New season, new blog home

Starting Tuesday, September 2nd, we Signalers will be abandoning this here blog for a new home on the CBC Radio 2 web site. Please adjust your bookmarks to:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/thesignal/

Hope to see you over there.

Summer Profiles in the ides of August

 

The Weekend of August 15th- WINNIPEG

August 22nd – Calgary & Edmonton

August 29th – The East Coast

 

enjoy!

Props in The Globe and Mail

Check out this article

July 25, 26, 27 on The Signal

The Signal with Odario Williams – Friday July 25, 2008

Winnipeg ex-pat and Hip Hop artist Odario Williams is back as guest host tonight on The Signal. Tonight in concert the electronic madness of HOLY FUCK. There will also be brand new tracks by Tanya Tagaq, School of Language, Mr. Scruff and Parenthetical Girls.

 

 

 

The Signal with Odario Williams – Saturday, July 26, 2008

Tonight Odario Williams guest hosts The Signal. In concert the fresh electronica of Vancouver’s The Hermit. Odario will also take the new Brendan Canning CD for a spin, sampling 5 offbeat tracks. Vancouver’s piano driven pop composer Jason Zumpano will premiere a new track and you will also hear music from Ratatat, Tippy Agogo and Kathleen McLean.

 

 

The Signal with Pat Carrabré- Sunday July 27, 2008

Tonight Pat features a concert by Pulitzer prize winning composer George Crumb including the stunning composition Black Angels. All night long the words will flow, inspired by the beat poets Pat has dug up a wide range of pieces incorporating the spoken word. You’ll hear words and music from Montreal’s D. Kimm, Laurie Anderson, Winnipeg’s Poor Tree, Halifax’s Buck 65 and a work inspired by the poetry of Leonard Cohen by composer Kelly- Marie Murphy. Get out your duo-tangs and pencils.

 

 

 

Lazy, hazy, listening days…

Things are quiet at work these days — half of CBC radio music seem to be on holidays — the rest of us working stiffs are working, but are on summer mode.  Why is it that work in the summer seems…well….like less work, less stressful?  There seem to be buckets more time to see friends, go out..blah, blah, blah.  Summer music is different too.  What’s on my ipod is funkier, fun, and pretty soulful.  The new Jamie Lidell CD – called Jim is a killer summer record.  Produced by Gonzales (Feist’s producer) it’s a pop/soul record with a tons of hooks with the tongue planted firmly in the cheek.  A load of fun.  

When night gets a little quieter I’m listening to Cinematic Orchestra’s latest live album (Live at Royal Albert Hall)  big strings, very filmic, moving music.  There’s a new Bill Frisell record that I’m liking a lot – 2 discs, lots of live recording.  Called History, Mystery, it’s making the rounds at my house.

So what are you listening to this summer?  Drop a comment and let’s make a list of great new music – now that it seems we have a little more time to actually listen…..

Stay cool,

Laurie

On The Signal July 18, 19, 20th

The Signal with Odario Williams – Friday July 18, 2008

Winnipeg ex-pat and Hip Hop artist Odario Williams guest hosts The Signal tonight. In concert Canadian ex-pat-now living in the UK, electronic whiz kid Caribou mines 60’s pop on stage at Lee’s Palace in Toronto. Odario also samples the earth’s elements with tracks from Iceland’s Mum, The Penderecki String Quartet, David Mott and Veda Hille.

The Signal with Odario Williams – Saturday, July 19, 2008

Tonight Odario Williams once again takes the mic while Pat Carrabré is away. Get out your opera glasses because in hour two of The Signal Odario hands things over to a dishwashing epic musical by Canadian songstress Lullaby Baxter: Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Heartbreak, betrayal, paranoia and Palmolive— life, you are soaking in it. There will also be music from Regina Spektor, Socalled, Mark Templeton and Clogs.

The Signal with Pat Carrabré- Sunday July 20, 2008

Tonight Pat is back and samples a few pieces from the soundtrack to Deepa Mehta’s film ” WATER” by composer Michael Danna. Pat also celebrates the belated 60th birthday of composer Marjan Mozetich with a concert featuring musicians Gisèle Dalbec, Wolf Tormann, Donelda Gartshore and more. Music also pays tribute this evening to the late Canadian composer John Weinzweig with his Divertimento performed by flutist Robert Cram.

JULY 11, 12, 13

The Signal with Pat Carrabré- Friday July 11, 2008

Tonight on the Signal Pat explores the life work of one of our premier avant garde electronic musicians- Montrealer Mitchell Akiyama. Have your Dance tickets at the ready because in concert this evening Pat features the beats and rhymes of Toronto via Winnipeg’s Grand Analog. Pat will also sample new music from Yellow 6, Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra, and The Orb.

