My 2011's best

Best albums
Fred Frith, Stevie Wishart & Carla Kihlstedt  :  "The Compass, Log And Lead"
The Tiger Lillies  :  "Woyzeck & the Tiger Lillies"
Andy Moor & Yannis Kyriakides  :  "Rebetika"
Karima Nayt  :  "Quoi d'autre"
Tchan Tchou Vidal  :  "la gitane"
Michel Henritzi  :  "Shinjuku blues & whispering shadows"
Kamilya Jubran & Werner Hasler  :  "Wameedd"
Johann Johannsson  :  "The miners hymns"
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer  :  "Re:ECM"
Armenak Shah-Mouradian  :  "Songs by Komitas Vartabet"
Tango Crash  :  "Otra sanata"
Anthology  :  "Something Is Wrong - Vintage Recordings From East Africa"

all the works of:
Paul Metzger, Alessandro Bossetti, Jin Hi Kim, Alzheimer, Ethiopian gangsters, Bill Orcutt, Xavier Charles, Asakawa Maki, Fanta Damba (Mali) , L'Orchestre Kanaga de Mopti, Luigi Nono, Max Richter, Fovea Hex, Alejandro Viñao

and definitively these three songs
"I've Been Loving You Too Long" by Tindersticks
"I'll go crazy" by Terry Edwards
"Besame mucho" by Beñat Achiary

    picture : Susan Philipsz, Sunset Song, 2003

شادية الووAllo, allo

Allo, allo...

I want to be evil

"I punish myself more than anybody else does if I am stupid about my actions, and I suffer, really suffer." 
Eartha Kitt

***

Mogador

"... On dit que la musique est à Mogador un prolongement de la peau de ses habitants d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, de leurs résonances dans le monde, de leurs harmonies et de leurs contrepoints, de leurs éclats percutants et de leurs fugues, de leur regret au soleil quand il se couche et de leur joie au lever de la lune. Dans ce port, la peau a un très vieux nom, qui est synonyme de tambour. On raconte qu'il y a des siècles, avant d'ensevelir un mort, on faisait un tambour avec sa peau. Ce qui explique que les plus anciennes maisons soient pleines de ces instruments de musique, vénérés pendus aux murs. On les respecte, on les aime et on les décroche pour les caresser, façon d'évoquer les défunts de la famille; on les porte souvent aux endroits de la ville où les vents alizés soufflent au large avec le plus de force, et, là, on les agite jusqu'à ce qu'ils produisent de très faibles sons graves et cadencés. D'où le nom que l'on donne aux premiers souffles vespéraux des alizés, quand ils ont fait vibrer les peaux de tambours des morts: vents de requiem..."

Alberto Ruy-Sànchez
in "9 fois 9 choses que l'on dit de Mogador" - ed. Les Allusifs - 2006

Harmo sleigh

Palix's piece composed for the concert "Twisted Christmas"
@ Barbican - London  - dec. 2008

Aisha Al Mourta

Aisha Al Mourta is the queen of Samri in Kuwait




عايشة المرطة يا ناس دلوني

Wizard of the strings

Roy Smeck (1900 - 1994) was an american multi-instrumentist
who played banjo, guitar, steel guitar and especially ukulele...

Combustion Chamber

Combustion Chamber / EWA7
a piece by Annie Gosfield with Roger Kleier and the matchless drummer Chris Cutler
lives at Bates Hall, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
November 2011

Hamid Kasri

To Essaouira

Lmaalem Hmida Boussou

Lmaalem Hmida Boussou, Maître es musique Gnawa

Air 2

New Issue!! The CD "Air2" was recorded during a public event conducted by Olivier Agid  
in Thiers - 17 & 18 september 2010
Music by Agid & Palix, with Emmanuel Lalande, Nicolas Lounis, Eric Maurin, 
Eve Couturier & Fred Wallish.

Raksama Song

to order

Art's sake

"be blind for art's sake 
and deaf for art's sake 
and dumb for art's sake 
until for art's sake 
they kill for art's sake 
all the art for the art's sake."

 

"soyez aveugles pour l'art
soyez sourds pour l'art,
soyez muets pour l'art
jusqu'à ce que, pour l'art,
on tue - pour l'art -
tout l'art, pour l'art."

from the libretto of "The Craddle Will Rock", a musical written by the Brechtian's Marc Blitzstein in 1937.
The premiere, directed by Orson Welles, was targeted by the W.P.A. because of its left political aspect.
The "New York Times" said the show was "written with extraordianry versatility and played with enormous gusto, the best militant labor has put into the theatre yet".
One of the fist "agitprop" in USA?

I'll Go Crazy

Terry Edwards sings "i'll go crazy"

Agrégats sensibles

 " Le véritable objet de la science, c'est de créer des fonctions, le véritable objet de l'art, c'est de créer des agrégats sensibles, et l'objet de la philosophie, créer des concepts. "
Gilles Deleuze

DC-motors

138 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes 40x40x40cm
Zimoun 2011

Dancing

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Laurie Anderson

 

Chocolade plaat

punk's chocolade plaat

Flamenca!

a J.Sermet's picture - 1954

A new Teppaz

Aphorismes, proverbes et expressions # 81 - Joël Hubaut ? Master- Remix(e)!
by Francine Flandrin F2
objet  mobile: livre, papier imprimé, carton, moteur - 20

 in "Les vanités contemporaines", a blog by Francine Flandrin

Down the road

Smoke Benders duo version Samm Bennett (vocal, diddley bow, etc.) and Naoya Numa (drums), plus special guest Steve Gardner on the harmonica. Recorded live at Super Deluxe, Tokyo, on September 14, 2011.

