It's just too much work for too little sound. | | | | Ace of bass: Jaco Pastorius in Rome, Italy, 1986.
(Luciano Viti/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | "It's just too much work for too little sound."
| | | | | | rantnrave:// An Englishman named JAMES ERRINGTON has spent the past three years making mixtapes of music and recorded sound from (nearly) every year going back to 1853—the year that ÉDOUARD-LÉON SCOTT DE MARTINVILLE, a French printer and bookseller, built the first version of his phonoautogram, the earliest known device for capturing sound. The oldest sounds on Errington's first CENTURIES OF SOUND podcast (it's also a radio show), which covers the years 1853–60, are recordings of guitar notes and a human voice, which the combination of crude mid-19th century technology and the passage of time has rendered indecipherable. They sound like radio static or a previously undiscovered KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN composition (at least for now; there's always the chance that, as our own technology improves, we'll eventually be able to recover the original sounds). The first recognizable sounds we have at the moment are notes played on a cornet in December 1857. They may not rival what LOUIS ARMSTRONG would eventually do but they are, in their own way, more thrilling. How often do you stop and think about the strange fact that someone can play a note on a musical instrument and someone else can hear that same note a minute later and 30 feet away (never mind a century later and 12,000 miles away)? And that there was a time, less than two centuries ago, when that wasn't possible? No singles, no albums, no MP3s, no podcasts, no SOUNDCLOUD, no recordings of JOHN COLTRANE, no DRAKE, no POST MALONE. No arguments about whether it makes more sense to drop albums continuously like GUCCI MANE or to wait years like FRANK OCEAN. After covering the years 1853–88 in three short mixes, with gaps because there's literally no sound available for some years, Errington began devoting his monthly podcasts to individual years starting with 1889. The pickings are still thin even then; the 11 minutes be recovers from the final year of the 1880s include JOHANNES BRAHMS playing piano and the first known recording of an American president, BENJAMIN HARRISON. And then, year by year in historical time and month by month in podcast time, CENTURIES OF SOUND shepherds our ears through the development of recording technology, the beginnings of a recorded music industry and a steady march of musical styles: opera, brass bands, ragtime, brass bands, Vaudeville, British music hall and, as we move our way through the 1910s, the jazz explosion and the roots of recorded blues. This month's mix, featuring music recorded exactly 100 years ago, features the final recordings of pioneering jazz bandleader JAMES REESE EUROPE, who died at age 39 that year when a bandmate stabbed him with a pen knife; the ORIGINAL DIXIELAND JAZZ BAND; the JOSEPH C. SMITH ORCHESTRA's astonishing recording of W.C. HANDY's "YELLOW DOG BLUES" (featuring the "laughing" trombone of HARRY RADERMAN), and much much more. As with all the mixes, there's also contemporary non-musical audio and well-researched notes that place the year and the audio in context. A phenomenal job of curation and research, and an A-plus use of this thing we call the internet... A huge kudos also to writer NATALIE WEINER, who's nearing the end of her 1959 PROJECT, a day-by-day diary of that year, blogged in real time. On Nov. 9, 1959, for example, WAYNE SHORTER recorded his debut album in New York; the next day he recorded with ART BLAKEY & THE JAZZ MESSENGERS for the first time. Another heroic feat of research and context... DRAKE booed at TYLER, THE CREATOR's CAMP FLOG GNAW fest in Los Angeles, presumably for the crime of noit being FRANK OCEAN, and Tyler is NOT HAVING IT... Chicago rapper LIL REESE in critical condition after a shooting Monday afternoon... RIP BAD AZZ. | | | - Matty Karas, curator | | | |  | Trapital | | The president of SoundCloud talks about the streaming company's business model, how it compares to a tech accelerator, SoundCloud's growth in the Middle East, SoundCloud rap, and what sets the company apart from its competitors. | | | |  | Music Business Worldwide | | In2une founder Dale Connone tells us about the company's history, successes, global expansion plans now that it's a part of Kobalt. | | | |  | The Walrus | | My songwriting students pen misogynistic lyrics. But the music industry tells them that's okay. | | | |  | The New York Times | | The 35-year-old Swede has worked closely with Ryan Coogler and Donald Glover. Up next: the score for the "Star Wars" series "The Mandalorian." | | | |  | Centuries of Sound | | When we last heard from band leader James Reece Europe in 1914, he was taking his all-black orchestra to Carnegie Hall and accompanying Irene and Vernon Castle as they performed the foxtrot to high society. Of course, since 1914, a lot has changed. Jazz has swept ragtime – even the hottest varieties of it – from the scene, and America has been to war in Europe. | | | |  | The Daily Beast | | AMI exec Dylan Howard proposed setting up a shell company to hide the payments for a TV series about the accused pedophile. | | | |  | The New Yorker | | Toward the start of a 1993 recording of "Proud Mary," Tina Turner--who, by then, had been performing the number for decades, across the globe-gives a charismatic, gently teasing forecast of the song to come. | | | |  | Internet Archive | | Imagine if your favorite song or nostalgic recording from childhood was lost forever. This could be the fate of hundreds of thousands of audio files stored on vinyl, except that the Internet Archive is now expanding its digitization project to include LPs. | | | |  | The Atlantic | | Unmet hype created a viral clash between Drake and the audience at Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, but it might just work in his favor. | | | |  | Complex | | We survived Astroworld 2019 with a little help from Megan Thee Stallion, Bun B, Don Toliver, Slim Thug, Maxo Kream, Lil Keke, Paul Wall, and more. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | In their first joint interview in decades, Chris and Rich Robinson look forward and back for their upcoming 30th anniversary Shake Your Money Maker tour. | | | |  | VICE | | Beyoncé, Solange, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, and Rihanna released provocative, forward-thinking albums during the rise of the Trump candidacy, solidifying Black music's legacy as protest music. | | | |  | Consequence of Sound | | The tracks we leaned on during a decade of heartbreak and devastation. | | | | | The New York Times | | Netflix's "Rhythm + Flow" is the most recent example of the reality-TV business trying to get into the hip-hop business. | | | |  | Variety | | Music television is back: Major label-owned music video platform Vevo is launching a series of linear channels for leanback viewing on Pluto TV, the ad-supported video service that got acquired by Viacom earlier this year. A first channel, dubbed Vevo Pop, will launch on November 12; additional channels, including a holiday-themed station, are expected to go live in the coming weeks. | | | |  | HipHopDX | | Quality vs. quantity in Hip Hop. | | | |  | Longreads | | Raised in a school bus by itinerant hippie parents, with one foot in Mexico and one in the US, the singer blossomed into her true multicultural self in bilingual Montreal. | | | |  | Hollywood Reporter | | Six of this year's best doc contenders center on top artists from David Crosby to Linda Ronstadt and the behind-the-scenes locales that illuminated their stardom like The Apollo and Blue Note Records. | | | |  | Socially Aware Blog | | For the last twenty years, the music industry has been in a pitched battle to combat unauthorized downloading of music. Initially, the industry focused on filing lawsuits to shut down services that offered peer-to-peer or similar platforms, such as Napster, Aimster and Grokster. | | | |  | Vulture | | Before eternally horny theater kid Ariana Grande embarked on the final leg of her Sweetener tour last week, she let fans know to expect something a little different this time around. "pls have so much fun and sing your hearts out to christmas n chill bc no one on earth bought it or has heard it or will know what's happening," she tweeted. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | Settle in for a very long, epic doom metal ride. From "A Pyrrhic Existence," out now on Season of Mist. | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group | | |
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