 

 

The Signal with Pat Carrabré – Saturday, July 12, 2008

Tonight The Signal offers up an evening of contrasts. In concert the Toronto Symphony Orchestra present the powerful Seht Die Sonne by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. This piece is described as an extravagant and glittering piece on a grand scale. On the flip side Pat will also sample a number of tracks from the Icelandic iconoclast Mugison’s  new CD Mugiboogie. Tonight: free your mind and your tush will follow.

 

 

The Signal with Pat Carrabré – Sunday, July 13, 2008

The great Canadian composer R. Murray Shafer is having a birthday- his 75^th, next Friday. This is the guy who basically kick started new classical music in Canada. So pull out the streamers, blow up the balloons, and order up an ice cream cake.  Not only will Pat be playing some of R. Murray’s greatest hits but also music inspired by the composer’s greatest passion- the environment. Music from Tunng, the sound track to An Inconvenient Truth and 7 year old Penn Poutanen’s classic “Sharky” .

Any Creative Person is a Criminal!

R. Murray Schafer is Canada’s most widely known and respected composer. He’s been awarded the Glenn Gould Prize, the Walter Carsen Prize and the Molson Prize. On Friday, July 18th he turns 75. On Sunday night’s show we’ll have a little birthday party for him and play four pieces: “Tapio for Alphorn with Echoing Instruments” (from Wolf Music), Threnody, and String Quartets #3 and #9. Here’s a clip about one of his site-specific pieces that includes a large children’s choir.

 

 

 

 

We’re also including an excerpt from an interview I did with Murray when he was in Winnipeg last February. Murray has always been outspoken and during that interview he talked about how creative people exist someplace outside the laws of society. (I’ll paraphrase):

 

“Any creative person is a criminal – outside of society. Composers are the least respected, the least paid, the most ignored people in the country.”

 

Murray has been active as a composer, as an educator and as an environmental activist – especially for the sound environment. Despite his success on so many levels he’s had to fight to make a go of it. Murray started his own publishing company after losing control of some early books on music education, when they were sub-published out of the country. Just because he had written the books, the law didn’t fully protect his rights.

 

Late on Friday night, we’ll play a piece by Steinski, who’s been both political and outside society in his work. Not much of his material is available on CD, because he sampled freely from copyright material – but never legally cleared his sources.

 

Brazilian sensation Gilberto Gil is another activist-artist. He was jailed by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1969, but now sits as the country’s Minister of Culture. His new album Banda Larga Cordel celebrates broadband technology. Gilberto, who is a staunch leftist, hopes this new technology will help to liberate people. One of his goals is to establish a freely downloadable site for Brazilian music. Gilberto’s countryman, DJ Dolores titled his newest CD 1 Real – a little word play on Brazil’s currency. He just wants to get paid for his work.

 

I’m not sure how musicians are going to make these new technologies pay, but we should all be glad that creative people are still pushing the envelope – to bring us new ideas and great music.

 

Here’s the link I promised to Bel singing Echinacea:

 

 

The JULY 4th Weekend on The Signal

-

The Signal with Pat Carrabré- Friday July 4, 2008

This show is all about “home” and all that word inspires. Tonight on the Signal Pat takes an in depth listen to the work of the experimental ground breaking composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer, director: Meredith Monk. In concert tonight Pat listens in on Toronto’s multi talented Royal Wood, in session. But wait there is more:  tracks from Ann Southam, Jocelyn Morlock, Fond of Tigers, CocoRosie, the Parsley Sound and much more.

 

 

The Signal with Pat Carrabré – Saturday, July 5, 2008

Tonight Pat puts a phenomenal new disc by Jazz multi instrumentalists Jean Martin & Colin Fisher into high rotation sampling five tracks. In concert from Winnipeg the incomparable Kiran Ahluwalia joins forces with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in a word: stirring. Pat will also spin music by the likes of Peaches, The Notwist and more. 

 

 

The Signal with Pat Carrabré – Sunday, July 6, 2008

Olivier Messiaen would have been 100 this year. He was also KOO-KOO for birds, he spend much of his adult life transcribing their songs. This Sunday night on The Signal Pat hands all three hours over to Halifax and The Scotia Festival’s presentation of the seven “books” of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds). Halifax’s Simon Docking will perform this epic work and CBC’s Peter Togni will narrate Messiaen’s poetry.

 This work is described as: “Some of the most beautifully evocative music for solo piano ever penned”

 

Home Sweet Home

Some musicians are like itinerant farm workers or traveling salesmen. They have to hit the road to make a living. So thoughts of home are important. When you’re away, thinking about home can be your happy place, the one that keeps you going. When you finally make it home, it can give the grounding that you need to let you’re imagination run free and be creative.

 

For Jocelyn Morlock, the idea for Bird in the Tangled Sky flew into her mind when she looked out the window where she composes in Vancouver. It was the birds flitting through the telephone wires. The inspiration for New Era Dance by Aaron Jay Kernis came from the energy of his neighbourhood in New York City. It’s very urban with sirens and gun shots – that can be the downside of big city living – but the overall feel is high energy and fun. I remember standing on the corner of 5^th Avenue and 42^nd Street when I lived in New York. The mass of humanity buzzing around always pumped up my energy level.

