A Virtual Tour of Every Place Referenced in The Beatles’ Lyrics: In 12 Minutes, Travel 25,000 Miles Across England, France, Russia, India & the US

in Music | January 22nd, 2019

Ach, the won­ders and the blun­ders of the Inter­net. The won­der: Van­i­ty Fair–lovely mag­a­zine, a bit too many sto­ries about the roy­als and bil­lion­aires though–has the bud­get and the where­with­al to com­mis­sion this video. It’s a 12 minute ride around the world using Google Maps, touch­ing down to show loca­tions men­tioned in the Bea­t­les lyrics, from Liv­er­pool to the Black Moun­tain Hills of Dako­ta to Moscow, where the bal­alaikas are always ring­ing out. The blun­der: it’s laced with inac­cu­ra­cies and guess­es about the most over­doc­u­ment­ed group of all time.

Is it worth your time? For the Bea­t­les know-it-all or the casu­al lis­ten­er, the answer is yes.
The video begins unsur­pris­ing­ly in Liv­er­pool with a tour of Pen­ny Lane, Straw­ber­ry Field, and the child­hood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCart­ney. There’s a brief vis­it to the Cav­ern night­club where they grew their local fan­base, and down the Mersey to sug­gest that the “cast iron shore” in “Glass Onion” is refer­ring to this iron ore clogged water­way. (Per­haps, but not def­i­nite that one.)

We go up to Scot­land (the Kirkaldy men­tioned in “Cry Baby Cry”) down to Lon­don for all kinds of loca­tions, num­ber one being Abbey Road stu­dios, and south to the “Dock at Southamp­ton” although the video points out that you can’t get to “Hol­land or France” as in “The Bal­lad of John & Yoko.” (That would be Dover.)

There are stops in India, where we get to tour the remains of the ashram in Rishikesh, now lov­ing­ly adorned with all sorts of Bea­t­les fan art, and over to Amer­i­ca to the Bel Air home at the top of “Blue Jay Way.”

All in all, the total miles on this Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour add up to 25,510, and all using Google tech. Not bad.

But a scroll through the YouTube com­ments reveals how much the video gets wrong. The bar­ber­shop men­tioned in “Pen­ny Lane” is the wrong one, and Paul just recent­ly vis­it­ed it in his endear­ing “Car Pool Karaoke” seg­ment with James Cor­den. And while there is indeed a Bish­ops­gate in Lon­don, that isn’t the one men­tioned in “Being for the Ben­e­fit of Mr. Kite.” That one lies to the north of Liv­er­pool. The rooftop where the Bea­t­les played their last gig is wrong (the map shows the cur­rent loca­tion of Apple Records, not the build­ing at 3 Sav­ille Row, where it hap­pened). And what, no tour of George Har­ri­son or Ringo Starr’s child­hood home? I mean, you guys were in the neigh­bor­hood, you could have popped ‘round.

Ah well, as we said, it’s a bit of both good and bad this video. If any­thing, it’ll make you want to give those clas­sic songs yet anoth­er spin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Did Lennon or McCart­ney Write the Bea­t­les 1965 Song “In My Life”? A Math Pro­fes­sor, Using Sta­tis­tics, Solves the Decades-Old Mys­tery

The Bea­t­les as Teens (1957)

Watch HD Ver­sions of The Bea­t­les’ Pio­neer­ing Music Videos: “Hey Jude,” “Pen­ny Lane,” “Rev­o­lu­tion” & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Discover the Ingenious Typewriter That Prints Musical Notation: The Keaton Music Typewriter Patented in 1936

in History, Music | January 22nd, 2019

Noth­ing could seem more ordi­nary to any­one who has grown up with a musi­cian in the house, or tak­en music class­es them­selves, than sheaves of sheet music: quar­ter, half, and whole notes trip­ping through order­ly staffs in chords, arpeg­gios, and melodies. But the process of mak­ing those sheets of music is prob­a­bly far less famil­iar to most of us. Music print­ing his­to­ry, as the site Music Print­ing His­to­ry shows, par­al­lels book print­ing, but uses the tech­nolo­gies dif­fer­ent­ly, from wood­block to lith­o­g­ra­phy to pho­to­graph­ic repro­duc­tion to per­haps a rarely seen method—the music type­writer.

These inge­nious machines do exact­ly what it sounds like they do, in type­writer-like forms we’ll rec­og­nize and oth­er forms we will not. The first patent for such a device, filed in 1885 by Charles Spiro, shows an object resem­bling a sewing machine.

