Covers: Fanny - Special Care (Buffalo Springfield) / Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway - White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane) / PigPen Theatre Co. - The Only Living Boy in New York (Simon & Garfunkel) / Stonefield - Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin) / The Bangles - Open My Eyes (The Nazz) / The Flaming Lips feat. Miley Cyrus and Moby - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (The Beatles) / Two Minutes To Late Night - Walking on Broken Glass (Annie Lennox)

 Fanny - Special Care

 

 Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway - White Rabbit

 

 PigPen Theatre Co. - The Only Living Boy in New York

 

 Stonefield - Whole Lotta Love

 

 The Bangles - Open My Eyes

 

 The Flaming Lips feat. Miley Cyrus and Moby - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

 

 Two Minutes To Late Night - Walking on Broken Glass

 

Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway went all in on this cover of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” in this video they released last month.
“I have loved the story of Alice in Wonderland since I read the book as a kid and played the Queen of Hearts in my school play. I chose to cover ‘White Rabbit’ back in the fall of 2020 for a live stream of songs by San Francisco Bay Area artists. Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane is from Palo Alto, CA, just like me, and this song gives me the nostalgic feeling of growing up, but recording it also pushed my band forward into new territory musically. This is the first song I have arranged, produced and recorded from the ground up with the band members that I’ve been on the road with all year. Golden Highway and I have formed a strong musical bond after playing almost 100 shows together this year. Each band member brought ideas to the table, making this a truly collaborative effort.”  From: https://www.notreble.com/buzz/2023/05/23/molly-tuttle-golden-highway-white-rabbit-live/

Back in March, the Flaming Lips and Miley Cyrus got together in the studio for a weed-fueled session that produced a cover of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” It’s part of a star-studded, full-album remake of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Lips, and they previewed it last night at Cyrus’ gig at Manchester, England’s Phones4u Arena. According to Lips fan site the Future Heart, the performance of the song was filmed, possibly for the Billboard Music Awards, with Miley, Wayne Coyne, and Steven Drozd playing the cover three times in a row to make sure they got a good take. “You guys gotta pretend like you like it every single time, okay?” Cyrus tells the crowd before the first rendition. Overall, the cover is pretty faithful to the original, with some modern psychedelic effects added and other sections drawn out. It’s hard to tell for sure, because at one point Cyrus misses her cue, leading her to say, “We’re gonna do that again because I f—ked that shit up.”  From: https://www.spin.com/2014/05/flaming-lips-miley-cyrus-lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds/

No matter who you are or what your taste in music is, chances are you love at least one Led Zeppelin song, or you’ve got some sort of childhood memory attached to the band. We had a chat with Amy Findlay, drummer for Stonefield, who’s set to perform in the Led Zeppelin celebration show Whole Lotta Love.

So normally you’re playing drums and singing for Stonefield. How did you get on board for the Whole Lotta Love show?

A while ago I sang a couple of guest songs for Frank Zappa cover band Petulant Frenzy. One of the guys from that band is friends with the organiser of the Whole Lotta Love shows and put us in touch. It’s been a very different experience for me. I am so used to singing my own songs, so there is a lot of pressure when performing Led Zeppelin songs for hardcore fans! It’s also a lot of fun and an honour to sing some of my favourite songs.

And the rest of Stonefield weren’t interested in the part?

The way the show works is that they have a great band for the whole show and rotate guest vocalists. It makes for a really entertaining, exciting show. I guess being a vocalist opens me up for a lot more opportunities like this.

It must be pretty great knowing you’re a part of such a well-respected and long-running national show?

For sure, I feel totally honoured to have been asked in the first place. The musicians I get to sing with are pretty phenomenal!

Growing up, were you always a big fan of Led Zeppelin, and what is it you love about the band?

Always! Zeppelin make up majority of the soundtrack to my childhood. They are brilliant songs, an incredible band – both individually and it’s magic with them all together!

From: https://fortemag.com.au/whole-lotta-love/

 

 

Fanny

 

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway

 

PigPen Theatre Co.

