Nick Zinner with Songhoy Blues via Africa Express.
A trip to Mali by a bunch of Western musicians including Damon Albarn, Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner and Brian Eno has resulted in Africa Express Presents: Maison Des Jeunes.
For a week in October the Africa Express musicians and producers set up a studio at a city youth club and collaborated with a new wave of contemporary Malian musicians. The album was completed in one week. It will be released digitally on Dec. 9, 2013.
The earliest recordings made by the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo will be part of a two-CD set, No Depression: Legacy Edition, that will include the No Depression album along with lots of rare or previously unreleased material, according to Rolling Stone.The album will be released January 28 on Sony Legacy.
Listen to “I Got Drunk,” which was recorded in 1989 with producer Matt Allison. The members of Uncle Tupelo at the time of the recording were Jeff Tweedy, Jay Farrar and Mike Heidorn.
In today’s New York Times, book critic Michiko Kakutani offers a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed. It is fitting that Lou Reed, the New York outsider who documented the outsiders of New York, should now be celebrated in the ultimate New York establishment media, the New York Times.
About the New York that Reed wrote and sang about in song for close to 50 years, Kakutani writes, it was “as distinctive as Chandler’s Los Angeles or Baudelaire’s Paris.”
Kakutani continues:
Mr. Reed was a pioneer on rock’s frontier with the avant-garde, translating lessons he learned at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the disruptive innovations of the Beat writers — Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. (“Last Exit to Brooklyn”) — to the realm of popular music. He not only embraced their adversarial stance toward society and transgressive subject matter (in songs like “Street Hassle” and “Heroin”) but also developed his own version of their raw, vernacular language, while adding a physical third dimension with guitars and drums. His early songs for the Velvet Underground — delivered in his intimate, conversational sing-speak — still sound so astonishingly inventive and new that it’s hard to remember they were written nearly half a century ago.
If Mr. Reed provided a literary bridge to the Beats (and through them, back to the Modernists, and the French “decadents” Rimbaud and Verlaine, and even Poe, the subject of his 2003 project “The Raven”), he also created a bridge forward to punk and to glam, indie, new wave and noise rock. He would become a formative influence on musicians like Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Roxy Music, R.E.M., the Sex Pistols, Sonic Youth, the Strokes, Pixies, and Antony and the Johnsons. As his friend the artist Clifford Ross observed, “Lou was the great transmitter” — of ideas, language and innovation.
Russian officials have revealed the location of imprisoned Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a statement released Tuesday by Russia’s human rights ombudsmen Vladimir Lukin.
The statement said Tolokonnikova will be transferred to a prison colony in the Siberian province of Krasnoyarsk. She is already there.
“Tolokonnikova has arrived in the Krasnoyarsk region, where she will be serving a part of her term,” the Interfax news agency quoted Lukin as saying. “I have been told that, according to her wishes, she has been placed [in the penal colony’s] medical ward.”
As previously reported, Tolokonnikova’s husband Peter Verzilov told Rolling Stone on November 6 that he believed his wife was headed for Penal Colony 50, near the town of Nizhny Ingash, which is 190 miles from the city of Krasnoyarsk. This prison is in a much more remote location than Penal Colony No 14 in Mordovia, where Tolokonnikova was previously held. It is about 2600 miles from Moscow. Prison management havem thus far, not confirmed that Tolokonnikova is in Penal Colony No. 50.
Lukin said that Tolokonnikova has ended her prison strike, and that new prisoners are placed in quarantine for 10 days on arrival and she will be able to see her husband and lawyers within the week.
It has been more than three weeks since Tolokonnikova’s family or lawyers have been in contact with her.
I like Cardiff-based Joanna Gruesome a lot. Their debut album, Weird Sister, is great. Here’s a cover of Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat,” the flip of their single, “Sugarcrush.”
A memorial for Lou Reed, who died Sunday October 27, 2013 in Southampton, New York, will be held at Lincoln Center beginning at 4 PM. The public is invited.
On Lou Reed’s Facebook page a new post reads:
“New York: Lou Reed at Lincoln Center”
A gathering open to the public – no speeches. no live performances, just Lou’s voice, guitar music & songs – playing the recordings selected by his family and friends.
The Paul Milstein Pool & Terrace at Lincoln Center
Thursday November 14th. Time 1:00PM to 4:00PM
Bono offered a tribute to Lou Reed in Rolling Stone that begins:
The world is noisier today, but not the kind of noise you want to turn up. The world of words is a little quiet and a good bit dumber, the world of music just not as sharp.
Lou Reed made music out of noise. The noise of the city. Big trucks clattering over potholes; the heavy breathing of subways, the rumble in the ground; the white noise of Wall Street; the pink noise of the old Times Square. The winking neon of downtown, its massage and tattoo parlors, its bars and diners, the whores and hoardings that make up the life of the big city.
New York City was to Lou Reed what Dublin was to James Joyce, the complete universe of his writing. He didn’t need to stray out of it for material, there was more than enough there for his love and his hate songs. From Metal Machine Music to Coney Island Baby, from his work in the Velvet Underground to his work with Metallica, the city that he devoted his life to was his muse more than any other. Until Laurie Anderson came into his life 20 years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that Lou had no other love than the noise of New York City. If he thought people could be stupid, he thought New Yorkers were the smartest of them.
Lou Reed’s final performance, a reworking of the sad ballad “Candy Says” (from the Velvets third album), which took place at Paris’ Salle Pleyel in June of this year. Reed is joined by Antony.
U2 expect to release a new album in April 2014, Billboard reports.
The album is produced by Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), and recording took place for the most part at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, according to Billboard and other reports.
U2’s previous album was 2009’s No Line on the Horizon, the band’s seventh #1 on “The Billboard 200,” where it debuted at #1.
U2 is looking for “brand partners,” according to Billboard, so the band can advertise the album in a Super Bowl commercial.
This evening in New York, “Abstraktes Bild (809-1),” a painting by Gerhard Richter owned by Eric Clapton, sold for $20, 885,000 at a Christie’s art auction.
A triptych by Francis Bacon, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” with an estimated value of $85 million, sold for $142,405,000.
To see what other art sold for at the auction, including work by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, head to Christie’s and scroll down.
