Davy Graham - Folk, Blues & Beyond (1964) (@256)

For those who follow this blog, it must be notorious for (a) picking each post's subject from recent musical and social events and (b) for its long reaction time for some of these posts. But, you know how it goes. I only have time for 1-2 uploads per week, so sometimes I tend to skip something in favour of something else. So, I am in a position where I have planned at least fifteen posts based on recent events but I can't find the time to upload them.
One of the many events that took me too long to react is the death of one of my favourite guitarists, Davy Graham. Graham is cited as a major influence for artists such as Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, John Martyn, Paul Simon and Jimmy Page. His influence is also apparent in the sound of Fairport Convention and Pentangle. Graham can be also considered as the first western artist that introduced Middle Eastern forms to his music.
Ray Horricks writes in the album's liner notes: "Certainly he is one of the more extraordinary artists that the world of folk has produced: the most original young guitarist in Europe, a gifted, natural arranger and a singer who sings as he feels. Moreover, he is too large a personality for the folk scene to entirely contain, although he is one of its favourite sons. By this I mean that Davy is constantly drawing other musical forms into his own orbit: blues, modern jazz, Indian or Arabic forms, and so on. All have joined the basic folk repertoire he began with, colouring his overall output in a quite remarkable way." And Colin Harper writes in the Mojo's booklet about the 100 Greatest Guitar Albums: "Before Elvis, said Lennon, there was nothing. Well, before Davy Graham - six-stringed alchemist of Indian, Arabic, Elizabethan, Celtic, modern jazz, country blues, Broadway and pretty much everything else - the world of acoustic virtuosity (Julian Bream notwithstanding) was similarly void. Having already notified the post-Lonnie cognoscenti of where it was at with Angi - as if 1962 was the first year of contrapuntal bass lines since Bach - this era- and career- defining album, with muscular bass and drums off-setting the maestro's almost incongruously mannered vocal, arrived at precisely the moment to set the bar for Britain's young, vibrant, Soho-centred 'folk-baroque' movement of Jansch, Renbourn, Harper, Drake et al. And these were high times".
PS. The uploaded version of Folk, Blues & Beyond comes with the famous instrumental Anji as a bonus track.

read also:
Times obituary
Graham's official website
Graham's interview
Check also the fellow blogger Standin' at the Crossroads, who, based on the same sad occasion, has posted some clips from the Servant and from Folk Britannia (here), and uploaded two of Graham's personal albums (Fire in the Soul and After Hours at Hull University) as well as his famous collaboration with Shirley Collins

album review link: here

download link: here (mirrorcreator) and here (rapidshare)

Rev. Martin Luther King - The Great March To Freedom (1963) (@256)

Some days ago, on Jan. 15th, it was the 80th anniversary of Martin Luther King's birthday. Traditionally, it is celebrated in the US every 3rd Monday of January. This year, one day later it is Obama's inauguration; I guess there couldn't be a better match. It is for sure that without King's dignity and courage, without his achievements (which, incredibly, came non-violently although he was continuously provoked) without his vision for a "colour-blind" society, Obama wouldn't have been in the position he is today.
Today's upload is the speech that King gave in Detroit in June 23, 1963; it was during that speech that he first delivered "I Have a Dream". Many parts of this speech were also used during his Lincoln Memorial speech in Washington, some two months later, simply providing a masterpiece of rhetoric.

download link: here

PS. Since The Great March To Freedom was released by "Gordy Records", a subsidiary of Motown, this post could be also considered as a preamble of a post that will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Motown records.

Palestinians III

... or as nuzz explicitly quotes: "So Israel’s incursion into Gaza is “defensive not offensive.” Bollocks!; it’s a Fucking Offensive display of disproportional force."

Max Richter - Blue Notebooks (2004) (@256)

Waltz With Bashir, (watch the uploaded youtube video in the "Palestinias I" post), is not only a tragically up-to-date movie, but also within the best films of 2008. It is a splendid animation which documents the massacre of the Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in 1982. The plot is slowly built up through the attempt of director Ari Folman, who was among the Israeli soldiers that witnessed the massacre, to recollect the events of that period.
The soundtrack of the film is equally exceptional. It has been composed by Max Richter who with each new album establishes his position among the pioneer composers of his generation. Richter has "simply" distorted the rules of classical music by fusing modern elements in it, making him a favourite artist for many indie fans.