 

Stonefield

The Bangles

The Flaming Lips

Throwing Muses - Counting Backwards

Having been a Throwing Muses fan since I first saw them play with Pixies some 37 years ago at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, it was with some excitement that I received the news that the band would soon be releasing a new record, Moonlight Concessions, particularly as their extensive UK tour would also include a date in Hastings, my new home since February 2024. Employing a different sound palette to 2020’s noisier Sun Racket, Moonlight Concessions offers an evocative collection of vignettes from everyday life that impact in a similar way to the understated and deceptively simple prose of Raymond Carver. Cello, strings and overlaid acoustic guitars imbue the music with an atmospheric presence that matches the directness of the stark but empathic lyrics. Yet the consistently hardworking Hersh again manages to carve out a distinct sonic identity that marks the release apart from her other (also excellent) solo material and work with her noise rock trio 50 Foot Wave. Hersh has in the past said that during her earlier years as a musician, songs would seem to arrive fully formed as a consequence of a dissociative disorder. Since integrating both sides of her personality via successful EMDR therapy, Hersh stresses the importance of a creative process that transcends the ego, humorously adding: “This process that we all are as humans is hard to keep tabs on. When we try, we screw up. So, I’d rather just keep saying the good songs are not me, while the bad ones are definitely me.” Hersh says that the process this time “took about three years. Usually, it’s longer. I recorded 30 or 40 songs, which is not unusual. Then I pared them down to the most elemental form, to this paragraph that is a collection of songs. If it’s your blue period, then you just gotta keep painting in blue over and over again until it forms itself into something that you learn from.” She again stresses that the writing comes from somewhere bigger than just the mind, adding: “I would probably say the same thing about my children. I didn’t invent their fingernails or what they say.”

You mentioned colour. Do you still think in terms of colour when you write music?

Kristin Hersh: Absolutely. Everything is colour. People still have doubts about synaesthesia. There are a lot of musicians who also claim that there’s no such thing as inspiration. A lot of writers and painters too. They’re just jealous. They’re baffled that sometimes they suck and sometimes they’re OK. It can be really confusing, because in the music business suckage is success! This activity that we engage in, it necessarily has to keep your mind and your ego out of it, or you’re going to make a dead body. The people that say there’s no inspiration, they’re just working on craft – absolutely, hone your craft, love your instrument. Fall in love with it. Lose time, lose self. But what happens when you’re good? That’s inspiration. I don’t care what they say.

Did the mood of the album appear over time, or did you have something in mind when you began?

KH: I can learn as I go, but if I had a vibe in mind, it would fall apart. I record so many songs so that I can just stare at the speakers and let the musical moments hit me. This one was honed to only nine songs. We’ve done records of 30 songs because it was like, “this has to work this way”. This time, it wanted to be very clean and clear and percussive and simple. Not simplistic, but simple in a human way. If I started dancing around the studio, I knew that it was working. And if I stopped dancing and just squinted at the speakers, I knew it wasn’t working. Sometimes you have to kind of crucify yourself. If it sounds pretentious, then you have to take that bullet. And if it sounds really unpretentious, like this one, then you have to take that bullet! Gravity is a truism in music. You can’t apply it to yourself, you can’t think that you’re important. Yet your process must engage with that kind of gravity and that kind of depth, or you’re insulting your listener.

Does the album title, Moonlight Concessions, have any specific meaning, or do you want to keep it mysterious?

KH: At Moonlight Beach in Encinitas California, there’s a concession stand. It’s really beautiful. I wrote a lot of the songs there. The cover art is all at Moonlight Beach. It’s my son Bodhi’s dog on the cover. We were living in our truck at the time. We had to escape a stalker landlord and we didn’t have a lot of money and we had to lose almost all of our belongings. We had to live in our truck while we tried to find a place. We ended up living in the ‘Junky’ Days Inn, with a bunch of people who were never gonna leave, and the staff from Tijuana. It was a very moving time but we didn’t know that it was going to end, we just sort of hoped and it did. A quarter of the nation’s homeless are in California. When we moved out there, we were really struck by the homeless. We made friends with them. We visited them every day. Bo called them our ‘burrito brothers’ because one burrito could feed them all day. So, we’d bring burritos and we’d listen to their stories and we’d sit by the railroad tracks which are on the ocean there and bring them donuts and listen to more stories.

This informed the record, the stories and the sense of human connection?