The next inven­tion, first patent­ed by F. Dogilbert in 1906, resem­bles a mechan­i­cal engrav­ing machine—and indeed, that’s more or less what it was. By con­trast, the 1946 Musicwriter, invent­ed by Cecil S. Effin­ger, looks just like an ear­ly IBM type­writer with a QWERTY key­board. The next ver­sion of the machine was, in fact, a word proces­sor made by IBM.

One inven­tion Music Print­ing His­to­ry does not men­tion was made by a woman, Miss Lil­lian Pavey, in 1961. In the British Pathé news­reel film above, you can see her type­writer in action as she tran­scribes music from a record in real time. In-between the ear­li­est music type­writ­ers, which were not mass-mar­ket­ed to con­sumers, and IBM’s slick, 1988 Musicwriter II, which was, there is the odd Keaton Music Type­writer, first patent­ed with 14 keys in 1936, then again in 1953 in a 33-key ver­sion.

See the Keaton’s clunky oper­a­tion at the top of the post. It looks a lit­tle like a seis­mo­graph or lie detec­tor machine with a semi­cir­cu­lar dou­ble ring of keys (in the 33-key design) in the cen­ter of a met­al car­riage. (See the orig­i­nal patent below.) Con­trary to the Pathé newsman’s claim that no one had suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing a work­ing music type­writer, the Keaton and oth­er mod­els to fol­low in the 40s and 50s sold, though not in large quan­ti­ties, and “made it eas­i­er for pub­lish­ers, edu­ca­tors, and oth­er musi­cians to pro­duce music copies in quan­ti­ty.” Typed sheet music could eas­i­ly be mass-repro­duced by pho­tog­ra­phy.

Nonethe­less, Music Print­ing His­to­ry notes, “com­posers… pre­ferred to write the music out by hand.” The type­writer was main­ly offered as a tool for mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion, not spon­ta­neous com­po­si­tion. Com­put­ers have changed things such that com­posers seem to have the same kinds of debates about hand­writ­ing vers­es dig­i­tal as writ­ers do. But where the type­writer is still a pow­er­ful sym­bol of lit­er­ary art—for some an instru­ment as dis­tinc­tive and wor­thy of study as the gui­tars of rock ‘n’ roll greats—the music type­writer is an odd­i­ty, a mechan­i­cal curios­i­ty no one asso­ciates with cre­ation.

Yet, as “the most vin­tage and won­der­ful­ly imprac­ti­cal thing ever,” as Clas­sic Fm dubs the device, unwieldy machines like the Keaton remain high on the list of cool, quirky inven­tions its most like­ly cus­tomers did­n’t real­ly seem to need.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball”

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

Con­serve the Sound, an Online Muse­um Pre­serves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Type­writ­ers, Elec­tric Shavers and Cas­sette Recorders, to Cam­eras & Clas­sic Nin­ten­do

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

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To Help Digitize and Preserve the Sound of Stradivarius Violins, a City in Italy Has Gone Silent

in History, Music | January 21st, 2019

Image by Mark Ordonez, via Flickr Com­mons

We all have respect, even awe, for the name Stradi­var­ius, even those of us who have nev­er held a vio­lin, let alone played one. The vio­lins — as well as vio­las, cel­los, and oth­er string instru­ments, includ­ing gui­tars — made by mem­bers of the Stradi­vari fam­i­ly 300 years ago have become sym­bols of pure son­ic qual­i­ty, still not quite replic­a­ble with even 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy, with rar­i­ty and prices to match. But to tru­ly under­stand the pre­cious­ness of the Stradi­var­ius, look not to the auc­tion house but to the north­ern Ital­ian city of Cre­mona, home of the Museo del Vio­li­no and its col­lec­tion of some of the best-pre­served exam­ples of the 650 sur­viv­ing Stradi­var­ius instru­ments in the world.

“Cre­mona is home to the work­shops of some of the world’s finest instru­ment mak­ers, includ­ing Anto­nio Stradi­vari, who in the 17th and 18th cen­turies pro­duced some of the finest vio­lins and cel­los ever made,” writes The New York Times’ Max Par­adiso.

“The city is get­ting behind an ambi­tious project to dig­i­tal­ly record the sounds of the Stradi­var­ius instru­ments for pos­ter­i­ty, as well as oth­ers by Amati and Guarneri del Gesù, two oth­er famous Cre­mona crafts­men. And that means being qui­et.” It’s all to help the ambi­tious record­ing project now cre­at­ing the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank, “a data­base stor­ing all the pos­si­ble tones that four instru­ments select­ed from the Museo del Violino’s col­lec­tion can pro­duce.”

