gravação de sons pelo tecladista.

Vinil, vinil, vinil!

Muitas discotecas estão a alargar substancialmente o espaço dedicado vinil, e este é um fenómeno que se verifica de forma transversal no mundo ocidental. À edição de novas e velhas obras neste formato as lojas estão a responder com mais espaço de montra; e não poucas vezes reservando uma área considerável para os discos em segunda mão. É o que se passa com uma das minhas lojas preferidas, a Newbury Comics, na Newbury Comics, em Boston, que visito sempre que posso.

Na semana passada tinha dois longos expositores só com vinil novo; e um mais pequeno com vinil usado. Houve que abrir portanto os cordões à bolsa, que as tentações eram muitas. Aqui ficam algumas delas:

STEVIE WONDER, THE TALKING BOOK, 1972



A edição deste clássico absoluto em vinil de 180 g não podia passar ali ao lado e ficar onde estava. Stevie Wonder é um enorme autor que o tempo irá dando cada vez mais relevância. São deste discos clássicos intemporais como "Superstition" ou "You are the sunshine of my life".

DEAD CAN DANCE, INTO THE LABYRINTH, 1993

Uma capa notável para um disco esplendoroso, em que o misticismo antigo dos DCD se funde com a percussão africana. Edição da Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO, 1967

O disco "da banana", em edição mono, como saiu originalmente. O disco em que começa o rock moderno, aquele que começaria a ser feito 10 anos mais tarde...

OWEN PALLETT, LEWIS TAKES OFF HIS SHIRT, 2010


O excelentíssimo Owen Pallet, anteriormente conhecido como Final Fantasy, no tema mais vibrante do seu álbum mais recente, em quatro remixes e mais dois temas (keep the dog quiet, midnight directives) também em remix. Deleite sónico. The six-song single includes the Heartland version of the song, the previously posted Dan Deacon remix and additional tweaks by Benoît Pioulard, CFCF, Simon Bookish. You’ll also get a remixes of Heartland tracks “Keep The Dog Quiet” by Simon Bookish and “Midnight Directives” by Max Tundra.

SEREGENTI, SUFJAN STEVENS, SON LUX - BEAK & CLAW, 2012



Esta é a obra mais recente de Sufjan, que desde o seu último trabalho que quebrou com o seu próprio e muito pessoal paradigma sónico e busca uma ruptura não só com a sua história pessoal mas com todo o som conhecido. Este aguarda o momento de conhecer as agruras da minha Goldring.

SUFJAN STEVENS, RUN RABBIT RUN, 2009

Uma ediçao dedicada aos signos do zodiaco chinês. Magnífica edição em vinil, que pesa mais ou menos um quilo, entre vinil de alta qualidade e capa em cartão duro...

ROKY ERICSSON, TRUE LOVE CAST OUT ALL EVIL, 2010

Já escrutinado no Perú, Roky Ericsson é um descendente de aliens que fez a travessia de todas as alucinações, para vir a ser resgatado pelos Okkervil River e fazer um dos discos mais genuínos e tocantes de 2010.

JONATHAN WILSON, PITY TRIALS AND TOMORROW'S CHILD, 2011

Uma edição especial do Record Store Day do ano passado, de uma das maiores revelações do ano passado (álbum"Gentle Spirit"), herdeiro da California e do espírito de Laurel Canyon, onde reside. Aqui, uma versão de "Isn´t it a pity", de George Harrison, com Graham Nash  - checar também a versão dos Galaxie 500 - "Trials of Jonathan" e "Tomorrow's Child". Só foram feitas 1000 cópias do disco.

THE FELICE BROTHERS, CELEBRATION, FLORIDA, 2011



Os Estados Unidos estão a dar-nos alguma da música mais genuina dos ultimos cinco anos, através desse epifenómeno chamado Americana. Os Felice Brothers são uma das bandas mais interessantes. Basta ouvir "River Jordan", deste disco. Ian Felice tem uma voz que lembra Dylan, mas há uma sombra mais negra que paira aqui - Tom Waits?

White Denim, D, 2011



Mais Americana, mas desta feita musculada, intensa. Os White Denim têm vindo a refinar-se, e nas primeiras faixas que ouvi deste álbum passa algum psicadelismo e até alguma toada progressiva. Vou ouvir com atenção.

Resta dizer que que as edições mais inteligentes em vinil asseguram que há um download de mp3 para ouvir sempre que não há um pick-up à mão. opção de compromisso, mas muito adpatada aos tempos de hoje, em que um ipod ou o estereo do carro nos acompanham muitas vezes. Em casa podemos depois deixar-nos levar pelo som absorvente do disco preto...

Também comprei uns CDs, mas ainda não me entusiasmei para falar deles...

Storm Corrosion

O novo prog, pela mão de dois dos mais mediáticos líderes da atualidade: Mikael Akerfeldt dos Opeth e Steven Wilson dos Porcupine Tree.