KH: I learned from these people and their stories. They’d had the inspired moment, which was sometimes something horrifying, and they would bring it to this kind of entertainment. We’d be sitting in a circle, everybody eating donuts and they would entertain. This process, I’d liken it to the process of creating music, since most of these songs were written at that time on that beach, and I think this is why there’s something you want to dance to about them, which is not something someone’s ever said about Throwing Muses! There’s definitely a humanising function in places with poverty. New Orleans [where Hersh spends part of her time] runs on the concept of redemption through sin. So, everything is forgiven before you even begin. I live pretty clean and I’m pretty pure of heart but I can’t stomach the places where hypocrisy runs the show. I get real ill about that. And here in New Orleans, with all the degradation, and it’s the murder capital of the country, it’s tough and it’s rough and yet it’s so kind. It’s where I come for my familial information. This is family and they treat you like family. You can’t get away with anything and yet they don’t call you out on anything either, you’re already forgiven. 

From: https://thequietus.com/interviews/kristin-hersh-throwing-muses-moonlight-concessions-interview/

The Shins - The Rifle's Spiral

James Mercer talks Craig Howieson through the songs that showed him there are no limits in the quest to write the perfect pop song.

There are few songwriters with an ear for melody quite like James Mercer. But it is clear that in crafting some of the most memorable moments of his back catalogue, he was also paying homage to some of the very best who had come before. This month marks the twentieth anniversary of The Shins second record Chutes Too Narrow; an event that is being marked by the release of a remaster of the album and also coincides with the launch of Sub Pop’s first ever EU/UK online store, the Mega Mart 2. The significance of such anniversaries is not lost on Mercer, the driving force behind the band. “It's a strange thing, because it's revealing how long I've been doing this.” It also becomes apparent that the intervening years have provided some perspective on Chutes Too Narrow’s creation for the indie pop icon. “When I was doing the record, I felt like I was under a lot of pressure,” he says. “It was the first time I had worked on a project where felt like I hadn't been given the opportunity to get into every little detail and tweak it.” While the album may not hold the band's biggest hits - if streaming numbers are to be believed - it holds a special place in the hearts of fans, and seemingly amongst some of Mercer's inner circle. “It's funny,” he laughs. “So many of my friends and people that I respect are like, ‘That's your best record.’ I think it's probably because when I do go in there and get obsessive about things, I tend to actually make things worse…maybe? Who knows?” And while there may be a raw immediacy to Chutes Too Narrow, it still contains all the hallmarks of Mercer's uniquely pop inflected indie rock. The Shins are rightfully regarded as one of the finest indie bands of the past two decades, but they have also always been outliers, daring to embrace classic pop when their peers would scoff at the mere thought of it. It comes as no surprise then to find Mercer’s song choices are littered with some of the most exquisite pop moments from the past seventy years. “These are songs that definitely mean a lot to me,” he explains. “I guess they represent some sort of higher ideal of quality that you could aspire to.” One constant in his transient youth - a time spent following his dad, who was a munitions officer in the Air Force to bases in Germany, England and then back to the U.S - was the presence, and deeply held love of music. “One of the first songs I remember ingesting and really being moved by was “Top of The World,” he beams when talking of his formative experiences with music. “I'm talking about when I'm four or five and just being really transported.” It’s clear his almost studious approach of the masters has shaped the writer he is today. “I'm blatantly trying to do this type of material” he says when asked how much of an influence the acts on his list have been.  “I don't worry too much about trying to make a song sound avant-garde or anything. I'm just trying to get to the nuts and guts of what makes a song compelling. I follow these people as examples of how you could do it.”

“We've Only Just Begun” by The Carpenters
Who doesn't love that song? I remember as a high school student in the ‘80s when things were so much more cliquish, that you had to pick an identity and your music was going to be part of that, at least in the American high school culture.  I was in England during high school, but I was with a lot of American kids in an International School. And you just couldn't stray from what you knew. If you were a punker, then all you listened to was those few bands that were accepted as proper punk.  So the Carpenters were just something you would never claim to like at all. You had to hate them in fact, if you wanted to be cool. But in my 20s, I succumbed to the beauty of these songs; how wonderfully they're recorded and the charming nature of those two kids who made them.  It’s beautifully written and beautifully executed. I don't know much about it, but I know that they were fans of Burt Bacharach and they even worked with him a little bit. And you can tell they loved the Beatles, and they loved songwriting. They just were trying to be ninjas and they did it.

