ZNR - Barricade 3

I think I came across these guys through a mix (maybe one of Jiro's?). Hector Zazou is the Z; Joseph Racaille (which has to be a stage name, it would be too cool to just be named "Joseph Scum") is the R, thus, Z'n'R. 

This one's all over the place, but is held together by the laid-back feel and willingness to experiment shown by the two (? - in any case, it feels like two) performers. Occasionally my Soft Machine whimsical proggy funny-bone is tickled. Electric pianos, synthesizers, (sometimes treated voice), guitars... singing/speaking in English, Spanish and French sometimes all in one song. Good for Sunday morning mental puttering.

Esto es musica

Postscript: From time to time, I stall a bit with this blog/music blogs in general, the community produced (or lack thereof), etc. Today, while researching for a mix I'm putting together for friends (a primer on reggae), I revisited what we could call a "frozen blog" - one of those wonderful archives teetering forever on the precarity of sudden removal. No posts for over five years. All the links are dead. But it still exists, like a virtual cemetery, for you to go traipsing through if you have an inkling. A snapshot in time of a fellow traveler's explorations in taste, and one of my early inspirations for starting this site: Big Head Stevenson. 

  

Buddy Emmons - Steel Guitar Jazz (1963)

Warm vibes for the beginning of spring. Right up there with Chet Atkins' Hollywood album in terms of gorgeous guitar nostalgia-for-a-time-that-never-existed-/-that-you-never-lived-though. Try walking around in a grumpy mood with this coming through your headphones. Impossible. 

Here you go!

Glenn Copeland - "Ghost House"

I first came across Glenn Copeland's music via the ever-impressive Listen to This! blog, who posted his 1986 masterpiece "Keyboard Fantasies" last year. Go check it out over there if you haven't heard it, or, better yet, buy it here or here (just rereleased on vinyl by Invisible City). 

I just got finished watching Loving. It messed me up. Most everything I see and hear about my country these days messes me up. Imagining the brutality of daily existence for the Loving family, living in a place whose local police and legislators didn't want them, the legal body that was them, yet furtively inhabiting that space, a space that was always under threat of being violated, shattered in the night... it burns me up, but their defiance and intractable will to go on assuages any pain I feel, sitting in a room thousands of miles from home, a home that terrifies me more and more each day. The persistence of  love assuages terror.

I think Glenn Copeland's music would have made a perfect compliment to the soundtrack of Loving, which, like so much of Jeff Nichols' work, is so much about the silent strain of human contact, about what should come bursting out of people in hot words but instead lingers painfully in faces, in Southern eyes sometimes welling with tears. Copeland calls out to his love, lamenting their (permanent?) absence from their home become a house, a ghost house. So much of Loving revolves around homes, those intimate spaces we so often taken for granted as private; however, history can shatter one's sense of propriety with the brusqueness of a flashlight on a marital bed. When Copeland wails, "My flesh a naked window here waits for you," he offers up the leap of faith that is love, the possibility of reunion to-come (in that tradition of Derrida's wonderful coinage, à-venir, the future as always to-come and thus never closed, an idea I need to keep close at heart now, always).

Rather than post Copeland's album for download, I've provided her song above. The whole album is beautiful and can be bought directly from the artist here. 

Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams - Third Plane

Some highly pleasurable excursions from these three, who previously got their ya-ya's out as members of Miles' second quintet. Vibes to contemplate by. 

Chin chin

Hi there! Repost from Microphones in the Trees

Happy new year, folks. No new albums to post at the moment, but I noticed that Microphones in the Trees posted a review of the new album by Baltimore natives Rod Hamilton and Tiffany Seal, "Versatile Ambience." Thought I'd add my praise to the solid review from MitT; I've had the pleasure of seeing Rod perform many times over the years, and his new collaborations with Tiffany are breathtakingly lovely. Really happy to see/hear an album's worth of these tunes emerge. Please check out their music here and buy a copy of the tape!

Here's a video of Rod and Tiffany doing what they do, inimitably, at an iteration of a yearly art showcase I put on w/ friends in the Baltimore area: