Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Liberty and love
These two I must have.
For my love I'll sacrifice
My life.
For liberty I'll sacrifice
My love

- Sandor Petofi

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

What's My Life Doing Out There...While I'm in Here?

Look out, another weird movie...

What's My Life Doing Out There While I'm in Here? from clark barclay on Vimeo.
Shot on 16mm kodak color and b & w film with a Bell & Howell Filmo camera.
Directed By: Carlos Monterrey
Starring: Me

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Graffiti in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Argentina's definitely got some unique graff. Check out that hand-style!
Drips

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Don't be afraid of dying, be afraid of not living.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet - Back Door Blues [1961 - USA]

I attended a toys and collectibles expo over the weekend at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds and came home with way too many records as usual. I thought I bought a Shirley Scott LP, but when I got home I discovered that inside the sleeve was actually Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson's Back Door Blues. I had never heard of Cleanhead, but I'm huge Cannonball fan. Turns out I'm really pleased with the mistake; this is now one of my new favorite albums.

By the way, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson got hit nickname after some lye burned his hair off trying to conk it.

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - vocals
Julian "Cannonball" Adderley - alto sax
Nat Adderley - cornet
Joe Zawinul - piano
Sam Jones - bass
Louis Hayes - drums

enjoy

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Smashing Pumpkings - 1979

Pretty much my favorite music video of all time.


sing along...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2snP7rGP6g


Shakedown 1979
Cool kids never have the time
On a live wire right up off the street
You and I should meet
Junebug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we'd never see an end to it all

I don't even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don't know
Just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed to the earth below

Double cross the vacant and the bored
They're not sure just what we have in store
Morphine city slippin' dues down to see

We don't even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and towns below
Faster than the speed of sound
Faster than we thought we'd go
Beneath the sound of hope

Justine never knew the rules,
Hung down with the freaks and ghouls
No apologies ever need be made
I know you better than you fake it to see

We don't even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don't know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
The street heats the urgency of now
As you see there's no one around

Fujiko Drive

Watch my movie:

Fujiko Drive from clark barclay on Vimeo.

Shot on B&W 16 mm Kodak film with a 1940 Bell and Howell Filmo camera.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Fat Clark - Shred the Gnar



The perfect mix to accompany any gnar pow pow shred sesh on the mountains this winter. Get pumped on adrenaline and turn it up to 11.


get it

Monday, November 29, 2010

Who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky-filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
            it's
                 Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves

Monday, November 8, 2010

"The surest way to have an empty life is to fill it with things."

- Henry David Thoreau

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Graffiti in Beijing

Where's all the graff in this city!?

Beijing is probably the least painted city I've seen given its size and population, but if you look hard enough you can find some here and there. The reason being, I'm guessing, is strict vandalism laws and the fact that China has never experienced a major modern art movement like many other countries in the 20th century.

If you visit, be sure to check out the 798 District. It's a huge area of abandoned shipping/receiving warehouses that have been converted into chic art galleries and studios sometime after the Cultural Revolution of 1966. The art is almost purely Chinese, but I found a Spanish and Korean gallery as well.






Wednesday, October 27, 2010

On Music

From Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee. Diary of a Bad Year, 2007


In doctors' waiting-rooms, a decade or two ago, the tedium would have been relieved with quiet background music: sentimental songs from Broadway, popular classics like Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Nowadays, however, one hears only the thudding, mechanical music favoured by the young. Their cowed elders bear it without protest: faute de mieux it has become their music too. The rupture is not likely to be repaired. The bad drives out the good: what they call "classical" music is simply no longer cultural currency. Is there anything of interest to be said of the development, or must one just grouse about it under one's breath?

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music in the past, and were recorded to the extent that music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul. 
From such a premise one might go on to identify qualities of feeling that have not survived into the twenty-first century of Our Lord. A good place to start would be the music of the nineteenth century, since there are some of us around to whom the inner life of nineteenth-century man is not quite dead, not yet.

