Separate Sound

Start your Wednesday off right with 5 doses of music news from around the web:

The Indie Acoustic Project has just announced the winners of the their Best CDs of 2006 Awards. Find out who won what here.

Subculture Magazine’s latest podcast is up. Ready for a free hour of synthpop, industrial dance, goth and all other sorts of cutting edge music?

PopCultureBuzz is talking about Lily Allen…”a rare pop princess with her finger on the pulse of what is hip at the moment.”

And Obscure Sound reviews The Young Playthings. “A few months ago, The Young Playthings delivered an interesting live set by dressing up in pink trucker hats and reading erotic fiction to a crowd of sexually anxious teenagers.” You know you want to find out more!

music, music news, indie acoustic project, awards, world music central, subculture magazine, podcasts, obscure sound, the young playthings, pop culture buzz, lily allen, videos, mps

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

DaveP shares 5 songs from the current British music scene. Check it out!

Another video contest! Modest Mouse is calling for your design for a video of “Missed the Boat.” Get all the details here.

Andrew Lander has a box of cassette tapes from a thrift store - and they seem to be Taiwanese children’s music of mysterious origins. Go give them a listen.

And Keith lets those of us who missed it catch Björk performing “Earth Intruders” on Saturday Night Live - here.

music, mp3, pop buzz uk, british, modest mouse, contests, taiwan, earth intruders, bjork, volta, saturday night live, popculturebuzz, video, music videos

In honor of Earth Day…

Earthology Records. “Earthology Records, a not-for-profit environmental record label. Inserts are printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper with nontoxic soy-based ink, packaged in 100% reused salvaged jewel cases, shrink-wrapped with environmentally benign LDPE plastic, and shipped with recycled packaging. The CD scraps from manufacturing are recycled into milk cartons. Earthology is located on a geothermal wind-powered organic farm.”

Cloud Cult is one of the groups on the Earthology label. Their latest release, The Meaning of 8, came out on April 10th. You can find out more, hear a sample, and watch the video for “Chemicals Collide” at their site.

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Clocks made from recycled CDs by Acorn Studios. “Compact discs have been rescued from a life in the landfill and turned into functional art!”

earth day, earthology recods, cloud cult, music, acorn studios, recycling

For your Wednesday morning browsing pleasure, here are some bits of music news:

“Music indeed integrates minds, brings peace to the agitated minds and leads to positive thinking,” declares Indian President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.

The iPod is the “fastest selling music player in history,” according to The Telegraph.

British rockers The Klaxons are “at the forefront of the indie revolution,” says PopBuzzUK.

And Casey Criswell tells you how you can join Five for Fighting in raising money for autism research and other charities by watching videos online.

music news, music, news, five for fighting, autism, popbuzzuk, the klaxons, ipod, apj abdul kalam

I’ve gotten a lot of great response to my mention of Ghada Shbeir last week.

In case you missed it, Ghada Shbeir’s album, Al-Muwashahat, won the BBC Radio 3 2007 World Music Award in the Mid East & North Africa Category.

Since there’s been so much interest, I’m excited to be able to hook you up with an article published in today’s edition of The Daily Star - from Shbeir’s native Lebanon.

Considered one of the leading exponents of Arabo-Andalusian singing and Assyrian religious chants, Shbeir is one of the rare performers of a musical form that many thought was on its way to extinction.

“When we started producing ['Al-Muwashahat'] it was really a shot in the dark. We wanted to do it because it is good for the archives of this music, to safeguard it,” says Forward Productions’ Ghazi Abdel Baki.

Go here to read more about Ghada Shbeir and the intriguing music she performs.

ghada shbeir, bbc radio 3, world music awards, music, al muwashahat, lebanon

A day after the vital newsflash that Keith Richards may or may not have snorted (the ashes of) his father, let’s take a moment to listen to a great cover of a Rolling Stones standard…

PJ Harvey and Björk perform “Satisfaction.”

keith richards, rolling stones, satisfaction, pj harvey, bjork, covers, music, insufflation