Brainpicker #2

A recording created as part of the Golden Record carried into space by the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Story here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/10/murmurs-of-earth-sagan-golden-record/

FULL STORY

The Sounds of Earth (The Golden Record)

From the album, 'South Wind,Clear Sky,' out now on Second Language Music.  www.secondlanguagemusic.com

Perhaps still most widely recognised for Dreaming With Alice, his 1972 psych-folk debut for RCA Italy as a 19-year-old art student-troubadour, Mark Fry has been turning his creative gaze on the world, and alchemising its elements into shimmering, quietly visionary works of art, ever since. Certainly not an artist who dances to the music of time in any conventional sense, Mark, a respected, and collected, painter, most often to be found holed up in his Normandy farmhouse studio, allowed more than three decades to glide by before recording Alice’s follow up, 2008’s Shooting The Moon. His subsequent musical activity has been frenetic by comparison.

Mark’s beguiling, Arcadian-flavoured 2011 Second Language album, I Lived In Trees, recorded in collaboration with The A. Lords – musicians from a more recent generation of psychedelic-folk experimenters – proved a major critical hit, demonstrating that Mark Fry’s musical stock lay not only in the Paisley-hued haze of his Aquarian Age youth, but also in the full glare of the postmodern, internet-facilitated present. A series of concerts in Japan and Scandinavia, and a widely reported ‘supergroup’ London showcase, featuring members of Mercury Rev, Super Furry Animals, Tunng and Lemon Jelly, further evinced the subtle but inexorable diffusion of the Mark Fry legend, something abetted by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme airing an interview with Mark in the wake of Trees’ release.

All of which brings us to Mark Fry’s latest, most exquisitely realised musical offering to date, South Wind, Clear Sky. Sung with that now familiar alloy of cool restraint and wondering innocence, and passingly reminiscent of the kind of English pastoralism associated with the likes of Kevin Ayers or Bill Fay, the album’s leanly arranged yet immersive songs are propelled by Mark’s glinting, plangent guitars and deliciously embroidered by John Parker’s double bass, Angèle David-Guillou’s piano and backing vocals and Katie Lang’s French horn, all bound together by producer Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab) into a delightfully iridescent whole. For all its finely honed arrangements, and the translucence of its recording, South Wind, Clear Sky is still very much the work of the man who made Dreaming With Alice; the mature Mark Fry’s feeling for wonderment and magic, for the dreamlike and the innocently surreal, is just as pervasive, and persuasive here, only more focused, and etched against a more luminous, even heavenly canvas.

Where the lyrics on his last album found Mark reaching up through the summer branches toward an azure sky, here that celestial dimension provides the focus for eight shimmering chamber-folk essays whose wistful narratives of flight and fancy and empyrean romance purr and soar with a stately grace, like the ‘Aeroplanes’ of the album’s richly melodic opening track.


Mark Fry - Aeroplanes

BAS JAN - SAT NAV

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/03/working-together-david-whyte/
Excerpted from https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/sets/david-whyte-the-conversational

Photograph by Nicol Ragland

POEM TEXT / CONTEXT

David Whyte reads "Working Together"

Full context and poem text: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/27/janna-levin-reads-planetarium-by-adrienne-rich/

Recorded at "The Universe in Verse," April 24, 2017.

Photograph of Janna Levin by Molly Walsh / Academy of American Poets

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich

A French-born Tibetan Buddhist monk and a central figure in the Dalai Lama's dialogue with scientists, Matthieu Ricard was dubbed "The Happiest Man in the World" after his brain was imaged. But he resists this label. In his writing and in his life, he explores happiness not as a pleasurable feeling but as a way of being that gives you the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life and that encompasses many emotional states, including sadness. We take in Matthieu Ricard's practical teachings for cultivating inner strength, joy, and direction.

On Being with Krista Tippett

Matthieu Ricard  — Happiness as Human Flourishing

http://www.dominorecordco.com/artists/robert-wyatt/

Robert Wyatt - "What A Wonderful World"

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/04/23/ursula-k-le-guin-hymn-to-time-janna-levin/

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Hymn to Time" by Ursula K. Le Guin

Josephine Foster - Shepherd Moon Of Starry Height

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/02/04/janna-levin-w-h-auden-the-more-loving-one/

Recorded at the Academy of American Poets' 16th annual "Poetry & the Creative Mind."