“Mama Tried” by Merle Haggard
I really learned this song because my dad would play it. We lived in Germany during my elementary school years, and he was a nightclub singer. He had an old Gibson J-50 - a big bodied acoustic guitar - and he would sing a lot of country songs. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Montana, so he was literally a fucking cowboy. He learned how to ride a horse before he was driving a car or riding a bike or anything. And so he was legit, and the Germans just loved it. And he was good at doing it. He was good at sitting with the guitar and being funny and entertaining in between songs. He'd walk around and ask for requests and stuff.  It's one of those cases where I knew my dad's version of the song and the way he delivered it. Then when I heard Merle Haggard's version later, I was a little bit disappointed. There was something about the way my dad did it. And there were many songs like that, where I'll hear them and I'll remember ‘Oh, my dad used to do that. He did it better.’ But I love Merle Haggard's version of it, it's terrific. It's just different I guess. So that's the story behind me being introduced to Merle Haggard. It was my dad covering those songs to earn supplemental income for the family in the late ‘70s through the ‘80s.

“Close To Me” by The Cure
My freshman year of high school was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And there was a girl down the street who all the boys had crushes on. She had a checkerboard shaved into the side of her head and half of a mohawk and she was just super cute. And she was into The Cure. I didn't know much about them because back then I would have been 14, and I wouldn't have even known where to go. The records that I had bought up to that point were from department stores. It would be hits, so it wouldn't be anything as obscure as The Cure. So I knew I had vaguely heard her playing The Cure in her bedroom and I knew it was really cool, and that I could be cooler if I liked them. And so when I moved to the UK in 1986 The Cure were like a pop band, or at least they were in the charts. You didn't have to go to some weird fucking record store to find out what's going on with them.  I bought The Head on the Door and this song has always stood out to me because it is so interesting. It's such an inventive, strange way to produce a song. It has this old timey sort of jazzy flow to it, it’s kind of cinematic in that way.

“Seven Seas” by Echo & The Bunnymen
Ocean Rain by Echo & the Bunnymen would have been right around the same time. I really fell in love with that record. That was a record where I sat down and tried to learn songs like “The Killing Moon” and they were manageable. Really, really gorgeous stuff.  I found the 7” release of “Seven Seas” sometime in the late ‘90s and I gave it to a girl that I was trying to impress. I should never have done that. It was so cool. It was a fold out 7” thing with a little booklet, and now she's got it and she probably doesn't even care.

BEST FIT: Are they a band that you've continued to follow? Or are they more of a fixed moment in time for you?

I think they're more fixed in a moment in time. In the later ‘80s, they came out with some really great stuff like “Bring on the Dancing Horses” and “Lips Like Sugar” and it was bigger and maybe more pop sounding, but still really good.

“Do You Know the Way to San Jose” by Dionne Warwick
I love Dionne Warwick. I loved her when I was a kid in the ‘80s because she still had hits then too. And I thought she was so pretty, and she looked like a very kind person. So I kind of had a crush on her when I was like 13. I guess I must have heard this song on the radio but I'm not exactly sure as it probably came out in the mid-60s or something. But it would have been sometime in the 2000s that I heard it again, and I was struck by how interesting it is. The arrangements are so clever. You can hear the room and it's just that classic old world way of doing records. It seemed like Burt Bacharach would produce things in the same way that Frank Sinatra had been doing them in the ‘50s. It's a big room, you’ve got a really good band, you fucking get a terrific take, and maybe overdub the main vocal, and it's just nightmarishly good. She's so charming and there's so much charisma coming across from her voice, but the lyrics are so great too. It's such a moment in time. It's a sad story about this kid who goes off to L.A. from San Jose, hoping to have a career in the business and it just doesn't work out. And she's defeated, but also seems to say, ‘You know what? I'll be fine.’ It’s just a neat, complex and subtle song.

BEST FIT: I read somewhere that initially she wasn't a huge fan of the song. But when it did so well and she realised how much it resonated with people she made sure to always sing it in her sets. Is that something you can relate to? Are there songs that you've written that fall flat for you personally, but someone's latched on to it and you feel you can't deny them by not performing it?

