Gennady Tkachenko-Papizh – Ethereal Singing

There are a number of very strange but wonderful singers in the world, as 5 minutes surfing on Youtube will show you, but one of the strangest and most enchanting of them is Gennady Tkachenko-Papizh who was born in Petropavlosk in Kamchatka (Russia) but who has lived most of his life in the Ukraine.

For most of his adult life he has worked as an animal impersonator and singer, and been modestly successful in both endeavours apparently.    But of late he has come to our attention thanks to his taking part in the Ukraine’s version of “……….  has talent”, in which he has introduced the world to his very individual way of singing, which he describes as Earth Sounds.

This consists of a mix of animal and bird imitations and a very unique and haunting form of singing – All very New Age and meditative.   He mixes a whole range of musical genres into a huge acoustic construction.  Highly meditative, but not sleepy by any means.  As you will see in this typical example of his work, he ranges widely over a huge and highly coloured acoustic wilderness (for want of a better term).

As is often the case with this sort of musician, there is a sort of monotony about what he does, a certain sameness, but for us this is unimportant, as what he has done is so powerful and is absolutely a sound cloud that lends itself ideally to meditation, but in a more directed and intrusive fashion than, for example, Alpha Rhythms.

The first time I heard this guy’s singing, I was absolutely captivated, and promptly hunted up loads more of his music to get a wider feel of what he does.  Luckily for me (and you) there is no end of material online about his work.  So if you Google his name you will be offered a multitude of videos, recordings, articles and so on.

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Truly Moving – Brother Can You Spare A Dime?

A while ago I wrote a post about the depression period song Brother Can you spare a dime?, in which I played you a number of differing versions of this classic song.  This evening while I was enjoying myself simply following the links on Youtube (as one does), going from one amazing bit of music to the next, I came across this version of that song sung by Dr John and Odetta which was so amazing I felt I had to add it to the blog.

The only thing to be said about it is that it is an astoundingly beautiful and moving version of the song and the way the two voices blend and flow is simply wonderful.

Anyhow, I have no desire to examine this version to death, but to simply let you listen to it and enjoy it as I did, so here it is for your pleasure.

So, did you enjoy that?   I really do hope you did, and that you might even feel moved to leave a comment here telling me how you felt about this version of that song.

Link to my earlier post about this song:  http://ozthoughts.com/the-great-crash-songs-that-describe-it-pt-2/

High Five Machine – Totally Silly Gadget

The other day, whilst hunting for some Steam Punk stuff I came across this absolutely silly and pointless machine.

The idea seems to be to have a machine that gives itself endless high fives, which I suppose it actually achieves quite well.  This of course begs the obvious question, namely, why on earth would anyone want such a machine?  And even weirder, why would anyone go to the considerable troubles that the good soul who created this thing did?

As you will see, what he (or perhaps, she) has created here is a machine that very slowly and ponderously gives a series of high five salutes.  It is about as basic a machine as you can imagine, there has been no attempt to give it any sort of “finish”, which in fairness I suspect is simply because this is an early stage in the making of a properly finished bit of kinetic art.  So you will see a machine which is held in place with clamps with rubber arms that still have their sprue along the edges of the mould that was used to make them.

In many ways this machine is in the same area of philosophy as the “Ultimate Machine” which was invented by a bloke by the name of Marvin Minsky and actually built by another odd ball called Claude Shannon.  This was a machine that had as its only purpose the function of switching itself off.   So as you will see in the video below, when you push the switch on the outside of the box (the only control it has by the way), the lid slowly opens, and a hand comes out, and pushes the switch to the off position, and then flips back into its box again.

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Angie And Agent X – Again.

Some time ago I wrote a review of the first Angie And Agent X book by Gary Ruse, a silly, funny and thoroughly enjoyable book all about a very unlikely pair of CIA operatives and their adventures attempting to defeat a totally evil criminal (Link to that review: Angie and Agent X).  Well now I have just had the pleasure of reading the follow up to that book and found it to be as enjoyable as the first volume was.

mandarin mystery

Once again our unlikely pair of heroes (Angie the young woman CIA operative and Agent X, an alien who has become involved in the CIA after his arrival on earth) find themselves asked to solve some very puzzling mysteries, the first mystery being how on earth did the dead body of a CIA operative who was apparently killed in Mexico turn up in the USA about 45 minutes after he was killed… And it gets weirder and weirder from that point on.

