Tag Archives: music

enjoying good music with good friends

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Aimee and I spent an enjoyable evening Saturday night at some friends’ house where singer/songwriter Bill Mallonee (formerly of the Vigilantes of Love) was giving a house concert.  Several of our friends have known Mr. Mallonee for many years but it was our first introduction to his music.  The music was great and the company was wonderful.  After Bill went on his way, we sat around for a long time just talking. Today, as I thought about some of the things that were said, I realized how blessed I am to have honest, decent and interesting friends who live thoughtful, intentional lives. 


Radiohead in K.C.

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My wife, Aimee, and I had an incredible time seeing Radiohead at the Sprint Center in Kansas City last night. They were amazing. In a time when hardly anything really is as it appears, these six guys can produce beauty, then manic intensity, then manically intense beauty right there in front of you on the stage.

The evening started with a joyful looseness that included a new song in progress and mistakes. Then, sometime in the middle of the set, they locked in — song after amazing song with driving rhythms, unsettling harmonics and Thom Yorke’s voice soaring over the band.

Miscellaneous highlights of the trip…

Dinner
Po’s Noodle Bar on 39th St.
Fun, simple, affordable and satisfying

Seats
Full points to my wife for securing some of the best seats in the house.

Staging
The suspended screens that showed live images of the musicians really added to the experience by increasing the feeling of intimacy with the band.

Setlist

1. Bloom
2. 15 Step
3. Morning Mr Magpie
4. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
5. All I Need
6. Pyramid Song
7. The Daily Mail
8. Supercollider
9. Nude
10. Identikit
11. Lotus Flower
12. There There
13. Feral
14. How To Disappear Completely
15. Reckoner
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16. Separator
17. Myxomatosis
18. Idioteque
19. Lucky
20. Everything In Its Right Place
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21. Give Up The Ghost
22. Paranoid Android

Pretty good, huh?

give a listen — Sophie Madeleine

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Because she is promoting her new album, ‘The Rhythm You Started’ and because she is an amazing musiciam and can, Sophie Madeleine is recording 30 covers of great songs in 30 days and posting them on the internets. I thought these stripped-down versions were great. I hope you enjoy them, too.

link to her website with videos

http://sophiemadeleine.com/30days.html

via boingboing

Romantics: Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann — a poem by Lisel Mueller

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Romantics
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University).

What I’m listening to; April 2010

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annie clark (st. vincent)


ben sollee


kieran hebden (four tet)


hendrick weber (Pantha du Prince)

I find myself increasingly drawn to electronic music. I didn’t see this coming. Who knows, I may have finally decided to join the 21st Century. Nah, let’s not get crazy.

My current favorites:

Four Tet – Trance-inducing beauty (my wife, Aimee, would say “brain-cell-destroying aural assault”)
Pantha du Prince – Found-sounds of industrial machinery meets gamelan. Works for me.
Freelance Whales – I like “Hannah”
St. Vincent – The next big thing? It’s not too often you hear music that sounds really new. A unique songwriter and a great singer.
Ben Sollee – Jason Mraz with a cello. Cool.