 

Victoria’s Beast and Superbeasts bring love to life in “If I Was A House.” Just don’t threaten to leave, because the possessive side of that structure can be scary. On the lighter side, I Am Robot and Proud let’s you make music using the houses on his webpage. I also thought it was pretty funny to hear the Strung Out String Quartet do an unplugged version of Arcade Fire’s “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out).”

The home you grow up in can have a huge impact on the kind of music you make when you’re older. You can really hear the self-confident country boy in Royal Wood’s studio session. He even phoned in to tell us how great it was to grow up on a farm – not even a town, just a rural route. In “We Dreamt of Houses,” The Awkward Stage makes a song for the insecure little person hiding inside each of us. And then there’s CocoRosie. A stranger childhood I can’t imagine. Their mother was on the compulsive side – moving them back and forth across the country – for no real reason. Their father was an itinerant teacher who dragged them along on his peyote hunts each summer. The sisters lost track of each other when the parents split and the rebellious years took over, but they hooked up again in Paris and recorded their first album in a bathroom.

 

The romantic idea of the tortured genius struggling to create is still a big part of our collective concept of what makes important art. I can appreciate that and we celebrate it on The Signal, but I’m glad I can go home and feel the warmth of family in my happy place.

 

I also promised a link to The Violet Archers (and here’s a link to “the” Violet Archer.)

 

Remix-Reposted!

 

For the last year or so I’ve been wondering what the next step is beyond post-modernism. If that hasn’t been the burning question on your mind, I can’t blame you. I think that most people don’t even notice it any more. The easy availability of digital copies of almost everything has made the creation of new meaning from artistic artifacts that already exist part of our everyday life.

In contemporary music, this has been going on since the late 70s. Luciano Berio’s amazing tour-de-force, his “Sinfonia,” is a great example and on the other side of the spectrum is John Oswald’s Plunderphonics. He was obviously an early adopter on the non-classical side and he paid for that, when the industry didn’t really know how to deal with what he had created – and chose to make him take it off the market. Since then, the whole DJ genre has evolved, based on using records that already exist, as a way of creating new music in a new context.

Remixing and re-making is nothing new, but it just seemed to hit me when I was working my way through the music for this weekend’s shows. There’s a maturity and depth to some of these musicians who aren’t just using bits and pieces that already exist, but are building the foundation of their craft on this idea of renovating art. Early on Friday night, we’ll hear Tortoise and Bonnie Prince Billy doing Elton John’s “Daniel” and right afterwards, its Margaret Leng Tan’s quirky version of “Eleanor Rigby.” They’re just a warm-up for Four Tet and his awesome re-thinking of Caribou’s “Melody Day.”

But the real shocker for me was learning that the Montreal band Misteur Valaire are releasing their CDs under The Creative Commons Copyright license. This is a whole new way of thinking about what we create. It goes way beyond so called “fair use” or peer-to-peer sharing. It assumes that we can make use of things that already exist, while it continues to recognize the role of the original creator. Up to this point, most remixing has been done in a rigidly controlled environment, often to give new life to music that’s already sold itself silly in the market. The results can be great, like Psapp’s take on Astrud Gilberto’s “Bim Bom” from the new Verve Remixed 4, that’ll show up in the first hour of Saturday’s show. But think about Aphex Twin’s famous 26 Mixes For Cash. At that point, the industry was chasing him all over the place, because an Aphex Twin remix had the potential to rejuvenate a career with the same kind of certainty that appearing in a Quentin Tarantino movie would for an overexposed actor.

In the end it’s probably all about the money – as usual. Our consumer culture has given us access to the whole world of art. All we have to do is watch the commercials and put up with the banner ads. But as we move into the new on-demand world, somebody has to come up with a new way of making sure the artists get paid. For their part, artists have to learn to accept that once they’ve finished their creation that it might take on a life of its own. Think about the Rolling Stone’s iconic anthem “Satisfaction.” How many times have you heard it used to sell stuff on TV? On the other hand, listen to Prince’s take on Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” or Stina Nordenstam’s re-think of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” For me, they’re in the same league with Glenn Gould’s interpretations of Bach. Blasphemy? Maybe, but they all present compelling artistic statements that reflect the “remixing” artist as much or more than they do the originals.

There are still lots of new original voices appearing in our world – despite what we might think after a particularly bad run of TV shows. I’ll just give one example. CocoRosie have a new single out for download and it’ll kick the show off on Saturday night. But this idea of renovating music that already exists is appealing. It’s no different aesthetically than taking an old house with good bones and completely overhauling it, so you can have a to-die-for bathroom or kitchen. I might not do it to a Frank Lloyd Wright original, but you have to be a pretty special person to live in a house that unique anyway.

So I welcome the remixers. They’ve already taken on classics like Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and Handel’s “Messiah.” I think this new “genre” is just beginning to spread its wings.