I'm a very pragmatic person and when you're doing a show and people have travelled to get there, and paid good money to be there, I feel a responsibility to entertain them, and I intend to show them a good time. Some people may think that somehow that's being inauthentic, or you're not a proper artist if you try and please anyone. Or that you shouldn't ever try to please anyone but yourself, and you have to be completely selfish and all that. And maybe that's true when you're writing, as you don't want to be trying to sound like that Taylor Swift song because ‘Boy, that did well.’ But when we're out touring, and working people are showing up and paying money, we have to play “New Slang” you know? Because I know that's a huge reason why a lot of people are there. But there's certainly evenings where I'm not excited about doing it. And there's a number of songs that are like that, but I'll do what it takes to keep people happy and coming back. You can put yourself back in that moment, you can remember how it was when you were writing the song and why you wrote those lyrics. That's what we're doing when we're listening to Dionne Warwick sing the song. We're being transported by the song and the words.

From: https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/nine-songs-the-shins-james-mercer

Hatis Noit - Jomon

Hatis Noit is a Japanese vocal performer hailing from distant Shiretoko in Hokkaido who now resides in London. Her accomplished range is astonishingly self-taught, inspired by everything she could find from Gagaku — Japanese classical music — and operatic styles, Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, to avant-garde and pop vocalists. It was at the age of 16, during a trek in Nepal to Buddha's birthplace, that she realised singing was her calling. While staying at a women’s temple in Lumbini, one morning on a walk Hatis Noit heard someone singing. On further investigation it was a female monk singing Buddhist chants, alone. The sound moved her so intensely she was instantly aware of the visceral power of the human voice; a primal and instinctive instrument that connects us to the very essence of humanity, nature and our universe.
The name Hatis Noit itself is taken from Japanese folklore, meaning the stem of the lotus flower. The lotus represents the living world, while it’s root represents the spirit world, therefore Hatis Noit is what connects the two. For Hatis Noit, music represents the same netherworld with its ability to move and transport us to the other side; the past, a memory, our subconscious. After participating in a memorial and appreciation ceremony tailored to the withdrawal of the evacuation area in Fukushima on 31 March 2017, Hatis Noit collaborated with renowned visual artist Nobumichi Asai on a project titled Inori (prayer) which they premiered live at Mutek Japan in Tokyo. March 23, 2018 marked the worldwide release of her first enigmatic EP Illogical Dance on Erased Tapes. The arresting 4-track record features Björk-collaborators Matmos and creates unique song-worlds with transcendent vocal interpretations that at once deconstruct and recombine Western Classical, Japanese folk and nature's own ambience atmosphere.
Having recently moved to London, she's performed solo shows and appeared at various festivals across Europe, including a special live performance at the Milan Fashion Week 2018. Hatis Noit has collaborated with Kevin Richard Martin aka The Bug, the NYX Electronic Drone Choir and appeared on recordings by fellow countryman Masayoshi Fujita as well as Ukrainian pianist and Continuous Music pioneer Lubomyr Melnyk. She's been invited by David Lynch to perform at his Manchester International Festival takeover in 2019, and appeared on US super-producer Rick Rubin's Showtime documentary series Shangri-la, followed by headline shows across Europe and beyond, culminating in a much applauded sold-out London show with the London Contemporary Orchestra at Southbank Centre.  From: https://www.erasedtapes.com/artist/hatis-noit   