Consider singing. Nineteenth-century art-song is very remote in its kinaesthetics from singing today. The nineteenth-century singer was trained to sing from the depths of her thorax (from her lungs, from her "heart"), bearing the head high, emitting a large, rounded tone of the kind that carries. It is a mode of singing meant to convey moral nobility. In performances that were of course always live, those present had staged before their eyes the contrast between the mere physical body and the voice that transcends the body, emerging from it, rising above it, and leaving it behind.

From the body, thus, song was born as soul. And that birth took place not without pain, not without pangs: the link between feeling and pain was emphasized in such words as passio, Leidenschafi. The very sound that the singer produced — rounded, echoing — had a reflective quality.

What Cartesian nonsense to think of birdsong as pre-programmed cries uttered by birds to advertise their presence to the opposite sex, and so forth! Each bird-cry is a full-hearted release of the self into the air, accompanied by such joy as we can barely comprehend. I! says each cry: I! What a miracle! Singing liberates the voice, allows it to fly, expands the soul. In the course of a military training, on the other hand, people are drilled in using the voice in a rapid, flat, mechanical manner, without pause for thought. What damage it must do to the soul to submit to the military voice, to embody it as one's own!

I recall an episode that took place years ago in the library of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I made some or other enquiry of a librarian, from whom each question of mine elicited a swift, monotone response, leaving me with the unsettling feeling that I was speaking not to a fellow human being but to a machine. Indeed, the young woman seemed to take pride in her machine identity, in its self-sufficiency. There was nothing she sought from me in the exchange, nothing I could give her, not even the salving moment of mutual recognition that two ants give each other as they brush antennae in passing.

Much of the ugliness of the speech one hears in the streets of America comes from hostility to song, from repression of the impulse to sing, circumscription of the soul. In the education of the young in America, instead, the inculcation of mechanical, military patterns of speech. Inculcate, from calx/calcis, the heel. To inculcate: to tread in.

One can of course hear stunted and mechanical speech all over the world. But pride in the mechanical mode seems to be uniquely American. For in America the model of the self as a ghost inhabiting a machine goes almost unquestioned at a popular level. The body as conceived in America, the American body, is a complex machine comprising a vocal module; a sexual module, and several more, even a psychological module. Inside the body-machine the ghostly self checks read-outs and taps keys, giving commands which the body obeys.

Athletes all over the world have absorbed the American model of self and body, presumably because of the influence of American sports psychology (which "gives results"). Athletes speak openly of themselves as machines of a biological variety that have to be fed certain nutrients in certain quantities at certain times of the day, and "worked" in various ways by their taskmasters to be brought to optimum performance level.

One imagines the lovemaking of such athletes: vigorous activity, followed by a burst of orgasm, rationalized as a kind of reward to the physical mechanism, followed by a brief winding-down period during which the ghostly supervisor confirms that performance has been up to standard. Old people still querulously demand to know why music cannot continue in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century symphonists. The answer is simple. The animating principles of that music are dead and cannot be revived. One cannot compose a nineteenth-century symphony that will not be an instant museum piece

Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius composed within the bounds of symphonic form a music of heroic rebirth and/or transfiguration. Wagner and Strauss did much the same in forms of their own invention. Theirs is music that relies on parallels between harmonic and motival transmutation on the one hand and spiritual transfiguration on the other. Typically, the progression is through murky struggle toward clarification — hence the note of triumph on which so much of the symphonic music of the period ends.

Curious, given how alien the ideal of spiritual transformation has become, that the music of transformation still retains some of its power to move us, to create a swelling feeling of exaltation, such an odd emotion in our day.

More difficult to pin down are the animating principles of the music of our own times. But certainly we can say that the quality of yearning, of erotic idealism, so common in earlier Romantic music has vanished, probably for good, as have heroic struggle and the striving toward transcendence.