This requires great efforts on the part of the engi­neers and the per­form­ers, the lat­ter of whom have to play hun­dreds of scales and arpeg­gios (exam­ples of which you can hear embed­ded in The New York Times arti­cle) on these stag­ger­ing­ly valu­able instru­ments. But the peo­ple of Cre­mona have to coop­er­ate, too: in the area around the Museo del Vio­li­no’s audi­to­ri­um where the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank is record­ing, “the sound of a car engine, or a woman walk­ing in high heels, pro­duces vibra­tions that run under­ground and rever­ber­ate in the micro­phones, mak­ing the record­ing worth­less.” And so Cre­mon­a’s may­or, also the pres­i­dent of the Stradi­var­ius Foun­da­tion, “allowed the streets around the muse­um to be closed for five weeks, and appealed to peo­ple in the city to keep it down.”

Few of us alive today have heard the sound of a Stradi­var­ius in per­son, but that num­ber will shrink fur­ther still in future gen­er­a­tions. It’s to do with the very nature of these cen­turies-old instru­ments which, no mat­ter what kind of efforts go toward mak­ing them playable, still seem to have a finite lifes­pan. “We pre­serve and restore them,” Par­adiso quotes Museo del Vio­li­no cura­tor Faus­to Cac­cia­tori as say­ing, “but after they reach a cer­tain age, they become too frag­ile to be played and they ‘go to sleep,’ so to speak.” The day will pre­sum­ably come when the last Stradi­var­ius goes to sleep, but by that time the sounds they made will still be wide awake in their dig­i­tized sec­ond life. And we can be cer­tain, at least, that future gen­er­a­tions will think of a musi­cal use for them that we can no more imag­ine now than Anto­nio Stradi­vari could have in his day.

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Stradi­var­ius Vio­lins Are Worth Mil­lions

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

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 or on Face­book.

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Hear the Sounds of the Actual Instruments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Handel Originally Composed Their Music

in History, Music | January 18th, 2019

When we go to a con­cert of orches­tral music today, we hear most every piece played on the same range of instru­ments — instru­ments we know and love, to be sure, but instru­ments designed and oper­at­ed with­in quite strict para­me­ters. The pleas­ing qual­i­ty of the sounds they pro­duce may make us believe that we’re hear­ing every­thing just as the com­pos­er orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed, but we usu­al­ly aren’t. To hear what the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Han­del, and Haydn would have had in their head as they com­posed back in their day, you’d have to have an orches­tra go so far as to play it not with mod­ern instru­ments, but the same ones orches­tras used back in those com­posers’ life­times.

Enter Lon­don’s Orches­tra of the Age of the Enlight­en­ment, which takes its name from the era of the late 18th cen­tu­ry from which it draws most of its reper­toire — and from which it draws most of its instru­ments, a vital part of its mis­sion to achieve peri­od-accu­rate sound. You can read more about the OAE’s instru­ments on its web site, or bet­ter yet, head over to its Youtube chan­nel to hear those instru­ments demon­strat­ed and their his­tor­i­cal back­grounds explained. Here we have four of the OAE’s videos: on the clar­inet they use for Mozart’s Clar­inet Con­cer­to, on the con­tra­bas­soon they use for Beethoven’s Fifth Sym­pho­ny and Hayd­n’s Cre­ation, the organ they use for Han­del’s Organ Con­cer­to, and an oboe like the one Haydn would have known.

“We love the music we play,” says OAE dou­ble bassist Cecelia Brugge­mey­er, “and we love ask­ing ques­tions about the music we play.” So when you use an instru­ment like the 300-year-old bass she shows off in anoth­er video, “you sud­den­ly find it does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do the things a mod­ern instru­ment will do, and that sets up a whole train of ques­tions.” These include, “What would Bach have heard? How might the play­ers in his day have played? What does that mean for us, play­ing today? What does that mean for live music now, with this his­toric infor­ma­tion? We’re not try­ing to re-cre­ate the past. We’re try­ing to make some­thing that’s excit­ing now but using what was from the past” — not a bad metaphor, come to think of it, for the entire enter­prise of clas­si­cal-music per­for­mance in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Watch a Musi­cian Impro­vise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instru­ment, The Car­il­lon

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

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 or on Face­book.

