Saturday, November 22, 2014

'' jefferson airplane '' - somebody to love - live 19/8/69.

'' jefferson airplane '' - we can be together/volunteers - live 19/8/69.

The Airplane tearing  down  the wall


Zeitkratzer (Lou Reed) Metal Machine Music Part 1 (Live)



To be a student of pop music history is to grapple with the story of Lou Reed’s 1975 double album Metal Machine Music.
No record by a major artist on a major label is so puzzling and so
contradictory—it’s simultaneously dismissed out of hand and written off
as a joke and cited as both important and hugely influential. Where you
fall on that spectrum has a lot to do with how receptive you are to the
idea of noise music in general. While there was music before MMM that was just as harsh and intense (parts of John Cage’s “Cartridge Music” come to mind), Reed’s album was the first to re-imagine noise for the post-acid-rock era.

Pure
noise had previously been a classical phenomena, the logical endpoint
of the dissonance introduced early in the century by modern composers
like Schoenberg and Webern (and in fact Reed had originally hoped MMM
would come out on a classical label) combined with the tinkering of
musique concrète. In the late 1960s, the idea that extreme distortion,
static, and feedback could be a part of popular song changed the way
people understood noise, turned it from exclusively the realm of “art
music” into something that could be appreciated more viscerally—a pop
intensifier.

So the context of Metal Machine Music is what
made it so revolutionary (or repulsive): listeners found it in the
racks next to the rock’n’roll records, a 2xLP “electronic
instrumental composition” by the guy who the year before had charted
with a funky number called “Sally Can’t Dance”. The idea that MMM
was a joke or a contract-breaker has been convincingly discredited in
the last couple of decades; it seems clear that, whatever Reed’s state
of mind in the mid–1970s (and there’s a great deal of evidence that
heavy drugs were doing strange things to it), he created the record and
put it out there because he thought it sounded neat. “I honestly thought
‘Boy, people who like guitar feedback are gonna go crazy for this.’
Count me among them. If you like loud guitars, here we are,” he told
Pitchfork in an interview in 2007.

I’m not a connoisseur of noise but I’ve heard my share, and Reed’s original Metal Machine Music
strikes me as one of the more unique albums the genre has produced. You
hear it and know what it is immediately. It’s heavy in the midrange and
high frequencies, so it can be overpowering at even modest volume, but
there is a tremendous amount of textural detail the more closely you
listen. Even though it was apparently created with what seem now to be
simple tools (guitars, a few pedals, amps) there always seems to be so
much going on, and most of all the whole thing is constantly changing, a
vibrating sculpture that looks different every time you see it.

A little over a decade ago, the experimental music ensemble Zeitkratzer
began performing a live arrangement of Metal Machine Music. It was the
sort of thing that sounded ridiculous: how could you possibly notate
this stuff? Composer Ulrich Krieger, working with Zeitkratzer accordion
player Luca Venitucci and with Reed’s blessing, found a way. The key to
the live MMM project is that the scored version pays particular
attention to what’s changing in the music, where our ears initially lock
in to what stays the same. Metal Machine Music throbs, with
feedback in constant modulation, and that’s part of what makes it sound
so alive. Zeitkratzer evoke that quality by having rapidly sawing
violins mimmic the squall of the feedback, and with those central
oscillations established, the other instruments interject with their
drones and squawks and cries and blasts. They performed the composition
live with Reed in 2000s, with the orchestrations augmented by his
electric guitar, and recordings from those shows were released on CD and
DVD in 2007. This new version of the recording is made from more recent
Zeitkratzer shows, all acoustic and without Reed, and it’s the first
orchestrated version to incorporate the original album’s four 16-minute
pieces in full.

The first thing I can say is that Zeitkratzer’s arrangement enriches my appreciation of Metal Machine Music
as a whole. The spirit of the music, as well as its general sense of
shape structure, is rendered so well it gives you a deeper understanding
of what the layers of sound in the original are doing, and how the
interplay between the competing bits of noise adds up to something that
exceeds the sum of its parts. There’s no question that hearing the music
rendered on acoustic instruments (clarinet, trumpet, trombone, piano,
bowed guitar, percussion, violin, violincello, doublebass) changes its
essential character, and makes it seem more controlled and less
dangerous. But the fact that it’s less of a pulse-quickener is offset by
the sheer beauty of the sound, and sometimes that sound moves to
surprising places. The held trombone drones, for example, lend the music
a feeling of symphonic grandeur, and there’s a sense that the piece is
in a constant state of collapsing and re-assembling itself.

Metal Machine Music in any form isn’t about dynamic range; the music never really gets noticeably quieter or louder; it changes,
yes, but only within strict parameters. As such, it’s not “emotional”
music in the way I usually think of the term. There is very little in
the way of contrast and, since individual emotions acquire meaning by
how they differ from other emotions, it’s never about evoking easily
named states as “sad” or “frightened” or “angry.” That’s partly why Metal Machine Music
works as a mediation piece, a wavelength of energy that some want to be
carried along on and others want to avoid at all costs. Zeitkratzer’s
version taps even more deeply into that meditative energy and provides
another intriguing chapter in a story that, it’s clear now, will have no
end.

Stevie Nicks ~ Tom Petty ~ I NEED To Know! ~ HeartBreakers! GREAT!♥♥♥♥♥

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Tim Buckley Live @ Newport Folk Festival (28th July 1968)









Rare  set... of  the great  Tim Buckley

Look backward to the past and events seem to gain speed and inevitability. Observe Tim Buckley and the passing milestones become blurs. His short lifetime adds urgency and meaning to our impressions of his every evolution

BETTYE LAVETTE THE Queen of Soul! - In Concert (Full Concert-Live!)




It’s simple really. Virtually anyone who has ever heard Betty LaVette sing immediately grasps that she is in possession of one of the most singularly unique voices in American music history. It is a voice that is capable of levels of timbral nuance, pitch inflection and rhythmic phrasing that most singers can only dream of. Informing that incredibly supple instrument is an artistic sensibility that allows LaVette to get to the core of any song she cares to sing, turning it inside out and back to front. The net result is that she is capable of making songs, no matter how familiar, her own, affording her audience the opportunity to hear material they have known for years as if for the very first time.

Songs of Love and Revolution: Bettye Lavette

Thursday, November 13, 2014

OUR SHANGRI-LA - Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris - The Best Version

These are great arrangements, great songs, great harmonies...in short...
a wonderful recording from two of the best talents in the music
"industry" today. In fact, if you sit back and listen to them as they
mesh their musical geniuses, you might forget about such terms and just
enjoy pure, unadulterated talent at play.