Separate Sound

This week’s Friday Playlist comes from the King of Pop Culture - DaveP! He’s put together a mix of Brits he’s currently enjoying - just for us.

Every track will lead you to a sample, so click away.

Arctic Monkeys - A Certain Romance

Art Brut - Bad Weekend

Bloc Party - She’s Hearing Voices

Coldplay - The Scientist

Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip - Thou Shalt Always Kill

Keane - She Has No Time

Maximo Park - Limassol

Muse - Plug In Baby

Snow Patrol - Run

The Beatles - A Day In The Life

The Futureheads - Decent Days And Nights

The Young Knives - She’s Attracted To

I hope you’ve found some bands you’re dying to hear more of. Now, head over to PopBuzzUK and hear what’s on DaveP’s British Jukebox this week!

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On Fridays, Separate Sound will feature playlists from readers, bloggers, and musicians. Want to submit a playlist? Click the “Contact Me� button right over there (—>) and send me five or more songs that you’re listening to. If you have a blog or website, be sure to include it so I can post the link along with your playlist.

music, pop culture, pop buzz uk, british music, arctic monkeys, art brut, bloc party, coldplay, dan le sac vs scroobius pip, keane, maximo park, muse, snow patrol, the beatles, the futureheads, the young knives, separate sound

Rosslyn Chapel is a medieval chapel in Scotland getting quite a lot of attention in recent years. I have to admit that I have just about zero interest in The Da Vinci Code, but the chapel’s appearance in the novel has certainly given it a new claim to fame. That aside, Rosslyn Chapel in a very interesting place for other reasons…

Father and son Thomas and Stuart Mitchell report they have found and deciphered a musical code in the stone architecture of the building.

From their site:

“Rosslyn Chapel holds a musical mystery in its architecture and design. At one end of the chapel, on the ceiling are 4 cross-sections of arches containing elaborate symbolic designs on each array of cubes (in actual fact they are rectangles mostly). The ‘cubes’ are attached to the arches in a musically sequential way. …After 27 years of study and research by Stuart’s father, Thomas J. Mitchell, we believe he has found the pitches and tonality that match the symbols on each cube, revealing its melodic and harmonic progressions. It is what we could call ‘frozen music’, a little like cryogenics. The music has been frozen in time by symbolism, it was only a matter of time before the symbolism began to ‘thaw out’ and begin to make sense to scientific and musical perception.”

Using period instruments, the Mitchells’ musical interpretation has been given sound and will be performed before and audience for the first time later this month. You can listen to a sample of it here. It’s quite nice.

Whether or not these shapes were originally intended to represent music, the concept of taking architectural patterns and interpreting them as sound is fascinating to me. (It also reminds me of a recent Achewood in which Ray imagines a road with music encoded in its grooves.) The possibilities for this kind of music-making are endless.

music, conceptual music, rosslyn chapel, scotland, da vinci code, hidden music, achewood, ray smuckles

Mumm-Ra is a young UK-based band with an indie-pop sound and gentle cleverness behind their aesthetic. And their new album, These Things Move in Threes, comes out in the UK and US later this month.

How does a grey town and a grocery giant transform into an echanted view of the world? And how can you sample some Mumm-Ra tunes? (more…)

 
The 10 Finalists for The Shortlist Music Prize have been announced. The prize is a “peer-selected award that recognizes the most creative and adventurous albums of the year” with judges such as Franz Ferdinand, KT Tunstall, Panic at the Disco, Sufjan Stevens, and select members of Snow Patrol, the Killer, and Flaming Lips.

 
Who are the finalists? (more…)