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Behold Moebius’ Many Psychedelic Illustrations of Jimi Hendrix

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Music | January 17th, 2019


The 1995 release of posthu­mous Jimi Hen­drix com­pi­la­tion Voodoo Soup has divid­ed fans and crit­ics for over two decades now. But what­ev­er its mer­its, its cov­er art should hold an hon­ored place in every Hen­drix fan’s col­lec­tion. Drawn by the leg­endary cult com­ic artist Moe­bius from a pho­to­graph of Hen­drix eat­ing soup in France, it cap­tures the sound Hen­drix was mov­ing toward at the end of his life—his head explod­ing in flames, or mush­room clouds, or pink psy­che­del­ic bronchial tubes, or what­ev­er. The image comes from a larg­er gate­fold, excerpt­ed below, which Moe­bius drew for the French dou­ble LP Are You Experienced/Axis: Bold as Love in 1975.

Jour­nal­ist Jean-Nöel Coghe was sup­pos­ed­ly very upset that he did not even receive men­tion for tak­ing the orig­i­nal pho­to, but in the nineties he and Moe­bius came togeth­er again for a project that would do them both cred­it, a book called Emo­tions élec­triques that Coghe wrote of his expe­ri­ences trav­el­ing through France as Hendrix’s guide dur­ing the Experience’s first tour of the coun­try in 1967.

Moe­bius pro­vid­ed the book’s illus­tra­tions, many of which you can see below, “each of them,” as the pub­lish­er’s descrip­tion has it, “imag­in­ing Hen­drix in a clas­sic Moe­bius land­scape of dreams.”

 

Obvi­ous­ly a huge Hen­drix fan, Moe­bius is in many ways as respon­si­ble for the psy­che­del­ic space race of the 1970s as the gui­tarist him­self. His work in the French com­ic mag­a­zine Métal hurlant—Heavy Met­al in the Amer­i­can version—epitomized the sci-fi and fan­ta­sy ele­ments that came to dom­i­nate heavy rock. His work with Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky on the Chilean vision­ary filmmaker’s abort­ed Dune is the stuff of leg­end.

Moe­bius had illus­trat­ed album cov­ers since the ear­ly sev­en­ties, most­ly those of Euro­pean artists. But his cre­ations as a mag­a­zine and comics illus­tra­tor (and film sce­nar­ist) have the most endur­ing appeal for much the same rea­son as Hendrix’s music. They are both unpar­al­leled mas­ters and nat­ur­al sto­ry­tellers whose imag­ined worlds are so rich­ly detailed and con­sis­tent­ly sur­pris­ing they have birthed entire gen­res. The two may have crossed paths too late to actu­al­ly work togeth­er, but I like to think Moe­bius car­ried on the spir­it of Hen­drix in a visu­al form.

It may not be com­mon knowl­edge that Hen­drix hat­ed his album cov­ers, leav­ing detailed notes about them for his record com­pa­ny, who ignored them. His own choic­es, one must admit, includ­ing a Lin­da McCart­ney pho­to for the cov­er of Elec­tric Lady­land that makes the band look like they’re on the set of a pro­to-Sesame Street, do not exact­ly sell the records’ trea­sures. But Jimi might have loved Moe­bius’ inter­pre­ta­tions of his head­space, a visu­al con­tin­u­a­tion of a promi­nent strand of Hen­drix’s imag­i­na­tion. See all of Moe­bius’ Hen­drix illus­tra­tions here.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Icon­ic Footage of Jimi Hen­drix Play­ing “Hey Joe” Ren­dered in the Style of Moe­bius, with the Help of Neur­al Net­work Tech­nol­o­gy

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view Ani­mat­ed (1970)

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

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A Fender Stratocaster Made Out of 1200 Colored Pencils

in Music | January 14th, 2019

Alder and Ash. These woods have tra­di­tion­al­ly made up the body of the Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er. Cray­ola col­ored pen­cils? They were nev­er part of the mix … at least until now.

Above, Burls Art gives it a go. In nine min­utes, they take you through the mak­ing and play­ing of the Cray­ola Strat, from start to fin­ish. Afi­ciona­dos, feel free to argue over the tonal qual­i­ties of this new fan­gled cre­ation.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

Repair­ing Willie Nelson’s Trig­ger: A Good Look at How a Luthi­er Gets America’s Most Icon­ic Gui­tar on the Road Again

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Philip Glass Finishes His David Bowie Trilogy, Debuting His Lodger Symphony

in Music | January 11th, 2019

Some­times I feel
The need to move on
So I pack a bag
And move on
Move on

–David Bowie, “Move On”

We might have been call­ing it the Lake Gene­va Tril­o­gy, giv­en David Bowie’s recu­per­a­tive sojourn in Switzer­land after the empti­ness he felt in L.A. The first album in the Berlin Tril­o­gy, Low, was most­ly record­ed in France, and the last album of the tril­o­gy, Lodger, in Mon­treaux in 1979. But they were almost all writ­ten in, around, and about Berlin, where Bowie found what he was look­ing for—a more rar­i­fied form of isolation—or as he puts it, “vir­tu­al anonymi­ty…. For some rea­son Berlin­ers just didn’t care. Well, not about an Eng­lish rock singer, any­way.”