Paul Metzger

one of the most amazing concert i listen to this year was a Paul Metzger's one...

Piano solo

a piano solo' concert in Berlin with Marilyn Crispell
including an "ode to Messiaen"
not so far away from Cecil Taylor!
via Destination Out

Ordon

ORDON: n,m. Techn. Dans les jeux d'orgue, petites lames que l'on soude à la bouche des tuyaux qui servent à les accorder.
in "Dictionnaire des mots rares et précieux" 

 

tuyau d'orgue de Strasbourg

 

°o°-°o°

Björk interviews Stockhausen

 
"We should listen to old music one day a year and the other 364 days"

Stockhausen 

Experimental

Experimental : the really experimental direction of situationist activity consists in setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognized desires, a temporary field of activity favorable in these desires.  
in "S,M,L,XL" O.MA. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau - 1995

Mutir

MUTIR: v.tr. S'est dit pour grommeler, faire entendre des grognements inarticulés, comme le font certains muets.
in "Dictionnaire des mots rares et précieux"

Behind nothing

"Behind nothing" : a new work on CD by Michel Guillet

a chronical of "whitout shade" , his 2008's cd
Don't let that title put you off – there've been plenty of nearly nothings in musique concrète over the years and they've all been really something. This sequel to his Without Shade, adapted from a piece Michel Guillet presented at the Présences Electroniques fest back in 2008, is an impressive collection of eight dense and carefully worked pieces. Michel Guillet, working quietly and patiently away just up the road from here, combines the intricacy and subtlety of classic GRM concrète with the gristle of Xenakis and a Noisy fondness for rough static and raw hiss. But whether it's sourced from analogue or digital sound (both, I suspect), it's the composer that wins out: there's some serious ProTooling (or Sound Forging) going on here, with every sound precisely placed spatially and temporally to assure maximum effect. Fine, uncompromising work – check it out.–DW
via Paris Transatlantic Magazine

buy @ souffle continu

 

Harlem Mambo

This silent YouTube allows to look at the dance in another way

Teleharmonium

An electromechanical instrument called the Teleharmonium,  was developed by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897.

A keyboard with 36 notes per octave, and the experience of listening described as "highly irritating". Unfortunately, no recordings have survived

In 1907, Ferruccio Busoni was interested in the Teleharmonium, as well he thought that the "acoustic" instruments were too limited, and in his "Esquisse d'une nouvelle esthétique musicale", he believed in the future "electroacoustic" aera to explore and create new sounds.

Un-drum 3.1

Our friend Tarek Atoui  at Belluard Festival in Fribourg (2010)

!¨!_I_!¨!

New ideas

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." 
John Cage

Treatise

the september's issue of the french magazine "Revue et Corrigée" includes a long report , as well interviewes, around "Treatise", the famous score of Cornelius Cardew...

WTC 9/11

La dernière oeuvre de Steve Reich, interprétée par le Kronos Quartet, en écoute sur Minnesota Public Radio, via le blog de Jean Jacques Birgé

WTC 9/11

 

 

 

 

 

***

Disques Vogue

An exhibition around the french record's label Vogue, at Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris.

Folk creature

For me, innovation does not consist in composing European and academic music with inserted “folk” references.  It consists in appropriating academic or technical devices and subordinating them to my purposes as a “folk creature.”  An outstanding prototype of this approach was Bo Diddley’s use of the electric devices of pop music to project the Afro-American sound.
Henry Flynt - 1980

Zar

a musical movie by Vincent Moon

The fence

 a work by Jon Rose who has been bowing and recording the music of Fences worldwide.

Harmonic fields

for eolian instruments, a work by Pierre Sauvageot & Lieux Publics & Cie

Record groove

a record groove magnified 1000 times

 

Farmer in the city

 

 

 

a Scott Walker's jewel
from "Tilt", published in 1995

 

Glass harmonica

 

dans Libération du 20/08

la réponse est B, mais il s'agit du "glass harmonica" … instrument de musique qui n'a absolument rien à voir avec l'harmonica!

 

Michel Becquembois ne penserait-il qu'à son bec?

Cardboard record player

Scrupule

Le scrupule, c'est cette petite pièce d'or que les tribuns de la Gréce antique se mettaient dans la bouche pour apprendre à mieux articuler. Démosthéne, qui s'efforçait de corriger ses défauts d'élocution, criait devant la mer, des petits galets plein la bouche, tentant de couvrir le son des vagues.

tableau de Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ

Tripartite

a music by Piotr Kurek, with an animation by Magdalena Sybon

***

Yacoumana

 

Ali Farka Touré & Khaira Arby - Yacoumana

The Amen break

an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break.

http://www.nkhstudio.com/pages/popup_amen.html

Kamantché

Cairo

listen "a wedding in Cairo"

Sewing machine

Martin Messier’s installation, SEWING MACHINE ORCHESTRA, invites us to closely observe the choreography of twelve sewing machines orchestrated by computer and amplified by contact microphones.

 

 

_-_-_-__-_-_-_

Big trouble

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a big trouble...

with Push Pull
in 1992

Push Pull was David Coulter, Vincent Segal, Palix & Igal Foni