Recorded around the same time using similar raw materials as the seminal My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, Byrne made this music for a dance production by Twyla Tharp called The Catherine Wheel. There are several songs with words included but it’s mostly instrumental, and the music has a simplicity and directness that very effectively undercuts the smarty-pants vibe that overwhelms some of Byrne’s work. Although Bush of Ghosts is a conceptual smash hit, I’ve spent as much time actually listening to this record over the years.

Byrne has a deep Web site and has just begun serving up an interesting mp3 stream called Radio DavidByrne.com. You can find a bit more info about The Catherine Wheel here and here, and you can pick up a copy here .

He may not be the best MC or the worst MC, but based on this track I’d say Rodney Smith aka Roots Manuva is the best MC who once rapped about eating cheese on toast and is now about to have a US crossover hit without selling out very much.

There’s a nice chat with Rodney in The Guardian about the new record, Awfully Deep, which came out in the UK January 25th and will be out in the US in April.

You might consider pre-ordering the limited edition of Awfully Deep which contains a second disc of special tracks. Or if you want to buy something today, how about Dub Come Save Me.

Here’s a simple and beautiful track from Bali for a Tuesday morning.

This is a classic 1960’s field recording by David Lewiston taken from Music From The Morning Of The World: The Balinese Gamelan & Ketjak, The Ramayana Monkey Chant. The CD compiles two LPs from the ground-breaking Nonesuch Explorer series first released in 1967. These records gave many people in the West their first opportunity to hear Indonesian music and were hugely influential at the time. Indeed, the contemporary concept of “World Music” (a culturally flattened commoditity for resale to Western consumers) had it’s beginnings in the Nonesuch series.

The CD also includes the mind-bending Ramayana Monkey Chant and seven beautiful gamelan recordings. You can buy it here.

This is one of those tracks that seems like it might be too clever for its own good, but that turns out not to be the case. If there were ever a way to administer the kiss of death to a song as great as Goldfinger, slathering it with downtown snootiness could be the way. Instead trumpeter Douglas and his great chamber jazz band use an affectionate light touch and wistful humor to make this the best version of the song since Howard Devoto gave it the art-school treatment in 1978.

Dave Douglas is so prolific you have to wonder how he finds time to make so many smart choices. You can buy A Thousand Evenings here. The artist’s site is here.

Right then, here we are at tenthousand.org. If you preferred the old look… well, you should have said something before. Say something now in the comments if you like.

A few things are changed; instead of hearing a file by clicking on the title, you can use the “HEAR THIS NOW” button at the bottom of the post. Clicking on the title will now take you to the permanent link for an individual post (which isn’t of much use, but at least now there IS a permanent link).

The new URL for the rss feed is here. Also, the RSS feed now includes the link to the mp3 file, via the same HEAR THIS NOW button. That means you can get all this content without ever visiting the site if you prefer.

Unfortunately, the site is completely broken in IE on a Mac. Fortunately, my stats show that only three people have ever viewed the site in IE on a Mac. You three have my condolences.

Also there are now archives by category. This will acquire utility over time, as the categories fill up. If you have suggestions for additional categories, please chime in. In fact, please chime in with any suggestions, comments, diatribes, feedback, harangues, haiku, what have you… GO!

I’m taking the weekend off from Blogging. See you on the re-up with more music.

Peter Gabriel got a lot of mileage over the years from going

Nyaaaaaaaah… Eeeeeyyyyyeeeeyyyyyuuuhhhh!

and drenching it in reverb. A neat trick, and you’ve got to admit it does sound good. But in this score he did for Marty Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988 he got someone who could do the nyahhhh thing even better: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And he got a boys choir. And every duduk and dumbek player west of the Nile, and took them all into the studio and made a really, really good film score.

You can buy the re-mastered (whatever) version of the CD here. Also very good is the CD Passion Sources which has all the tracks he got his ideas from.

Les Paul can play guitar but Boubacar Traoré can do that and sing as well. He usually composes in the typical Malian pentatonic scale which makes his music sound like The Blues to many ears. Traoré has had a long life of ups and downs, and you can hear it in his voice and in his fingers.

This unbearably poignant ballad comes from his 1997 CD Sa Golo, and was also featured in the film about Traoré’s life, also called Je Chanterai Pour Toi, which has a good soundtrack.

With his creation in the 1930s of the solid-body electric guitar Les Paul, The Wizard of Waukesha, opened the door leading away from Django Reinhardt and towards Jimi Hendrix and Robert Fripp. But in 1947 he created this, the first true multitrack recording, which ultimately begat Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Lee Perry, and The Bomb Squad. Much of what we consider music from 1950 forward would have been impossible without this technology.

Although stunts involving re-recording a musician playing alongside a recording of themselves had been tried earlier by Sidney Bechet and others, Les Paul was the first to record parallel tracks on a single piece of tape in order to have control at a later time of the “mix” of these elements. He also did it all in his home studio, and released these bizarre experiments to great commercial success.

This music is also a celebration of the machine-made aesthetic, flaunting the humanly impossible guitar playing and inviting the listener to follow along into the space age. Some of the main guitar lines here were achieved by playing back the tape at half-speed and recording parts which are then at superhuman speed when the tape is returned to its original time-base.

The 1992 exhaustive box set The Legend and the Legacy is no longer available, but there is a (cheap!) sampler disc from that collection which includes Lover and the amazing How High the Moon, in which Paul applied the same multitracking techniques to Mary Ford’s voice.

From the opening fuzz-guitar stabs to Eugene Record’s closing tenor improv, this has to be one of the most perfect American pop songs of all time. Stunning in it’s vocal performances and perfectly gauged to the delivery format of it’s time (it sounds great on a four-inch transistor radio, which is how I listened to it), the single sky-rocketed to number one on the Billboard Black Singles charts and the British charts at the same time in 1971. As a nine-year-old boy in England, this record taught me the power of musical tragedy and the glory of Soul.

The exhaustive 2004 compilation Complete Chi-Lites on Brunswick 1 is probably more than anyone needs. The Greatest Hits CD has Have You Seen Her and the other most important songs.

The liner notes suggest that the percussion on this track was made by Tuareg women using their bare feet on carpets in a tent in the desert. I have a hard time believing that, but it is a gorgeous track nonetheless, one of many gorgeous tracks on the stupendous compilation Rêves d’ Oasis: Desert Blues 2. The album focusses on ballads of North Africa, particularly the region surrounding the Sahara, and has a wide range of music beautifully sequenced to flow like The Blues.

Volume One in this set also looks like a winner, although it contains more familiar fare like Baaba Maal, Youssou N’Dour, and Ali Farka Toure, while for this second collection the curators cast a wider net and caught some more obscure and unreleased artists in the mix. The Frankfurt-based Network label has a number of excellent two-CD anthologies of music from around the world, all with lavishly produced booklets like this one.

You can buy Desert Blues 2 here or here, and the official info is here.