Ecstatic Music Festival: Sarah Kirkland Snider, Shara Worden & yMusic from Kaufman Center on Vimeo.
Ecstatic Music Festival - Roomful of Teeth and tUnE-yArDs from Kaufman Center on Vimeo.
Ecstatic Music Festival: Dan Deacon & So Percussion from Kaufman Center on Vimeo.
This an album of recordings made by Gershon Kingsley in the late 60s and early 70s, being reissued by Reboot Stereophonic, a label that puts out vintage Jewish music.For those few suffering music fans who don't immediately think of Kraftwerk-esque electronica when they hear melodic Jewish liturgy, treatment is now available by mail-order. God Is a Moog is a double album featuring recordings from 1968 to 1974, in which pioneering musician, and Moog keyboard innovator, Gershon Kingsley attempted to fuse the machine and the divine. Using his creativity, the Moog, and a few choice Proverbs, Kingsley recorded everything from meditations on identity and freedom, to a rock opera for the Sabbath (written to include a gospel choir). Be warned, the album is as infectious as it is intelligent, which is to say, it just might blow your mind. In addition, you, who have previously been described as "endearingly awkward and strangely moving," might be interested to know that the very same words were used by Time Out New York to describe God Is a Moog. Though, Time Out also called it an example of "radical Jewish culture decades before John Zorn coined the term," and that bit doesn't sound like you at all. Find out more about Robert Moog, the visionary who invented the Moog Synthesizer.
Have a listen here.
Cymande came to being in 1971 in London, England, formed mainly by musicians from Jamaica and Guyana. In their 3 short years together they created some incredibly soulful music, and were one of the more sophisticated funk bands of the early 70’s.
That being said, to call them “just a funk band” is doing them a stellardisservice. They combined groove, funk, african music and percussion, calypso, reggae-type Rasta lyrics, Santana-esque rhythms and minimal arrangements into a superbly distinctive, complex and eclectic mix.
"I'm not the least bit self-conscious," says Hammer, now 46, his tone steeled with defiance before the show. "I'm the guy who went to the Tokyo Dome and sold out five nights. Who's the other rapper who sold out five nights at the Tokyo Dome? Oh, that's right, there isn't one. You don't have to add anything to my résumé, just read it like it is."Vanilla Ice saved his choice lines for the audience:
After a few songs, he starts speaking their language: "How about I take it back to the old school?" The crowd goes nuts. "Ice Ice Baby" brings down the house. He follows with "Play That Funky Music," and even plays "Ninja Rap," the song he penned for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze."Ninja Rap! (plus some awesome interview clips with Vanilla: "ice ice baby's in full effect - yep, yep")
Victoire has just released a short EP-style album, A Door Into the Dark, made up of live recordings (spruced up beautifully by the studio-wizard, Lawson White) to hold us over until their full album comes out at the end of the year.Missy Mazzoli, the young composer who writes the music for the all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire, seems to have a private line on mute anxiety, on quietly nagging uncertainty, and on the four short pieces that comprise the Door Into the Dark EP, she taps it with effortlessness bordering on the uncanny. Her urgent, enigmatic songs feel like 3AM dispatches garbled by a bad connection, with only the occasional loaded phrase puncturing the static. The band's combination of chittering electronics, found sound and repetitive string and woodwind lines eloquently conjures how it feels to helplessly grope for words that don't exist to describe disquiet we can't place, how it feels to be left alone with only the colors of our own thoughts for company. Victoire live in the up-close dots of a Seurat painting, the point where a seemingly clear picture dissolves into incomprehensibility. You can squint and focus, but the harder you train your gaze, the further everything breaks apart.Plus, for the burgeoning groupie-base, they also post an interview with the band:
...
...it urges you to lean forward, to decode the message just out of earshot. But there is no secret, nothing that needs unlocking, just four gorgeous and inscrutable pieces of music worth puzzling over.
Do you ever think about where your music "fits"?
Missy: I think about it a lot. I always have the same thought pattern, and it's like a circle. It starts when I'm trying to figure out where we're going to play a gig, or trying to figure out who's going to release our album. Even the next song, or piece, or whatever you want to call it, that I'm going to write, where to start from. I always have this question: "It would be a lot easier if we had this specific genre." But then my next thought is: Wait, that would defeat the very purpose of writing music that exists in this crack, in this imagined world. It's kind of like our very mission is to not be defined in one or two words. It's fun being enigmatic. It's fun not really being able to be pinned down.
There are so many bands like that, though! Whenever I get angsty about categories, I think about bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor! or the Dirty Projectors. It sounds like they just don't give a shit, like they are totally free from having to stuff themselves in a genre.