Deep Purple - Into the Fire - Live 1971

Well, first you have a four octave vocal assault, given by no other than the legendary Ian Gillan, also known as Jesus Christ (Superstar, of course.) His amazing banshee wails have been known to Disturb the Priest, every now and then. I can't emphasize how great Ian Gillan is, you have to hear this album to truly understand. Combine Ian Gillan's mastery at hard rock vocals with Ritchie Blackmore, and you have a winning team. Ritchie Blackmore is a truly great guitar player. He gives us fantastic riff after riff, and his solos are even more amazing. He is deeply rooted in classical music, and it gives a fresh perspective compared to the blues style many bands played at the time (and hey, I love Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, but variety is good). Add Tony Iommi into the mix with these four greats, and you have my five favourite guitarists outside of prog. We cannot forget Jon Lord, the organ player. "Organ player!?" some might exclaim. But believe me, he is fantastic. He really knows what he is doing. Without him, Ritchie's guitar riffs wouldn't sound half the same. What a lot of people don't realize is that when Jon Lord is riffing with his Hammond Organ, it sounds similar to a guitar. This in turn creates a huge massive sound, which would become a trademark of the band (well, sometimes Jon played piano and stuff, but that wasn't particularly often). I could compare Jon Lord to some other organ players, maybe Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman, but his style is far different from these geniuses. He himself is also one!
We cannot forget the rhythm section, however. They are very impressive themselves. The two of them are Ian Paice (drums) and Roger Glover (bass). I'll start with Little Ian first (Gillan was called Big Ian, and Paice wasn't really small or anything, but Gillan was pretty big). Ian Paice, in short, just has the groove. His drum beats are great. He can play speedy beats with ease, bashing his drum set, but at the same time keeping his "groove." He plays amazingly throughout the album, and is often underrated when people talk about drummers. Granted, I prefer John Bonham (Led Zeppelin) over him, but he beats out his other competitors at the time such as Bill Ward (Black Sabbath). Then again there is Keith Moon, who is fantastic, but I would still put Ian Paice on the same level as him. I just mentioned these drummers because they were all in Hard Rock bands that had overflowing influence on the genres of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.
Now on to Roger Glover, who is very important in the history of Deep Purple, despite getting the job in Deep Purple by coming along with Ian Gillan when he was about to join Purple. Roger Glover is a great bassist, and was the co-writer of the lyrics along with Ian Gillan. You can hear his thundering bass amidst all the guitar and organ action from Ritchie and Jon. Admittedly, his bass was not as loud as Geezer Butler, but it is still loud and great. He works great alongside of Ian Paice, which is very important for the rhythm section. Someone has to keep the rhythm while Jon and Ritchie are trading off solos (which happens frequently)! We cannot forget the fact that he does the remixing and a lot of the work on the Anniversary Editions of the Mark II (which is this line-up) albums. Before I go on, I should also mention that I will be reviewing the 25th Anniversary Edition of "In Rock". The normal version is great too, but the extra songs you get are a superb addition, and the intro to Speed King isn't cut off. Plus, the 25th version is remastered, which is very noticeable. I have both versions, and the sound quality is vastly improved on the remastered version. "Into the Fire" is barely listenable on the non remastered version! The remastered version is an import though, but it is only about five dollars more if you order it. In Germany you can get it in any well-ordered cd shop for the price of around 8 dollars/euros.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=9120

Rhiannon Giddens - Black Is the Color

The Believer: How did you develop such an interest in telling other people’s stories? That’s been a constant in your songwriting and now your opera as well.

Rhiannon Giddens: Well, it came from the very fact that we don’t know what we think we know, and what we’re being told is… they’re not even trying to hide the fact that it’s just lies. You kind of go, OK, this thing I was told my entire life, that the banjo was invented by white people in Appalachia — it’s not just a little bit wrong. It’s not like it was invented by white people in Arkansas or Maine, or by Irish people, which I’ve been told before. It was invented by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean! I mean, if that is so wrong, what else have I been told that is that wrong? It’s like, if that is so wrong, what else don’t I know? And then the corollary is always: In whose best interest is it that I don’t know these things? In whose best interest is it that these divisive narratives have become truth for people? Because it’s always in somebody’s best interest. Nobody makes this shit up just for the fun of it. It’s got to be working on lots of different levels. You’ve got to have a grand plan of white supremacy. And it’s not a conspiracy; it’s not like there’s some mastermind behind it. It’s just the way of American thought. England practiced genocide on Irish and Scottish people by saying that Gaels, who have one of the oldest literate languages in Europe, were savages. They wanted land, so they used this rhetoric of race. Then you have trans-Saharan Arabic slave traders talking about sub-Saharan Blacks being natural slaves. These racial attitudes that have already existed for a while come together in this unholy alliance during the economic explosion that happens around the slave trade. I mean, people are making money hand over fist. So it is in everybody’s best interest to reinforce this racial notion of a permanent underclass. When you’re looking at where white supremacy comes from, I mean, it’s just literally enforcement of the status quo to maintain the wealth of the many in the hands of the few. That’s it. And it’s an underclass of all colors, where everybody has one thing in common. They’re all poor. That’s why this narrative is so fucking important, because it strikes at the heart of anywhere those people come together. Poor white people, poor brown people, poor Black people, living together.

BLVR: What role does music play in all this? And how is your own music a response to it?