Gary Ruse (the author of this fine bit of silliness) has this to say about his book:-

In this sequel to Aggie & Agent X, CIA officer Agnes Westfeld has now been permanently assigned to the special investigative unit at Area 51 in Nevada. She and her partner, Agent X, are immediately thrown into a new case with a seemingly impossible twist. As they seek to solve this baffling mystery and learn the extent of a diabolical scheme by an ancient criminal organization, Aggie and Agent X face dangers more deadly than ever before. A new adventure with that special blend of sci-fi, espionage, mystery, humor and old movie atmosphere that launched the most unusual team-up of spies ever. A new mission! New perils! New villains! And more…

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Chapman Stick – Extraordinary Instrument

I came across the Chapman Stick a couple of days ago for the first time and fell in love with it at once.  It is the most amazingly versatile and pleasing electronic instrument I have heard, one that is capable of being played in real time without any pre-programming of its various voices.

chapman stick

As you can see, it owes its form and to a lesser degree, its function to a simple electric guitar, but it is way more than that.   Unlike a guitar, which is essentially a plucked string instrument, this one is much more a sort of keyboard in which the strings are hit rather than being plucked, though you can of course, pluck the stings if that is the effect you desire.

I think probably it would be best to show you a video made by the guy who invented the instrument, in which he describes in fine detail exactly what and how it works and is played. And for those of you who prefer to get your information by reading it, here is how good old Wikipedia describes it.

A Chapman Stick looks like a wide version of the fretboard of an electric guitar, but with 8, 10 or 12 strings. It is, however, considerably longer and wider than a guitar fretboard. Unlike the electric guitar, it is usually played by tapping or fretting the strings, rather than plucking them. Instead of one hand fretting and the other hand plucking, both hands sound notes by striking the strings against the fingerboard just behind the appropriate frets for the desired notes.

For this reason, it can sound many more notes at once than some other stringed instruments, making it more comparable to a keyboard instrument than to other stringed instruments. This arrangement lends itself to playing many lines at once, and many Stick players have mastered performing bass, chords and melody lines simultaneously.

So now you know what it looks like and roughly how it works, here is a video in which Emmett Chapman (the guy who invented this wonderful instrument) describes it, tells us how it works and demonstrates it as well.

See what I mean?  Isn’t that the most amazing instrument you have ever heard?   Such a versatile and intuitive instrument, and capable of so many different tones, colours and styles.

As you will see in the following videos, it is an instrument that lends itself easily to just about any sort of music you can think of.

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Awful Songs – Some Of The Worst Songs Ever!

As I wander through the depths of Youtube, hunting for bits of music to give me (and I hope, you) pleasure, I also come across some truly dreadful musical excrescences as you can probably imagine.  So I thought I might collect some of them for your musical pleasure.

This wont be of the Portsmouth Sinfonia variety as they are not really simply making bad music, they are having fun making bad music  and know perfectly well that is what they are doing.  But the bits and pieces I shall be sharing with you are created by people who are labouring under the delusion that they are making beautiful and meaningful music.

So just to show you the difference, here is a video of the delightful Portsmouth Sinfonia and then one of the pieces that I consider to be truly lousy music.

Absolutely awful I agree, but done with love and pleasure, and no pretensions of being real musicians – They know they are dreadful and don’t care.

However, this next one is a very different kettle of fish, as you will hear.

Er….   That was someone called Nervous Norvus, with his truly strange song called, reasonably enough, Transfusion.   I have no idea quite why anyone would want to make such a record, but he did, and apparently even managed to find people who wanted to buy it as well.

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The Great Crash – Songs That Describe It. Pt 2

During the Great Depression there were really two songs that captured the spirit of the time. The first one I have already written about ( link to part one) in which I discussed and gave you various versions of the song “No one wants to know you when you are down and out”, so now I am going to have a look at the one that really does sum up the spirit and suffering of that awful time to perfection.

This is the well known song, Brother can you spare a dime?

Before I get into the many differing versions of this classic song, I should give you a wee bit of background to it.  And who better to tell us what the song is really about than the guy who wrote the words – E. Y. “Yip” Harburg.

He had this to say about the purpose and message of this song, which by the way was actually written for a musical called Americana in 1930, just as the Great Depression was beginning to bite.

“I didn’t want a song to depress people. I wanted to write a song to make people think. It isn’t a hand-me-out song of ‘give me a dime, I’m starving, I’m bitter’, it wasn’t that kind of sentimentality”.  The song asks why the men who built the nation – built the railroads, built the skyscrapers – who fought in the war (World War I), who tilled the earth, who did what their nation asked of them should, now that the work is done and their labor no longer necessary, find themselves abandoned and in bread lines.

It refers to “Yankee Doodle Dum”, a reference to patriotism, and the evocation of veterans also recalls protests about military bonuses payable only after 21 years, which were a topical issue.

So that is the background to this song, and to start us off I shall give you the best known and as near original version as there is, that being the version that Bing Crosby recorded back in the 30’s.

