A decade ago, in Tokyo, 167 musicians performed a Beethoven classic with the “Matryomin,” a new-fangled instrument that lodges a theremin inside a matryoshka. A matryoshka, of course, is one of those Russian nested dolls where you find wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other. As for the theremin, it’s a century-old electronic musical instrument that requires no physical contact from the player. You can watch its inventor, Leon Theremin, give it a demo in the vintage video below. And via this link you can see the Matryomin Ensemble performing a mesmerizing version of Amazing Grace. Enjoy.

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See Japanese Musicians Play “Amazing Grace” with 273 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls–Then Learn How They Perform Their Magic

Soviet Inventor Léon Theremin Shows Off […]

Trombone may be Sweden’s Queen of Swing Gunhild Carling’s favorite instrument, but she blows some mean bagpipes too, as evidenced by her smoking hot performance of her late father, trumpeter Hans Carlings’ Bagpipe Blues, above.

A devotee of such early jazz greats as Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, and Billie Holiday, Carling told the Jerusalem Post some instruments “sing in my voice more than others”:

When I play trumpet, I try to be close to Louis Armstrong. Sometimes when I’m playing, I can hear him. It’s harder on the bagpipe, for example.

Vaudeville’s flame burns brightly in this consummate showwoman:

I grew up in the south of Sweden, outside of Malmo. Our house was full of variety – circus, acting, dance, vaudeville and novelty. I just picked up instruments from when I was very young and played them. I started with the drums, then the recorder, trombone and trumpet. Then I started tap dancing, and after that harmonica and bagpipe.

Carling keeps with tradition by populating the Carling Big Band with similarly multi-talented, musically inclined […]

Nobody knows more about cinema than critics. But in an entirely different way, nobody knows more about cinema than directors. That, perhaps, is one of the reasons that Sight and Sound magazine has, for the past thirty years, conducted two separate once-in-a-decade polls to determine the greatest films of all time. Last week we featured the results of Sight and Sound‘s latest critics poll here on Open Culture, but the outcome of the directors’ vote — whose electorate of 480 “spans experimental, arthouse, mainstream and genre filmmakers from around the world” — merits its own consideration.

As all the cinephile world knows by now, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles came out on top of Sight and Sound‘s critics poll this year. That temporally expansive masterwork of potatoes, veal cutlets, prostitution, and murder didn’t place quite so highly in the directors poll. It ranks at number four, below Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and — at number one — Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, for those who make movies, evidently remains the “ultimate trip” that its late-sixties marketing […]

I will let Vox preface the video above:

Ever since Qatar won the rights to host the FIFA World Cup in 2010, its treatment of migrant workers has made international headlines. News stories and human rights organizations revealed migrant workers who built the stadiums, hotels, and all the new infrastructure required for the World Cup were being forced to work, not getting paid, unable to leave, and in some cases, dying.

At the heart of the abuse faced by migrant workers is the kafala system. A system prevalent in Gulf states that ties workers to their sponsors, it often gives sponsors almost total control of migrant workers’ employment and immigration status.

Due to all the scrutiny Qatar has been under, some reforms have been put in place, but the kafala system is more than a law — it’s a practice. And while these reforms exist on paper, human rights organizations say there’s still a long way to go.

To understand how hundreds of thousands of migrant workers were stuck in an exploitative system while building the stadiums for the World Cup, watch our […]

Is there really a division in today’s culture between those who create and the merely receptive masses? Your Pretty Much Pop host gathers three artists in different media about the place of the artist in society: sci-fi author Brian Hirt, art photographer and academic Amir Zaki, and musician/novelist/ex-English prof John Andrew Fredrick, who leads a band called The Black Watch.

We touch on art education, the self-understanding of artists, the relation between artist and consumer, art vs. commerce, bad art vs. non-art, and much more.

Listen to Amir talking about photography on a past PMP episode. Listen to John talk about his music with Mark on Nakedly Examined Music. Listen to John’s new EP. Brian brings up the Decoder Ring podcast episode “The Storytelling Craze.” Listen to Mark’s tunes.

Follow us @blackwatchmusic, @amir_zaki_, and @MarkLinsenmayer.

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