RG: We’re so often told, Well, you guys do this kind of music, and you guys do this kind of music, and you don’t really do each other’s music. But take the banjo, which used to be an instrument that everybody played. There were Black people playing banjos in the Caribbean as ceremonial instruments, as sort of spiritual instruments. It becomes a dance band instrument in North America. And by the 1820s and ’30s, it’s starting to transfer over to European American hands and people in rural areas. There were Black people in Appalachia; there were brown people in Appalachia. There was all this mixing going on constantly, continuously, everywhere. Thousands of interactions, millions of interactions. And so the banjo is starting to be played by everybody. The first recorded instance of banjo and fiddle being played together is by Black people playing them in Rhode Island in 1756. It’s a pan-American instrument. There are banjo orchestras. There’s a famous Black banjo player who’s a celebrity in Australia. But this all starts to change by the early twentieth century. Because you still have blackface minstrelsy, though it’s starting to go underground in the nineteen-teens. You have The Birth of a Nation and the rejuvenated Ku Klux Klan and this growing idea that there’s too many immigrants. You see the rhetoric happening, this obsession with mongrelization. Henry Ford is very vocal about the “jungle music” of the time, and he’s very anti-Semitic, so he sees an unholy coalition between Blacks and Jews. And that’s when you really start seeing this idea of the banjo and Appalachia being an ethnically pure receptacle for good old-fashioned Anglo culture.

BLVR: You live in Ireland, whose influence is foundational to US music and culture, especially in the Appalachian region you’re describing. What are you learning from it? Are you playing or learning more Irish music?

RG: Irish music is foundational and a major pillar of the creation of the unique American sound. I, however, think it’s more foundational in the Atlantic world, from the Caribbean up to the centers in New York, the waterways, Baltimore. That’s where Irish music, I think, really inserts itself. But I don’t think it’s more than German tunes or English tunes or Welsh tunes or Scottish tunes in Appalachia. The recording of Irish music in America during the 1920s is what revitalized the Irish traditional movement. Not a lot of people know that. But it was dying out in Ireland because the culture was being murdered by the English. A lot of that culture was tied to Gaelic speakers, and the aristocracy had fled hundreds of years before. So there was not any kind of reinvestment in the native Gaelic culture. It was being pushed out along with the people because of the famine. And then by the ’20s, Ireland was fighting for its independence, and impoverished. They didn’t really value that music in that culture. It was being kind of invaded by English culture. This is not answering your question, but that is what drives me; because that’s more interesting and it’s more true than these nationalistic narratives that were told.

From: https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-rhiannon-giddens/

Attrition - A Girl Called Harmony

Attrition, whose early work showed a similarity to other experimental and industrial artists of the time, were set slightly apart from their contemporaries by the combination of punk aesthetics and EBM-styled beats but also the inclusion of ethereal and classical touches that permeate nearly all of their repertoire. After initial releases which moved from eerily constructed ambience into standard dancefloor electro sounds, the band soon developed their distinctive texture, based on haunting synthesizer washes, strong beats, fretless bass backing, and Martin Bowes's deep growls contrasted with Julia Niblock's operatic soprano flourishes.
Attrition began after Martin Bowes issued, as part of a fanzine covering the Coventry music scene, a vinyl compilation and met Julia Niblock at a resulting music festival. After a handful of demos, fully-formed tracks by Attrition began to appear on several notable cassette compilations, such as the Rising From the Red Sand series from the fledging Third Mind label. In 1983 their vinyl breakthrough came with the inclusion of "Dreamsleep" on the influential The Elephant Table Album alongside notable experimental artists such as Nurse With Wound, Chris and Cosey and Portion Control. Coil even opened for them at their first London show, and they appearded side by side with The Legendary Pink Dots on a European tour in 1984, attracting brief notice by John Peel in 1985.
In 1984 the band moved to London, rooming and sharing a studio with The Legendary Pink Dots. After signing to Third Mind Records, they released their debut album The Attrition of Reason as well as The Voice Of God EP to moderate commercial success. At this point, Julia Niblock briefly left the band to collaborate with The Legendary Pink Dots on Asylum (where she is credited as "Poison Barbarella") but returned the following year to rejoin Attrition. In 1985, the seminal Smiling, At The Hypogonder Club was released to extremely positive reviews; the release was later picked up for American audiences by the Projekt label.  From: https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/attrition