Bowie’s wife Angela remem­bers that “he chose to live in a sec­tion of the city as bleak, anony­mous, and cul­tur­al­ly lost as pos­si­ble…. He took an apart­ment above an auto parts store and ate at the local workingman’s café. Talk about alien­ation.” The feel­ing per­vades all three albums to dif­fer­ent effect, but Lodger takes things in a far edgi­er, more cacoph­o­nous direc­tion. Removed from Bowie’s time of soak­ing up krautrock and pro­duc­ing his room­mate Iggy Pop’s solo albums, record­ed as his mar­riage dis­solved, it is the sound of jad­ed cul­tur­al and rela­tion­al dis­lo­ca­tion.

“A lot more chaos was intend­ed” on Lodger says Tony Vis­con­ti, and it is on these rocks that com­pos­er Philip Glass foundered for 23 years. In the 90s, he began his own tril­o­gy, of sym­phonies based on the renowned Bowie/Eno/Visconti col­lab­o­ra­tions. Lodger hung him up because it “didn’t inter­est me at all,” he tells the Los Ange­les Times. Despite its wild exper­i­men­tal­ism, he heard “no orig­i­nal ideas on that record.”

Glass grav­i­tat­ed towards the melodies of the first two albums, releas­ing his Low sym­pho­ny in 1993 and the equal­ly inspired Heroes in ’96. Final­ly, just this week, he pre­miered Lodger, with ven­er­a­ble Amer­i­can com­pos­er John Adams con­duct­ing, in Los Ange­les on what would have been Bowie’s birth­day, Jan­u­ary 8th.

Though Glass nev­er shared his thoughts about Lodger with Bowie, he may not have need­ed to. Bowie him­self felt that “Tony [Vis­con­ti] lost heart a lit­tle” dur­ing the record­ing “because it nev­er came togeth­er as eas­i­ly as both Low and “Heroes” had. This had a lot to do with my being dis­tract­ed by per­son­al events in my life,” he says, though “I would still main­tain thought that there are a num­ber of real­ly impor­tant ideas on Lodger.” It is on the ideas that Glass seized. “The writ­ing was remark­able. It was some­one who had cre­at­ed a polit­i­cal lan­guage for them­selves.”

While Glass’s oth­er Bowie sym­phonies drew direct­ly from the albums’ music (the Low sym­pho­ny opens with the cin­e­mat­ic theme from “Sub­ter­raneans”), “What I was going to do on Lodger,” says Glass, “had noth­ing to do with the music that was on the record.” He real­ized that he had been giv­en “a whole piece by a very accom­plished writer and artist who had a vision of the world” in the lyrics. Employ­ing the unique voice of singer Angélique Kid­jo, Glass made what he calls “a song sym­pho­ny” using sev­en of the “texts” (he left off “Look Back in Anger,” “D.J.” and “Red Mon­ey”).

Glass takes these “poems” as he calls them and weaves them into his own musi­cal fab­ric. He’s “uncon­cerned,” writes Ran­dal Roberts at the L.A. Times “with what Bowie would have thought of his method,” but he remem­bers Bowie was most struck in his oth­er sym­phonies by “the parts that didn’t sound very much like the orig­i­nal.” At the top of the post, hear “Warsza­wa” from Glass’s Low sym­pho­ny and lis­ten to his oth­er Bowie-inspired pieces on Spo­ti­fy. The Lodger sym­pho­ny will make its Euro­pean pre­mier at the South­bank Cen­tre in Lon­don in May of this year, and we should hope to see a record­ing released soon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “David Bowie Is” Exhi­bi­tion Is Now Avail­able as an Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty Mobile App That’s Nar­rat­ed by Gary Old­man: For David Bowie’s Birth­day Today

Stream David Bowie’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy in a 19-Hour Playlist: From His Very First Record­ings to His Last

