Fanzines Plethora

This is music made by four postal workers as they cancel postage! When I listen carefully, I think I can actually hear the spring mechanisms as the stamps hit the ink. I love it as an example of music turning what is normally seen as a boring, repetitive task into something this joyful.

The song was originally recorded in 1975 at the University of Ghana by James Koetting and appeared on a cd accompanying the book Worlds of Music, but you can download the whole clip here. Thanks to Bernie Krause and Anthropologist Steven Feld for helping me track this one down.

Every time I have put this on at least three new conversions occur, where the listeners go on to permanently install this woman's music on their stereo. My neighbor even stalked me once just so she could listen to it more, until I just gave her my extra copy.

Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is a nun currently living in Jerusalem. She grew up as the daughter of a prominent Ethiopian intellectual, but spent much of her young life in exile, first for schooling, and then again during Mussolini's occupation of Ethiopia's capitol city, Addis Ababa, in 1936. Her musical career was often tragically thwarted by class and gender politics, and when the Emperor himself actually went so far as to personally veto an opportunity for Guèbrou to study abroad in England, she sank into a deep depression before fleeing to a monastery in 1948. Today, she spends up to seven hours a day playing the piano in seclusion and even gave a concert to some lucky ducks in Washington D.C. a few years ago. A compilation of her compositions was re-issued on the consistently great Ethiopiques label. You can read more about her life at the Emahoy Music Foundation.

BoingBoing pal and fellow happy mutant John Cusack visited the Boing Boing Video studio this week for an internet video crate-digging session, and shared the 10-minute clip above. This find is ample proof that Cusack possesses a doctorate degree with honors in the Studies of High Weirdness. The video is titled "Tiny Tim at The Hunt Club (The Festival Green Room)," and neither of us could figure out much about its origins. Which Hunt Club? What city, what year? What were the circumstances, an afterparty in a "green room," after some festival? There are some clues (the blip-flash between songs to sync light and sound suggests a certain era), but no answers.

What is evident in the video is what a delightful freak Tiny Tim is. Cusack points out that the video is different from all the other clips you can find of Tim on YouTube, mostly television appearances in which his character is louder and over-the-top. But this one seems more vulnerable, more personal. Tim meanders in and out of modified Vaudeville classics, dips into an Al Jolson impression somewhere, all the while strumming his uke.

"There's something about him that reminds me of Joey Ramone," Cusack observes—Tiny Tim was anything but classically handsome, just like Joey, and he had a certain talent and force of personality that the "normal" world had no use for. Until that talent burst forth, and the world came to appreciate it, weird punk freak that he was. Cusack also got a kick out of the "thank you/goodbye-kissies" hand-gesture Tim uses in this video, and compared it to Noh theatre. There's no kiss, really: he's just tapping his chin, a sort of oblique blessing-greeting. I'm tempted to use that one myself now, at tea parties.

Here's to high weirdness. I've asked Cusack if he might join us on Boing Boing as a guestblogger, and he's thinking about it. If you have some thoughts to share with him on that matter, why don't you tell him yourself, in the comments? Incidentally, Cusack has a movie coming to theaters on March 26 that you should go see: Hot Tub Time Machine. It's not on YouTube, but it might show up on YouTub.

Update: Thanks to the multiple Boing Boing commenters who identified the clip! The "Hunt Club" was the green room for VIPs at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and this video footage can be found on this Criterion DVD (Amazon). It's in the "additional material" section of the DVD. More about the what the disc contains here (criterionforum.org).

John Buckman from the excellent CC-friendly label Magnatune has great news: "The good-to-artists, DRM-free, Creative-Commons friendly music service said that their 'no-limits membership' offering now accounts for 3/4rds of their revenue, and so they are switching to that as their main business. As part of the move, Magnatune stops selling CDs, stops offering a streaming music membership, in favor of a simple $15/month membership which offers unlimited downloads and online listening. Magnatune is known as a pioneer music service, coining the term 'open music' and thumbing their nose at the industry with their strapline: 'We are not evil'."

Phil from Don't Disconnect Us sez, "Commissioned by UK ISP TalkTalk, we've been campaigning against the British Government's anti-filesharing proposals which form part of the Digital Economy Bill. In a nutshell the music industry has been lobbying the UK government saying that filesharing is killing the music industry. That's why we teamed up with Dan Bull, the musician behind Dear Lily and Dear Mandy, to create our very own music video. 'Home Taping is Killing Music' is a tongue-in-cheek video that features 80s legends Madonna, George Michael and Adam Ant (well, actually it's just a trio of look-alikes) lip-synching to the song Top of the Pops style."

