The best saxophonists play just as well unaccompanied as they do accompanied — but they also know that, in the act of musical creation, it certainly helps to have even a little bit of sound to play off coming your way. German musician Armin Küpper discovered more than a little bit of sound coming his way when he tried playing his saxophone into a gas pipe he happened across near his home. Kept at a construction site and not currently in a state to pipe any gas, it served him as a kind of echo device, one distinctive in both sound and appearance. On his Youtube channel he’s posted a dozen videos so far of the “concerts” he’s given at the pipe: playing into it, standing beside it, sitting in it.

“This sound on the tube, in this loneliness always gives me the feeling: Hey, you’re not alone there!” writes Küpper. “Sometimes I just can’t stop playing. The nice thing is, when it gets cool in the evening, I sit down in the tube heated up during the day and enjoy the sunset playing the saxophone.”

These sentiments appear in the description of the video at the top of the post, in which Küpper demonstrates the style of music he calls “Pipelinefunk,” or in his native German Röhrensound. He’s also tried his hand at “Pipelineblues,” pipeline guitar, and a composition called “Walking on the Pipeline” — during his performance of which he does just that, the sound of his saxophone changes with every step he takes toward the opening.

When played directly into the pipe, Küpper’s saxophone comes back sounding uncannily like a classic call-and-response. But what’s truly impressive is the range of effects he discovers while approaching the pipe differently each time, producing whole new soundscapes by changing little more than the angle of his playing. Alas, his time with the pipe seems to have lasted only so long.  The building project that brought the pipe in the first place would sooner or later have to make use of it, and in one video description Küpper mentions that “‘my pipe’ was laid in the ground.” There could be no better sendoff for this unusual musical partner — and a collaborator in the creation of this surprising variety of, literally, German industrial music — than Küpper’s dusk performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”?

via Laughing Squid

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

When David Bowie invited Chic guitarist and all-around funk/disco guitar genius Nile Rodgers to make an album of “hits” in Switzerland, Rogers remembers thinking, “okay, ‘hits’ with David Bowie, that’s an awesome project.” The way he deadpans might make us think he wasn’t super stoked about it, but the fact is, it’s hard to impress Nile Rodgers. He has produced, written, and played guitar—the very Stratocaster he’s holding in the video above—on “hundreds, maybe thousands” of records, he says. What’s one more, with one more superstar?

The album, it turned out, would become Let’s Dance, runner-up to Thriller for album of the year in 1984, containing such danceable hits as the title track, “Modern Love,” and “China Girl.” It was to be Bowie’s best-selling album—as he described it, “a rediscovery of white-English-ex-art-school-student-meets-black-American-funk.” He certainly brought the first part of that equation, a tune he strummed for Rogers on his 12-string acoustic that “sounded like folk music to me,” the guitarist says.

“Since I knew David loved jazz and he understood the vernacular, I said to him, ‘David, can I do an arrangement of this song?’” (What he has remembered saying elsewhere is much funnier: “I come from dance music. You can’t call that thing you just played ‘Let’s Dance.’”) Rodgers shows how he substituted and moved Bowie’s chords, giving the song its distinctive voicing. “Running away from funk because of the whole disco sucks thing,” Rodgers says, he simplified his strumming, letting a delay effect “make the groove.”

While he may not have gone into the experience expecting much more than the usual hit-making collaboration, the experience, “changed my life,” he says, “it changed David’s life, and we wound up working together on another five projects over the next five years.” In an NPR interview last year, Rogers debuted the first demo of “Let’s Dance” with Bowie singing over his new arrangement. You can hear just above.

The video at the top is part of Fender Guitars’ educational series, so Rodgers wraps up with an essential takeaway for guitarists about the importance of “good theoretical knowledge,” the basis of his “Let’s Dance” transformation from folk to jazz to New Wave post-funk. Sadly, we cannot hear from Bowie himself or from his other famous guitarist-collaborator on “Let’s Dance,” Stevie Ray Vaughan. But Bowie also credited the Texas legend for helping him access his inner American to create music, as he once observed, with a “European sensibility, but owed its impact to the blues.”

via Boing Boing

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

“Ring of Fire” has been covered many times and in many ways since Johnny Cash released it in 1963. But for all its recognition as one of his signature songs, Cash’s “Ring of Fire” is itself a cover — or another interpretation, in any case, of a tune originally written by Cash’s wife June Carter and songwriter Merle Kilgore for June’s sister, Anita Carter. Though it made nothing like the mark Cash’s recording did, the original “Ring of Fire” has its appreciators, a group that may well include Brian Eno. Or at least one feels an affinity between Anita Carter’s take on the song and Eno’s own, the latter of which you can listen to above.

Unlikely enough to begin with, in an artistic sense, the recording’s availability on the internet has saved it from near-complete obscurity. “In 1990, Brian Eno and John Cale made a wonderful experimental pop/art rock record called Wrong Way Up, released by Warner Bros. Records,” writes Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz.

“At the time, the label would send out 7″ records to alt.rock/college radio stations to promote their new releases. The promo series, called Soil Samples, featured different artists on each side of the record performing songs that weren’t included on their new albums.” Cale’s contribution to the sample was an instrumental called “Shuffle Down to Woodbridge,” and the flip side of this translucent-vinyl rarity featured “Merry Christmas” by the two-man Americana group House of Freaks.

As the legend goes — for every story connected with Johnny Cash becomes a legend — the idea for how to do “Ring of Fire” came to the Man in Black in a dream. The “Mexican horns” that had risen up from his subconscious “sound like they’ve stumbled in from somewhere else on the radio dial and are trying desperately not to fall over Cash’s standard shave-and-a-haircut clomping beat,” writes The Atlantic‘s Noah Berlatsky. “Cash, for his part, turns in one of the most awkward vocals of his career.” And yet “all those elements knocking against each other,” he continues “fit the song’s lyrics perfectly.” Eno’s flowing, languid, Mexican-horn-free recording may sound more like the original “Ring of Fire” than any other cover, but it also befits its artist, the man who popularized ambient music. Neither Cash nor Eno sing like men especially subject to “wild desire,” but what song isn’t enriched by a bit of counterpoint?

via Boing Boing

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.