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

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

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The Hu, a New Breakthrough Band from Mongolia, Plays Heavy Metal with Traditional Folk Instruments and Throat Singing

in Music | January 9th, 2019

Maybe you’re jad­ed, maybe you think it’s time for heavy met­al to final­ly hang up its spikes, maybe you think there’s nowhere else for the world’s most the­atri­cal­ly angry music to go but maybe blue­grass…. Or maybe Mon­go­lia, where folk met­al band The Hu have been invent­ing what they call “Hun­nu Rock,” a style com­bin­ing West­ern head­bang­ing with instru­ments like the horse­head fid­dle (morin khu­ur) and Mon­go­lian gui­tar (tovshu­ur). “It also involves singing in a gut­tur­al way,” Katya Cen­gel points out at NPR—no, not like this, but in the man­ner of tra­di­tion­al Mon­go­lian throat singers.

Now YouTube sen­sa­tions with mil­lions of views of its two videos for “Yuve Yuve Yu” and “Wolf Totem,” the band plans to release its first album this spring, after sev­en years of hard work. The Hu are not flash-in-the-pan inter­net fame seek­ers but seri­ous musi­cians who didn’t quite expect this degree of atten­tion, or so they say. “When we do this,” said gui­tarist Tem­ka, “we try to spir­i­tu­al­ly express this beau­ti­ful thing about Mon­go­lian music. We think we will talk to everyone’s soul through our music. But we didn’t expect this fast, peo­ple just pop­ping up every­where.”

Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin’s Kip Hutchins, a doc­tor­al stu­dent in cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gy, has tak­en an inter­est in the band and thinks their appeal, writes Cen­gel, has to do with how “the sto­ry of Mon­go­lia has been writ­ten in the West. Nomadism and horse cul­ture has been roman­ti­cized, and the empha­sis on free­dom and heroes tends to appeal to the stereo­typ­i­cal male heavy met­al fan.” The band’s themes focus on past nation­al tri­umphs, the leg­endary rule of Genghis Khan, and the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the nomadic warrior’s life.

Or so it would seem to West­ern­ers pars­ing their lyrics in Eng­lish. It may also be hard to read “Hey you trai­tor! Kneel down!” in a song about “tak­ing our Great Mon­gol ances­tors names in vain” and not think about metal’s role in a few vio­lent ultra-nation­al­ist scenes. Some sug­gest the songs are iron­ic or trans­late dif­fer­ent­ly to Mon­go­lian lis­ten­ers. Or that the band might be a sophis­ti­cat­ed satire, like Laibach, using nation­al­ist themes, cos­tumes, and dra­mat­ic set­tings on the steppes to cri­tique nation­al­ist nar­ra­tives.

One observ­er who knows the cul­ture sug­gests it’s more com­pli­cat­ed. The Hu are not mock­ing tra­di­tion­al Mon­go­lian cul­ture and his­to­ry, far from it. “The graph­ic visu­als used in the video cer­tain­ly evoke pride in our nomadic cul­ture,” writes Bat­shan­das Altan­sukh, “but the lyric is quite the con­trary. It’s very polit­i­cal and high­ly crit­i­cal of today’s Mon­go­lian soci­ety” and what the band sees as their country’s propen­si­ty for “emp­ti­ly boast­ing about the past” rather than actu­al­ly learn­ing about and respect­ing it (with motor­cy­cle gangs rid­ing across the plains).

The lyrics we read in trans­la­tion are appar­ent­ly “too west­ern­ized or sim­pli­fied” to real­ly get their point across and slo­gans like “tak­ing our great Mon­gol ances­tors names in vain,” Cen­gel points out, “are almost exact­ly what was sung in the late 1980s dur­ing the tran­si­tion to democracy”—a means of fierce­ly assert­ing an inde­pen­dent cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty against the hege­mon­ic Sovi­et Union. Mon­go­lian folk rock and jazz bands picked up the sen­ti­ment and Mon­go­lian hip hop acts pro­mote respect for the country’s tra­di­tions with new dance moves.

But whether or not The Hu’s pol­i­tics get wrong­ly inter­pret­ed, or ignored, by their mil­lions of new fans, it’s clear that peo­ple get it at the uni­ver­sal lev­el of metal’s com­mu­nal fre­quen­cies: long hair, leather, gui­tars, growl­ing, and epic medieval badassery.

via NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins of the Death Growl in Met­al Music

Finnish Musi­cians Play Blue­grass Ver­sions of AC/DC, Iron Maid­en & Ron­nie James Dio

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

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

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