In the popular music of the twentieth century there has been a newfound rootedness in body- experience. Looking back from the twenty-first century, we see with surprise how rhythmically bare a notion of dance sufficed, first for the aristocratic courts of Europe, then later for the European middle class. The court dances of Rameau, Bach, Mozart, to say nothing of Beethoven, sound quite leaden-footed by today's standard. Even by the late eighteenth century musicians were becoming restive about this state of affairs, looking around for more rhythmically challenging dances to import. Again and again they dip into the music of Europe's peasantry, of gypsies, of the Balkans and Turkey and Central Asia, to refresh the rhythms of European high music. The culmination of this practice is the ostentatious primitivism of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

But the really great refreshing of popular music takes place in the New World, via the music of slaves who have not lost their African roots. From North and South America, African rhythms spread over all of the West. It would not be too much to say that through African music Westerners begin to live in and through their bodies in a new way. The colonizers end up being colonized. Even so rhythmically nimble a fellow as Bach would feel out of place, as if on a different continent, were he to be reborn today.

Romantic music seeks to recover a lost state of raptness (which is not the same as rapture), a state of exaltation in which the human shell will be shed and one will become pure being or pure spirit. Hence the continual striving in Romantic music: it is always trying to push further (is there not a piece by Mendelssohn called "On Wings of Song" — the earthbound poet yearning to take flight?)

One begins to understand the basis of the Romantic enthusiasm for Bach. Characteristically, Bach shows how in almost any musical germ, no matter how simple, there lie endless possibilities for development. The contrast with more popular composers of his day is marked: in Telemann, for instance, a piece of music sounds like the application of a template rather than the exploration of a potential.

Is it too much to say that the music we call Romantic has an erotic inspiration — that it unceasingly pushes further, tries to enable the listening subject to leave the body behind, to be rapt away (as if harking to birdsong, heavensong), to become a living soul? If this is true, then the erotics of Romantic music could not be more different from the erotics of the present day. In young lovers today one detects not the faintest flicker of that old metaphysical hunger, whose code word for itself was yearning (Sehnsucht).

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Zap-Pow [1978 - Jamaica]


I inherited yet another box of LPs from a family friend; loaded with some real gems. I was grooving to this 70s reggae group, Zap-Pow, when all of a sudden I stumbled upon the sample behind that dope Collie Buddz hit "Come Around;" aside from the sample find, the record is pretty jammin', so I thought I'd share it with y'all.

Get it here

Friday, October 1, 2010

...The attitude of the United States needs to change too. Worries about crime and migration- symbolized by the wall it is building across its southern border- are leading it to focus on the risks in its relationship with the neighbours more than on the opportunities. This is both odd, given that Latinos are already the second-largest ethnic group north of the border, and self-defeating: the more open the Unites States is towards Latin America, the greater the chances of creating the prosperity which in the end is the best protection against conflict and disorder. After two centuries of lagging behind, the southern and central parts of the Americas are at last fulfilling their potential. To help cement that success, their northern cousins should build bridges, not walls.

From "Nobody's Backyard", The Economist, Sept. 2010

Saturday, September 18, 2010

The Poppy Family - Which Way You Goin' Billy? [1969 - Canada]





Another amazing album that's been really getting around on the interwebs. Solid 60s pop from the once husband-wife duo Susan and Terry Jacks. This album takes you from cheesy swingin' 60s to frighteningly dark and psychedelic. There's something about Susan Jack's voice that really makes this album.

This album contains two Deltron 3030 samples.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010



Beautiful song.

RIP Gabor Szabo

Sunday, September 12, 2010

 Fine art by Wang Yi Dong, oil paint on canvas, China

Monday, September 6, 2010


Zheng Xuewu, East Water
798 District, Beijing, China

see more



Sunday, September 5, 2010

Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.

-Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundreds Years of Solitude [1967 - Colombia]

“Go away,” she said voicelessly.
Aureliano, smiled, picked her up by the waist with both hands like a pot of begonias, and dropped her on her back on the bed. With a brutal tug he pulled off her bathrobe before she had time to resist and he loomed over an abyss of newly washed nudity whose skin color, lines of fuzz, and hidden moles had all been  imagined in the shadows  of the other  rooms.  Amaranta Úrsula defended  herself sincerely with  the astuteness of a  wise woman, weaseling her slippery,  flexible, and fragrant weasel's body as  she tried  to knee him in the kidneys and scorpion his face with her nails, but without either of them giving a gasp that might not have been taken for that breathing of a person watching the meager April sunset through the open window. It was a fierce fight, a battle to the death, but it seemed to be without violence because it consisted of distorted attacks and ghostly evasions, slow, cautious, solemn, so that during it all there was time for the petunias to bloom and for Gaston  to  forget about  his aviator's dream  in the next room, as if they were two enemy lovers seeking reconciliation at the bottom of an aquarium. In the heat of that savage  and  ceremonious  struggle, Amaranta  Úrsula  understood  that  her  meticulous  silence was  so irrational that it could awaken the suspicions of her nearby hus-band much more than the sound of warfare that they were trying to avoid. Then she began to laugh with her lips tight together, without giving up the fight, but defending herself with false bites and deweaseling her body little by little until they both were conscious of being adversaries and accomplices at the same time and the affray degenerated into a conventional gambol and the attacks became caresses. Suddenly, almost playfully, like one more bit of mischief, Amaranta Úrsula dropped  her defense,  and  when she tried  to  recover,  frightened by what she herself had made possible, it was too late. A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like. She barely had time to reach out her hand and grope for the towel to put a gag between her teeth so that she would not let out the cat howls that were already tearing at her insides.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Shadow Music of Thailand


To celebrate my upcoming trip to Thailand, here's an interesting compilation of Thailand's very own Shadow music. Shadow Music, named after the popular British instrumental group The Shadows, is the name given to a brief musical happening that occured in Southeast Asia in the 50s and 60s- primarily in Bangkok. Like the Shadows, Shadow music is dominantly instrumental, however it's a cool combination of south Asian and western musical elements. Check it out.

download

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Check out Bobby Blunt- a very talented and hard-working MC. He'll be on my new album coming out sometime this fall.

http://bobbyblunt.bandcamp.com/album/the-soupbowl-sessions-vol-2

and

http://www.myspace.com/olsoul7

Friday, June 25, 2010

Celebrations

Watch my weird movie.
Shot on B&W Super 16mm on a 1940s Bell & Howell Filmo camera.
Set to the song "Celebrations" by Rod McKuen.


Celebrations from clark barclay on Vimeo.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Cam'ron feat. Juelz Santana - Hey Ma

sing along...



Hey ma, what's up, let's slide, all right, all right
And we gonna get it on tonight
You smoke, I smoke, I drink, me too, well good
Cause we gonna get high tonight
Got drops, got Coups, got Trucks, got jeeps, all right
Cause we gonna take a ride tonight
So ma, what's up, let's slide, all right, all right
And we gonna get it on tonight


Yo, Now I was downtown clubbin', ladies night
Seen shorty she was crazy right
And I approach baby like
Ma, What's your age and type?
She looked at me and said you's a baby right
I told her, I'm 18 and live a crazy life
Plus I'll tell you what the 80's like
And I know what the ladies like
Need a man that's polite, listens and takes advice
I could be all three, plus I can lay the pipe
Come with me come stay the night
She looked at me laughin', like boy your game is tight
I'm laughin' back like show you're right
Get in the Car
And don't touch nothing, sit in the car
Let discuss Somethin'
Either we lovin' or I'll see you tomorrow
Now we speeding up the Westside
Hand creepin' up her left side, I'm ready to do it
Ready to bone, ready for dome
55th exit, damn, damn, already we home
Now let's get it on



Hey ma, what's up, let's slide, all right, all right
And we gonna get it on tonight
You smoke, I smoke, I drink, me too, well good
Cause we gonna get high tonight
Got drops, got Coups, got Trucks, got jeeps, all right
Cause we gonna take a ride tonight
So ma, what's up, let's slide, all right, all right
And we gonna get it on tonight