O vídeo está uma obra-prima.

Sandy Denny começa a ganhar o estatuto de culto que ela merece

Sandy Denny: The Queen of Fairport

She transformed folk-rock, but met a dismal end. Now, at last, she has the cult status she's due
Nick Coleman

Less than a decade ago a retrospective CD box-set came out. A Boxful of Treasures documented the life and career of the English singer-songwriter Sandy Denny, who died in 1978, at the age of 31, following a brain haemorrhage arising in part from an intoxicated tumble down a flight of stairs. One of several such tumbles. Another English songwriter wrote the introduction to the booklet inside: Denny's friend and greatest collaborator Richard Thompson.

"Where is Sandy's cult?" he lamented. "Where are the graveside vigilants? The colour supplement dissections? The South Bank eulogies...?" He went on to insist that, in talent at least, Denny stood head and shoulders above "her generation of female artists". He suggested that, without her intervention, Richard's group Fairport Convention might well have remained a callow footnote in the history of British rock. "It was like a Mini colliding with a lorry-load of bricks," he wrote of her impact on joining the band in 1968, the inference being that the boys in the band were the bricks. "She taught us to express our musical passions, gave us a real voice at the sharp end of our creativity." She made men out of the bricks.

So where is the Sandy Denny cult?

Not far away, actually, going on tour in the form of a concert "homage", starting in Liverpool on 19 May and drawing to a close in Manchester eight dates later: a caravan of musicians whose careers might not have been quite the same were it not for Denny's music, among them Maddy Prior, PP Arnold, Joan Wasser, Dave Swarbrick, and Thea Gilmore. Only eight years have passed since Thompson's piece, but an awful lot of cult can flourish in that time. Sandy's cult is growing like Japanese bindweed. But why now?

First we ought to establish who Denny was – the person, not the myth. She was the daughter of ultra-straight-laced, middle-class Surrey parents both of whom served during the Second World War. Sandy was raised in a comfortable suburban atmosphere, wanting for little. She had an amiable brother, a large, carefully tended garden – the one spreading itself out so lustrously behind Mum 'n' Dad on the cover of Fairport's Unhalfbricking – and no shortage of parental interest in her future. Her childhood was, on paper at least, a model of bourgeois post-war regeneration.

But Sandy preferred not to play the comfortably-off game. She obliged her mother by training (half-heartedly) to be a nurse, but chose instead to embrace that other mode of post-war regeneration, the life of the art-school troubadour. She admired Anne Briggs, the elusive anti-star of English folk music. She played guitar and piano, she sang, she drank, she cursed, she wrote darkly passionate songs framed in a medieval latticework of symbols and allusions, and she put it about in the company of men her mother would think unsuitable.

Denny seems, almost classically, to have been caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of 1960s individualism: the desire, on the one hand, for constant attention and, on the other, for freedom from scrutiny, contradictory longings for fame and romantic obscurity.

She was certainly not without her anxieties. She could not bear to spend time alone. She suffered, chronically, from low creative confidence. Her moods swung drastically. She also experienced a lot of bad luck. According to Mick Houghton, her latest biographer, the most "commercial" of all her solo records was a victim of the mid-Seventies vinyl shortage and reached the shops only six months after its promotional push expired.

When Denny died in dismal, upsetting circumstances, it seemed likely at least that she'd start selling records by the lorryload. But it didn't happen. Things seemed not to happen for Sandy, however hard she tried.

And that, one suspects, is what gives rise to the sharpest empathy in the hearts of all those musicians who constitute the Latterday Cult of Sandy: there but for the grace of God...

She was good, of course. That goes without saying. You don't make sense out of the rabble that was Fairport Convention in 1968 without real creative focus. You don't get to guest on Led Zeppelin records if you don't have a voice like a whipped sheet. You certainly don't write songs like "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" without a gift for nailing strokes of complex emotion to the wall.

Denny's range was not great, not as a writer. You can confine most of her significant composition to the basket marked "slow, bleak, reflective ballads with lots of water imagery". The good ones are terrific, but there are enough not-so-good ones to suggest she struggled to clamber out of her regular bag. Still, for every duffer there's an "I'm a Dreamer" (from her last album Rendezvous), which transcends its gloopy arrangement by articulating the likely truth behind her self-loathing.

She was paralysed by her own inertia; it filled her with horror. It is hard to avoid the thought that Denny only ever really got moving in her songs, with their leaves and streams and riverine motion.

You can hear that horror in her voice too, which is powerful, accurate and, when it reaches full intensity, really does whip like a wet sheet in the wind. But it's not a welcoming voice and it is seldom intimately involving; nor did Denny's way of singing hook the ear with rhythm. Rhythm, in Denny's voice, is an organising principle and not much more.