So as you can see, the guy is not really begging, he is saying what a huge contribution he made to things, and that now he has been dumped through no fault of his own.   He still has his pride, but admits he needs help, but not as a beggar, but as an equal who is in temporary need.  A powerful song.

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The Great Crash – Songs That Describe It. Pt 1

The period of the Great Depression, which was roughly the 30’s of the last century, produced some remarkable music in a whole slew of styles.    But one thing about almost all of this music was that it denied the realities of what was happening to the USA at that time.  However, there were two songs that in their differing ways did describe the realities of what was happening to so many people in that financial crash.

And it is the the first of these two songs I shall be looking at in this post, the second (Brother Can You Spare A Dime) I shall look at in the next post. and here is the link to that one. (Click here)

1: No One Knows You When You Are Down And Out.

Even though I am relating this song to the Great depression, it was in fact written in 1923, by a blues guitarist called Jimmy Cox, and had nothing to do with financial crashes on a national level, but was all about what happens when you go from being very rich to very poor – Obviously a very different situation to the total financial collapse of an entire country, but there are obvious parallels to be seen in the basic idea of this song and the Great Crash of 1929.

The first known recording of this song was by Bobby Leecan with the South Street Trio in 1927.

As you have heard, his version is a bit different to the one we all know and love, but it is actually the original version, and as such, it deserves to be recognised and played. And to be honest, I like its simplicity and straightforward Blues approach to the idea.

Blind Bobby Baker, another moderately obscure blues singer also recorded it in the late 20’s (1927 to be exact), but he changed the words to emphasise the depressing side of the song’s message rather more forcibly.

So here is his version, played on a very old 78 as you can see.

I rather think that the title on the video, which refers to “nobody nees you” didn’t mean nobody knees you, but needs you. Though when you think about it, both would work in the context of the song.

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Boulez And What’s His Name – 2 Very Different Conductors

While I was working at the Roundhouse Theatre in London, we not only held Rock Concerts regularly, (see my earlier posts about them) but for a period, we also hosted a series of classical concerts.  well, I use the term “classical” to differentiate them from the Rock Concerts, but in fact they were concerts made up of modern “serious” music.

What on earth do you call the contemporary equivalent of Bach and Wagner?

Whatever the correct term for this sort of music happens to be, the BBC had decided in its wisdom that they would broadcast a series of live concerts of extremely modern music under the baton of Pierre Boulez, who at that time (1974) was the resident conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

I am not sure why they had made this decision, except perhaps it might have been simply because Boulez was not only a conductor, but also a composer of such music, and a very active proponent of modern music.

Whatever the reason, a whole series of these concerts were put together and broadcast live from the Roundhouse over a period of several months.

Most of these concerts left me totally cold, as I have never been able to get into the more modern type of music.. all those plunks, squeals and roars simply fail to move me in any way – other than as far away from it all as I can get.   Having said that, working with Boulez was an unalloyed pleasure. He was such a gentle person, totally lacking in the arrogance I found to be the norm with many of the other conductors I worked with over the years. All conductors (except Boulez) insist on being addressed as Maestro for some reason, but he didn’t.   Well at least he never expected me to use that term, I always simply addressed him as Monsieur Boulez, and my technicians simply addressed him (to the total horror of the BBC guys and the members of the Symphony Orchestra) as Pierre.  Which didn’t phase him one bit.

pierre-boulez

As I said, off stage he was a delightful and relaxed man, extremely easy to work with and simply a pleasure to be with.  On stage however he was very different, still extremely civilised and polite, but meticulous and totally engaged in his work.  A total professional in all respects.

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David Cameron Leaves Us With Great Music

As David Cameron announced his departure from office, he managed – by chance – to do something that actually produced some good.  He hummed a jaunty little tune as he entered No. 10 Downing Street for the last time and this little hum has been taken by a number of highly creative people and turned into longer and actually rather good music, as you will see here.

Before offering you some of the better examples of this work,here is the unadorned original to set the scene as it were…….

OK, so that was how it went.

For some reason a lot of musical folk were inspired by that little bit of humming to take the hum and create much longer pieces of music based upon it, as in this example in which the composer feels that his hum was not so much a lament at the end of an unsuccessful political career, but actually a happy jig.

So, a relatively simple and straightforward version on an electronic piano/organ to show us how it might be done.

Other composers came up with much more complex versions of this little hum, as for example this rather amazing version by Jonathan Mul for harpsichord in the form of a Fugue on a Motif by David Cameron, as it rather grandly is called.

Wasn’t that beautiful?   I don’t imagine that Cameron would have ever thought that he might be the cause of such a pleasingly gentle piece of music, but he was.

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