Now That I got a girl, my ex wanna holla and spit
Told me to acknowledge her quick
She like Cam stop frontin'
On that Dave Hollister Tip
Come over lets swallow and sip
I'm like momma that's it
I promise you dick, usually have a problem with chicks
They all say I'm rotten and rich
But not her, booby's real
High heel dooby feel, plus got them Gucci nails,
You a cutie still, and this my down girl too
Ain't no groupie deal
We left the movies with Uzies, Suzuki wheels,
To the Jacuzzi, I tell you my booby's real
I mean she do be winning, luey spinning
Go to the crib she got the Gucci linen'
I see boo be grinning
She looked and said Cam, I know that you be sinning
Naw, I'm a changed man, look at the range ma'am
I got a whole new game plan
Looked and said that's nothing but game Cam
She was right; she was up in the Range man
Dropped her off at the L, now I'm flippin' the cell
That's right I had to call up L
You L, what up, I hit, what else, plus dome, say word
And we got it on tonight


Hey ma, what's up, let's slide, all right, all right
And we gonna get it on tonight
You smoke, I smoke, I drink, me too, well good
Cause we gonna get high tonight
Got drops, got Coups, got Trucks, got jeeps, all right
Cause we gonna take a ride tonight
So ma, what's up, let's slide, all right, all right
And we gonna get it on tonight

Monday, June 21, 2010

Emily Dickinson #23 [1858]

I had a guinea golden-
I lost it in the sand-
And tho' the sum was simple
And pounds were in the hand-
Still, had it such a value
Unto my frugal eye-
That when I could not find it-
I sat down to sigh.

I had a crimson Robin-
Who sang full many a day
But when the woods were painted,
He, too, did fly away-
Time brought me other Robins-
Their ballads were the same-
Still, for my missing Troubadour
I kept the "house at hame."

I had a star in heaven-
One "Pleiad" was its name-
And when I was not heeding,
It wandered from the same.
And tho' the skies are crowded-
And all the night ashine-
I do not care about it-
Since none of them are mine.

My story has a moral-
I have a missing friend-
"Pleiad" its name, and Robin,
And guinea in the sand.
And when this mournful ditty
Accompanied with tear-
Shall meet the eye of traitor
In country far from here-
Grant that repentance solemn
May seize upon his mind-
And he no consolation
Beneath the sun may find.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Jr. Walker & The Allstars - Greatest Hits [1969 - USA]

Feel good jams perfect for bringing in the sunny summer. Here'r the hits from one of the greatest Motown groups. If Jr. Walker is not already part of your regular listening routine, you seriously got to get with it.

here

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Firesign Theatre - How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All [1969 - USA]


Here's the my dad's second request.
The Firesign Theatre is a comedy troupe that started back in the 60s in Los Angeles. When listening to this album, I seem to recognize some of these famous character voices, you might too. The comedy is pretty slapstick yet witty as hell- they seem to pull a pun out of every word.
Enjoy this silly selection in C minus.

download

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Discover the samples behind hip-hop hits by Jay-Z, The Pharcyde, and Sublime on this weeks Way Back Wednesday!

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

And Then...Along Comes The Association [1966 - USA]


My pops made a deal with me that he'd give me a big box of his LPs as long as I convert four of his favorite records into CDs. So, I'm going to put them up here over the next week or so. Here's the first of them.

From the liner notes:
Some people think musicians are weird, and many would think The Association weird.
...But then it's the creative people who keep the world from being one gigantic Dow Jones average...people like The Association who are really adding something worthwhile to today's music scene.
The Association has been called the first "show-rock" group around today- which means they can play bluer than The Rolling Stones: harder hard-rock than The Raiders, and put more folk into folk music than the Kingston Trio- and they still come out with their own unique sound...
- Phyllis Burgess, Entertainment Editor, 'TEEN Magazine

enjoy

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Marvin Gaye - Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)

sing along...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9BA6fFGMjI

Mercy mercy me
Things ain't what they used to be, no no
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east
Mercy mercy me
Things ain't what they used to be, no no
Radiation under ground and in the sky
Animals and birds who live nearby are dying

Mercy mercy me
Things ain't what they used to be
What about this overcrowded land?
How much more abuse from man can she stand?