"It was a sweet voice," says Maddy Prior, who will be singing "John The Gun", "Fotheringay" (the song which, later, gave rise to the band) and "Solo" on the tribute tour. She is hesitant when pressed and continues, "Sweet but not ... cloying. She was an extremely lyrical singer."

Prior and Denny were friends. The Steeleye Span singer remembers her above all for her spiky sense of humour. The bleak songs of longing and loss? Well, that was the kind of material you were expected to produce if you were a young, romantic, hard-living hippie. She attributes Denny's lack of commercial success less to malign fate than to sheer lack of business acumen. "None of us were interested in that side of things," she says.

But what if we were to try to explain the new cult of Sandy by exploring only the myth? What then? What vapours rise from the ponds and streams of mythic time?

The playwright Jez Butterworth included "Who Knows..." inJerusalem, his brilliant snatch at the departing soul of lost, pagan, intuitive, rebellious Old England. His Falstaffian outlaw "Rooster" Byron harbours Phaedra, a waif-like minor, in his caravan in the woods, keeping her from the predations of her father, putting her in touch with the spirit of the green and, possibly, taking advantage himself. It is an uneasy spectacle, especially when 21st-century riotousness rubs up against 1960s folk-romanticism of such unequivocal beauty. Why did Butterworth choose Denny's song?

"I didn't choose it. The song chose itself. Or rather, Phaedra chooses it, when she wants to dance with Rooster, to mark the end of her time as May Queen."

And what is its function in the play? "I can't remember if I already knew that in the myth of St George, the dragon and the maiden are parts of the same whole; namely, they represent the qualities of high, angelic purity and the low bestiality which man possesses. The dragon spirals around the maiden, as in a dance. In any event, from what I've read, Sandy Denny had a very Rooster-like/Phaedra-like soul."

Divided and unresting.

Sandy Denny: Three from the heart

Fairport Convention: "Tam Lin". Unadorned electrified English folk. Some say that Fairport's Liege & Lief, on which this appeared, was the best work Denny ever did.

Led Zeppelin: "The Battle of Evermore". Jimmy Page and Robert Plant away from the hard-rock rat-race, with surging mandolins and Denny piping high and long against an epic narration of the conflict at the eve of all things.

 Fotheringay: "The Pond and the Stream". Denny's paean to the restless spirit of English folksinger Anne Briggs, set to the ensemble tinkling of the group she formed with Trevor Lucas, after leaving Fairport. Oh, the longing ....

 The Lady: A Homage to Sandy Denny, 19-28 May:musicbeyond mainstream.org.uk. 'Sandy', 'Like An Old-Fashioned Waltz' and 'Rendezvous' will be reissued by Universal/Island on 21 May

tUNE yARDS - My Country

Video fresco para uma das bandas em destaque em 2011

Imagens de um Festival - Fotos do Concerto dos Focus

O Thijs Van Leer e o El K

Pois é. O Thijs Van Leer, holandês louco que grita, assobia, canta em tirolês, martela o orgão e sopra na flauta a todo o gás é um porreiraço, sem pinta de estrelato, que passou parte da tarde no hall de Gouveia a falar com quem estava, enquanto a mulher vendia discos. Eis-me a mim com ele, enquanto ele assina o Cd dos Focus Live...

Imagens de um Festival 5: Curved Air

Na primeira noite, os Curved Air em grande, diz quem assistiu.

Gouveia Art Rock - Imagens de um Festival 4 - Strawbs

Um dos concertos grandes do festival, exuberante, emotivo, histórico: os Strawbs

Gouveia Art Rock - Imagens de um festival 3 - Shylock

Banda de culto francesa, os Shylock são muito venerados por alguns, sobretudo pela sua veia crimsoniana. Deram um bom concerto em Gouveia, com uns belos momentos sobretudo da Black Beauty de Frédéric L´'Epée (LP?)mas à sua música falta estrutura e composição.

Olá, desde há muito...

Numa ida rápida ao youtube, noturna, pós-laboral, dei comigo a procurar Keith Tippett. Ao tempo que já não ouvia isto. Aliás, espero que o meu cd repouse na prateleira onde é suposto estar! Quanto à música... dispensa qualquer comentário! Abraços

Gouveia Art Rock - Imagens de um festival 2 - Anglagard

2º excerto dos Anglagard Gouveia Art Rock 2012 - imagens de um festival

Gouveia Art Rock 2012 - imagens de um festival 1 - Anglagard

Terminado mais um Gouveia Art Rock, com excelentes concertos, aqui ficam alguns clips das principais atuações.

Em primeiro lugar, a banda sueca Anglagard, num excerto de Jordrok, do seu primeiro álbum, "Hybris"

As Piores Capas de sempre # 324

O verdadeiro DJ Porkka...

Capas que dão nas Vistas II

Música que se deve ter sempre em casa, just in case...

Capas que dão nas Vistas