This new upload, Richter's best album up to now, showcases his characteristic "post-Classical" (as he defines it) style, which combines his classical, electronic and rock influences. It features readings from Franz Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks and Czesław Miłosz's Hymn of the Pearl and Unattainable Earth. Both readings are carried out by the British actress Tilda Swinton.

album review link: here

download link: here

Palestinians II (reality)

1) The war in Gaza through the diary/blog of a 23-year old Palestinian: gazatoday.

2) The article of William Sieghart, chairman of Forward Thinking (an independent conflict resolution agency), in Times.

"We must adjust our distorted image of Hamas
Gaza is a secular society where people listen to pop music, watch TV and many women walk the streets unveiled"

Last week I was in Gaza. While I was there I met a group of 20 or so police officers who were undergoing a course in conflict management. They were eager to know whether foreigners felt safer since Hamas had taken over the Government? Indeed we did, we told them. Without doubt the past 18 months had seen a comparative calm on the streets of Gaza; no gunmen on the streets, no more kidnappings. They smiled with great pride and waved us goodbye.
Less than a week later all of these men were dead, killed by an Israeli rocket at a graduation ceremony. Were they “dangerous Hamas militant gunmen”? No, they were unarmed police officers, public servants killed not in a “militant training camp” but in the same police station in the middle of Gaza City that had been used by the British, the Israelis and Fatah during their periods of rule there.
This distinction is crucial because while the horrific scenes in Gaza and Israel play themselves out on our television screens, a war of words is being fought that is clouding our understanding of the realities on the ground.
Who or what is Hamas, the movement that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, would like to wipe out as though it were a virus? Why did it win the Palestinian elections and why does it allow rockets to be fired into Israel? The story of Hamas over the past three years reveals how the Israeli, US and UK governments' misunderstanding of this Islamist movement has led us to the brutal and desperate situation that we are in now.
The story begins nearly three years ago when Change and Reform - Hamas's political party - unexpectedly won the first free and fair elections in the Arab world, on a platform of ending endemic corruption and improving the almost non-existent public services in Gaza and the West Bank. Against a divided opposition this ostensibly religious party impressed the predominantly secular community to win with 42 per cent of the vote.
Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them. Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state. It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won't recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world's commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.
In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that. People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.
The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals - doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West. It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people. It has consistently offered a ten-year ceasefire to give breathing space to resolve a conflict that has continued for more than 60 years.
The Bush-Blair response to the Hamas victory in 2006 is the key to today's horror. Instead of accepting the democratically elected Government, they funded an attempt to remove it by force; training and arming groups of Fatah fighters to unseat Hamas militarily and impose a new, unelected government on the Palestinians. Further, 45 Hamas MPs are still being held in Israeli jails.
Six months ago the Israeli Government agreed to an Egyptian- brokered ceasefire with Hamas. In return for a ceasefire, Israel agreed to open the crossing points and allow a free flow of essential supplies in and out of Gaza. The rocket barrages ended but the crossings never fully opened, and the people of Gaza began to starve. This crippling embargo was no reward for peace.
When Westerners ask what is in the mind of Hamas leaders when they order or allow rockets to be fired at Israel they fail to understand the Palestinian position. Two months ago the Israeli Defence Forces broke the ceasefire by entering Gaza and beginning the cycle of killing again. In the Palestinian narrative each round of rocket attacks is a response to Israeli attacks. In the Israeli narrative it is the other way round.
But what does it mean when Mr Barak talks of destroying Hamas? Does it mean killing the 42 per cent of Palestinians who voted for it? Does it mean reoccupying the Gaza strip that Israel withdrew from so painfully three years ago? Or does it mean permanently separating the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, politically and geographically? And for those whose mantra is Israeli security, what sort of threat do the three quarters of a million young people growing up in Gaza with an implacable hatred of those who starve and bomb them pose?
It is said that this conflict is impossible to solve. In fact, it is very simple. The top 1,000 people who run Israel - the politicians, generals and security staff - and the top Palestinian Islamists have never met. Genuine peace will require that these two groups sit down together without preconditions. But the events of the past few days seem to have made this more unlikely than ever. That is the challenge for the new administration in Washington and for its European allies.