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Be sure to check out "Way Back Wednesday"- a new weekly series I'm doing with Yours Truly featuring strictly vinyl rips of amazing music. This week is Dionne Warwick, Hugh Masekela, Buddy Miles, and O.V. Wright.

yourstruly.us

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

"Let's went before we are dancing at the end of a rope, without music."

- Pancho to The Cisco Kid

Monday, May 10, 2010

Pierre Bachelet & Merve Roy - Emmanuelle (OST) [1974 - France]

Who else samples 1970s erotic film soundtracks? None other than Grammy award winning super producer Mark Ronson; the man behind such acts as Amy Winehouse, ODB, Ghostface Killah, Nas, Kaiser Chiefs, Macy Gray, Robbie Williams, and Christina Aguilera- to name a few. Off this record, he uses the piano melody from the opening song "Emmanuelle In the Mirror" in "The Littlest Things" which he produced for Lily Allen.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Unknown - Deep Throat (Soundtrack) [1972 - USA]


It's funny how porno films from back in the day actually, often, had good music. Here's a great soundtrack from one of the most famous adult films of all time, Deep Throat. Funny thing about this soundtrack is the composer or composers are unknown- my guess is that they simply didn't want their friends or family to know- but why didn't they just use a pseudonym (like many people in the adult film biz)?. As for you beat-makers, they're plenty of dope samples on here- I've cut up a bunch of this myself.

Enjoy

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Emily Dickinson - #280 [1896]

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My Mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Hugo Díaz - Lo mejor de Hugo Díaz [1967 - Argentina]

You 'aint ever heard harmonica shredding like this before. Prep yourself for the king of the harp hailing all the way from Argentina. Hugo's capable of playing all sort of styles but my favorite jams are the zambas and tangos. Here's a collection of his more "known" tunes. Oh, and did I mention he's blind?!

Wow

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Eder Espejo [2010]

Some awesome 360 degree panorama photographs my buddy Eder recently shot in Guadalajara, Mexico. Click the images to see them LARGER.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

The Incredible String Band - The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion [1967 - Ireland]








I mixed stones in water just to see what it would do
and the water it got stoney and the stones got watered too.
So I mixed my feet with water just to see what could be seen
and the water it got dirty and the feet they got quite clean.

- From my favorite tune on this album "No Sleep Blues".

If you're like me, and not the biggest follower of psychedelic folk music, I hope you surprise your tastes with this one. I was immediatly impressed by these guys' incredibly skillful playing ability and complex arrangements in the recordings. I also really dig the bluegrass edge and drunken Irish vocals.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Shel Silverstein - Invention [1974]

I've done it, I've done it!
Guess what I've done!
Invented a light that plugs into the sun.
The sun is bright enough,
The bulb is strong enough,
But, oh, there's only one thing wrong...

The cord ain't long enough!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

El Congreso [1971 - Chile]


I love finding new Chilean music, especially nueva canción. Thanks again to Hippy-DJkit for posting this. This is one of those albums I was immediatley blown away by the second I popped it in my stereo. True to nueva canción, El congreso fuses ethnic Chilean music with electric western styles, utilizing both cultures' instruments. Among them, my favorite is the zampoña (pan flutes). One thing I noticed about this album, is that it's the only nueva canción group I've heard that switch between playing the zampoña in an Andean and western jazz style, whereas other groups tend to stick to playing them just in the traditional Andean way. Their mastery of both culture's instruments allow them to seamlessly maneuver from the spiritual sounds of their people to funky flavors of today. The opening track is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I hope you like it!

Enjoy

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Graff in Chile

Here'r some flicks I took during my stay in Chile. They got some unique styles of their own going on down there.

Valparaíso

Valparaíso

Valparaíso

Valparaíso

Santiago

Pez (Barcelona, Spain) in Viña del Mar

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Valparaíso

Santiago

Santiago

La Serena

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago

Santiago


Santiago