This is some extremely funny stuff -- especially by the time we get to the grand finale and all the other industries at risk ("Home sleeping is killing hotels"). Taking the apocalyptic claims of the record industry about the net at face value is so short-sighted and short-memoried. These Chicken Littles have been telling us that the sky is falling and that they must must must have business-friendly laws and enforcement or the world will end since 1908, when the piano roll was invented. Every time, it just turned out that some of the old guard were going to lose out, and a new guard, who saw how to make a living in the new world, were going to come along to take their place.

Yet here we are in Britain, ready to establish a China-style Great Firewall to block sites the record industry doesn't like, ready to shut whole families off from the information society if one member is accused of copyright violations, ready to sacrifice national technological competitiveness to shore up the doddering relics who don't want to make way for the next generation of entrepreneurs and artists who thrive in a networked world. And the dumbest part is that there's no way it will actually reduce infringement: we're just going to further criminalize and alienate young fans and creators.

It's not too late: write to your MP and ask for a full debate on the Digital Economy Bill. The British record industry admits that its legislation will only pass because Parliament isn't holding a debate on it. Demand that your elected representative do her job!

Home Taping is Killing Music (Thanks, Phil!)

Here's a wonderful gallery at Reckon of high-magnification images of the grooves on a vinyl record, captured with an electron microscope. (via Farai Chideya)

Miles Davis called him "the most impressive musician in the world". He's Hermeto Pascoal from Brasil, and this is how he does it:

Aside from Hermeto's infectiously liberated attitude, this performance is unique as an exploration of the physical edge of two sound mediums. He makes entirely underwater concerts seem tame by comparison.

Full disclosure: when I was in high school I used to spend a couple of hours a day in the bathtub listening to what water did to different sounds - now I can see what a flute and an explosion of yellow butterflies would have added...

Perhaps you missed Boing Boing's interview on Friday with South African rap-rave zef gangsters Die Antwoord? And the news that the recently-minted internet stars shook hands (and pinched cheeks) with Interscope Records, tapped District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp to direct their next music video, they'll likely be performing at Coachella, and they're developing a movie?

Read the Boing Boing Die Antwoord interview here.

After that, they went off to meet David Lynch. The band says,

Ninja called David 'Dad'. David said "You turned out alright son." David also said, "I was a bit worried about you for a while there, but you turned out alright." Ninja said "I'm a lucky duck." David said, "You're a good guy."

Image: A photo shot last night in New York City by Clayton James Cubitt. "Yo-Landi jumps on bed while Ninja tries to nap."

Above, Boing Boing debuts the new video from David Byrne with Santigold, "Please Don't," from Here Lies Love, a musical biography of sorts about Imelda Marcos. David Byrne explains,

We did a photo session for a magazine the other day, and I told the interviewer that on this song, by the time you get to the chorus, she owns it -- she's turned it into a Santigold song. Perfect.

There are six of these videos that have been completed for this project. Most, like this one, use news and archival footage to, well, show that every word of the song is true! Most of the lyrics on this one are lifted gently from interviews and quotations -- the "please don't" chorus especially. At some point as first lady, Imelda began to feel that she could help Philippine interests by charming world leaders into seeing things her way. "Handbag diplomacy" she called it -- as she liked to imply that to solve a problem, she could bypass President Marcos and just grab a handbag and hop on a plane with some of her assistants. It sometimes worked! There was, for example, an Islamic-backed insurgency rising in the south of the Philippine archipelago, and she thought that a leader in that part of the world, Qaddafi in this case, might help pull the plug on that support if he saw things her way. Apparently he did -- the funding stopped and the insurrection lost momentum, and she later described him as a pushover, a mama's boy.

David Byrne: Here Lies Love, and you can purchase the music and book set here. The album is available in multiple formats (MP3, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and CD/DVD).

(thumbnail: portrait of David Byrne by Clayton James Cubitt)

"Tulane" wasn't Chuck Berry's last great song -- that would be "Oh What a Thrill," from Rockit -- but it's awfully close. Recorded for Back Home, the 1970 album he recorded for his return to the Chess label after a few years at Mercury that we fans are still trying to forget, "Tulane" both sounds like classic Chuck (you have heard this guitar intro before) and completely up-to-date (it's about a head shop raid). On the album, Berry follows it with "Have Mercy Judge," one of his sharpest blues performances, the tale of what happened when Tulane got away from the cops but the singer didn't.