The original article here

Palestinians I (fiction based on reality)

Divine Intervention (2002)



Paradise Now (2005)



Waltz With Bashir



Highly recommended further reading: Sharon And My Mother-in-law

Lift To Experience - The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads (2001) (@256)

The Texas JerUSAlem Crossroads...





















Well, apart from the semeiotics of the album's title, do not miss the chance to listen to this obscure classic, a concept album were the biblical/apocalyptic lyrics are combined with Spiritualized-meet-Jeff-Buckley soundscapes.

album review link: here

download link: here

Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Out Of Season (2002) (@256)

Portishead's Third was at the top of my favourite albums for 2008. It was difficult to imagine that a group that remained practically inactive for more than ten years would evolve their sound to release a jaw-dropping modern masterpiece. They indeed gave us an album that although it could be filed under "experimental" through its bleak, dark, perfectionist music, it also sounds so direct, humanised and warm. Very few albums have ever achieved that.

This current upload is the collaboration of Portishead's singer Beth Gibbons with Paul Webb (the bassist of Talk Talk under the pseudonym Rustin Man) which proved that Gibbons could perfectly function under a totally different texture than that of Portishead's. Far away from trip hop, Gibbons and Webb penned a series of songs which drew their heritage mainly from folk, and which let Gibbons's devastating vocals sparkle.

album review link: here

download link: here (linked removed due to a DMCA :-(

Earthbound - The Valley/ Tercera Cancion/ Riverside Song (7'') (1999) (@256)

The new Sonik issue comes with a premium 7'' Earthbound single. It comes as a preview for their new album La Guerra Final, but for a vinylholic like me, it was also a great Christmas present as well.
Their debut release was, again, a premium 7'', given with the Fractal Press mag, back in 1999, which revealed their trademark Calexico-meet-Kyuss sound.

download link: here

Birthday Party - Live in Athens, Sporting, Sep. 17,1982

Harold Pinter passed away on Dec. 24, 2008. He had written twenty-nine plays among which The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal marked the second half of the 20th century. His works comprise an anatomy of the contemporary British society. Pinter's influence as a playwright is enormous; very important figures such as Sam Shepard and David Mamet have been strongly influenced by him. He has also worked as a screenwriter for movies such as The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007), while he is also responsible for adapting his aforementioned plays. He had also been an actor, director and poet.
Pinter was also a vigorous political activist; an artist that was living, breathing, realising and outspeaking the problems of the society of which his was a member. In 2005, in his acceptance speech, given from a wheelchair, for the Nobel price award for literature, he strongly attacked the US foreign policy arguing that "the United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War" and continued his speech giving examples. Later on, for the same subject, in a phrase full of irony regarding the respective policy of the media, he said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Of course, his Nobel speech was only a tiny part of his overall attitude.
During the 80's, his was constantly criticizing Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, while in 1999 he strongly opposed the involvement of the United Nations in the war in Kosovo. As for the invasion in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, he cited Tony Blair and George W. Bush as mass murderers and war criminals.

Check also:
haroldpinter.org
Harold Pinter (wiki)
Guardian's obituary
Guardian's pictures

Pinter's Nobel speech



Today's upload offers a bootleg recording of Nick Cave's group before the Bad Seeds, the Birthday Party, the name of which many claim that pays homage to Pinter's famous play. Their sound, a disturbing blend of post-punk and industrial, is, of course, some thousand miles away from what a contemporary fan of the Bad Seeds expects to listen to. This concert documents a group with a primitive, dirty sound, equally violent and poetic with a self-destructive frontman howling to conjure his demons, provoking the audience to follow him. It is interesting to note that this was one of the very first concerts given in Greece by western rock artists; from what we can hear, the audience that attended were a little bit "unprepared" for such a sonic and visual assault...
That night, the Birthday Party were: Nick Cave (vocals), Rowland S. Howard (guitar), Tracy Pew (bass), Mick Harvey (drums), Jim Thirlwell (aka Foetus) (saxophone)

Tracklisting:
01-Hamlet Pow Pow Pow
02-Sonny's Burning
03-6'' Gold Blade
04-Deep In The Woods
05-Dim Locator
06-Fears Of Gun
07-Still Burning
08-Release The Bats
09-She's Hit
10-Funhouse
11-Junkyard
12-Loose

download link: here