Sia

Recently I started to update my list of best-liked TV series.  Friends and relatives always seem to be asking.  One of the most firmly-entrenched entries would have to be HBO's Six Feet Under, and I may well watch it again, perhaps when its ten-year-old anniversary occurs next year.  In contemplating this, the music of Sia came to mind.  Here, for old times' sake and for anyone who hasn't heard this before, is her "Breath Me" that was featured on the Six Feet Under soundtrack:


And here's another of my favorite performances, despite Sia's protestation about her voice:

Puddles the Clown - Puddles Pity Party

Spent a good deal of weekend time watching videos of Big Mike Greier, mostly covering pop songs in his sad-clown seven-foot-tall near-operatic-voice lonely-guy cabaret style of performance art.

 


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Low Rider

Friend Herm reminds me of this utterly terrific-ness from days past ...

Chromecast and V.J.

Just installed a Chromecast device on my TV, along with the requisite Google Cast extension for my MacBook Pro's Chrome browser.  Since my primary purpose was to play YouTube music videos, I cranked up one of my favorites for a test, Valerie June's year-old recording at the Seattle KEXP (a great public radio station, by the way) studio:

The video quality was excellent on the HDTV, even though I only used the middling quality option in the Google Cast settings.  The audio, likewise, was decent, running through an attached ZVOK.

I'm not so interested anymore in watching vids like this on tiny screens. At least use good headphones.

Lost On The River, Coming Soon

Coming in November is this album of twenty tracks with previously-unreleased Bob Dylan lyrics from 1967, the time of the original Basement Tapes. Here is an explanatory quote from the album website:

Produced by T Bone Burnett, Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes was written and performed in creative collaboration by Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens, Taylor Goldsmith, Jim James and Marcus Mumford. The artists and Burnett gathered in Capitol Studios in March to write and create music for a treasure trove of recently discovered lyrics handwritten by Bob Dylan in 1967 during the period that generated the recording of the legendary Basement Tapes.

And here is a video of one of the tracks, "Nothing To It", displaying Dylan's actual handwritten lyrics.

The Golden Age

A connection string:  Max Richter > Yoann Lemoine >\; William Gedney.  Or whatever sequence you want.

Woodkid (aka Yoann Lemoine) just released this video of his homage to William Gedney, a fascinating photographer who lived mostly in obscurity but was championed by the likes of Diane Arbus.  Gedney, whose street photography I have admired for years (and I have discussed on my photography blog), died of AIDS in 1989.  Woodkid -- whose In The Golden Age album and Iron EP -- occupy favored positions in my music library, does a remix of a track from another of my favorite composers (Max Richter's "Embers" from his Memoryhouse album).

Emmys, Oh My ...

Veering off topic here.  Not that the Emmys had all that much credibility (with me, anyway) before, but where was the nomination for Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black? Or Aden Young in Rectify, or Allison Tolman in Fargo, for that matter?

Back to music soon, where things are pretty much as screwed up there, too.