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "The More Loving One" by W.H. Auden

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/10/23/the-weighing-jane-hirshfield/

Recorded at @pioneerworks, October 29, 2018.

Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads "The Weighing" by Jane Hirshfield

Life in motion spits you out
need to relax without a doubt
I recommend a weekend spending time for just indulging

There’s a place that would suit you
it offers a fun point of view
it’s quite far out from all the trials and traps of broken cities

Oh, Jaunty View!
somewhere built for you
make of it whatever works for you
stay for a week or two
would you?, would you?

Check in via the sliding doors
the porter guides you to your floor
then your stay is truly just a lottery of amusements

There’s a weird little room in the basement
Disco underground
Then jump for a giggle on the ceiling
Weirdos hear that sound and fly

Stroll in the fields with the tall blooming trees and wonder
Dip in the pool with the water of blue and wonder
How could you ever go back home?
family and friends don't need to know
We care about you
you fit within our point of view
just book a lifelong stay
and watch your problems fly away
it’s up to you…

If you leave Jaunty View
please come back and visit soon
remember our policy for clientele satisfaction
credits
released June 26, 2020
Written, performed and produced by Thomas McConnell
Mastered by David Dargahi

Released on the Suddenly On Sea EP, 2020 on Abbey House Records.

Jaunty View

Hello everyone, I would like to show you my new album "Pereehali". This is my third album, it was written and recorded in the summer of 2012. After a long writer's block that was caused by a very pretentious and bombastic second album I decided to make a really intimate, solo-piano work. I lived in the countryside during the recording sessions, and every recording was done by me tête-à-tête with my lovely piano in the wooden house. It was a priceless experience working and writing while having a close contact with nature, it helped me a lot to understand the music I compose, to make it more organic, touching and moving.


playing & recording // dmitry evgrafov 
mixing & mastering // martyn heyne 
cover // vika bogorodskaya 
special thanks to nils frahm & dave howell

Coming Home

Robbie Basho - Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes
A 5CD Box Set - All Tracks Previously Unreleased
Available 12/4/2020
PRE- ORDER : http://www.tompkinssquare.com/bashoboxset.html

Robbie Basho (1940-1986) is widely regarded as one of the progenitors of what's commonly known today as American Primitive guitar. Growing up in Maryland alongside neo-traditional guitar explorers John Fahey and Max Ochs, Basho's path would take a decidedly different turn, bringing Hindi, Indian, Japanese and Native American musical traditions into his work. His albums for Takoma and Vanguard have left an indelible trail of influence across generations of musicians, from William Ackerman and Pete Townshend to Ben Chasny and William Tyler.

Liam Barker first became aware of Basho having purchased Tompkins Square's reissue of Venus in Cancer, released in 2006. This led him on an incredible fact-finding expedition, unraveling the many layers of mystery surrounding Basho's life and death, all deftly compiled and depicted in his documentary film, Voice of the Eagle : The Enigma of Robbie Basho.

During the research process, Barker came across a large cache of unheard Basho tapes recorded throughout his career, ranging roughly from 1965-1985. By arrangement with Basho's Estate and the original custodians of the tapes, Tompkins Square is set to release Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes, a 5CD set of previously unreleased material, on December 4th, 2020. The set includes notes by Barker, Henry Kaiser, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Glenn Jones and Richard Osborn, as well as many unseen photographs. The box set package featuring gold foil inlay, poster and extensive booklet, was designed by Barbara Bersche, known for her work on the 2009 Grammy-nominated Alan Lomax in Haiti box, as well as the new Dust-To-Digital Harry Smith B-Sides box.

TSQ 5715 - Robbie Basho / Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes - 5CD set

Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes

American Sunday

No-No Boy '1975' out on April 2nd, 2021, available now for pre-order. 

No-No Boy is the musical project of Vietnamese American singer and scholar Julian Saporiti. On his Smithsonian Folkways debut 1975, named after the year Saigon fell, Saporiti investigates his own family heritage as well as life in WWII Japanese internment camps, immigrant detention centers and refugee camps in 2020, and other stories of immigration that illustrate the complexities of becoming American. His songs are the epitome of folk storytelling in the modern era, as he interweaves histories with field recordings from the sites of collective trauma and fragments of Asian American musical tradition, from jazz to rock, to choral musicir). With his plaintive, direct voice, he takes listeners on a deeply human journey through the Asian American experience in the US.

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich

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