★Smithsonian Folkways
Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas
2024 stock. On this one-of-a-kind record, Jim Nollman showcases his experiments with "interspecies communication." Using a variety of instruments and vocalizations, Nollman improvises with turkeys, wolves, and orcas. The interactions are sometimes funny, often surprising, and always fascinating. The liner notes include essays by Nollman on his environmental theories and experiences trying to communicate with animals.
Outer Space
2024 stock. "Ingenious use of echo, artificial reverberation and electronic alterations gives the music in this category a weird, spooky futuristic, 'out of this world' quality, well-suited to super-natural happenings of any kind. Piano, drums and electronic instruments are used to achieve the strange atmosphere and spatial sounds." Vaclav Nelhybel crafts a supernatural world, describing nebulae, meteors, star clusters and craters on Mars with sounds natural and manipulated to tell the story of …
Indeterminacy: New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental And Electronic
2024 stock. Originally issued in 1959 on Smithsonian Folkways, the initial idea for Indeterminacy came from avant-garde pianist, David Tudor, who suggested that John Cage give a lecture that was simply the telling of stories. Cage did this in Brussels in September 1958. For this lecture Cage simply stood in front of an audience and told 30 stories without musical accompaniment. Upon returning to the States in 1959, Cage decided to record the stories, but this time with the musical accompaniment …
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In 1948, Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a self-proclaimed mandate to record the sounds of the entire world. From the Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Folkways documented the audible nooks and crannies of existence on hundreds of LPs produced by field recordists, scientists, and experimentalists probing the margins of the human soundscape. Seventy-five years later, electronic music duo Matmos have diced, looped, stretched, and recontextualized th…
Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958–1971
Big Tip! In the 1950s and 60s, the blues was the dominant form of Black vernacular music throughout Texas and the surrounding areas. In segregated neighborhoods, community members gathered in saloons, dancehalls, and each other’s homes to hear their neighbors sing their stories of sorrow, heartbreak, jubilation, and triumph. Robert “Mack” McCormick, an academically untrained but fanatical devotee of the blues, stepped into this world and became one of its most devout advocates and documentarians…
Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys
Dom Flemons presents Black Cowboys pays tribute to the music, culture, and the complex history of the golden era of the Wild West. In this single volume of music, the first of its kind, Flemons explores and re-analyzes this important part of our American identity. The songs and poems featured on the album take the listener on an illuminating journey from the trails to the rails of the Old West. This century-old story follows the footsteps of the thousands of African American pioneers who helped …