¡¡  FREE PBR WHAT? !!

As part of the Rhoda series, I wanted to reach out to friends from varying musical backgrounds. This particular song features a long time collaborator and friend of vosotros- Mike Gao. I have learned so much from Mike…he is so creative, using the computer like an instrument. We began sending tracks back and forth, adding and subtracting elements, boiling down ideas until the final product emerged. The trio of drums featured throughout the song are called batá, ceremonial instruments of the Lukumí, recorded in 2007 during the Quiet Orchestra sessions. I hope you enjoy I thought There’d be Lions (First Follower).

gabe

(released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

enter your email for a free download ::

vosotros

written, recorded, and produced by Mike Gao and Gabe Noel. masteted by john wood.

This is the second in a series of five songs – released weekly – culminating in an upcoming EP entitled vosotros presents: Rhoda.

(week one)

Willoughby

Mia Doi Todd (with Michel Gondry on drums & Gabe Noel on bass)

Ja Prawn (the band formerly known as Everybody)

Shoulda  (Charles Altura, Jody Giachello, Zach Harmon, Gabe Noel)

more photos on facebook + flickr

]]> http://www.vosotros.com/2010/02/24/photos-from-freak-city-2-18-10/feed/ 0 http://www.vosotros.com/2010/02/22/new-farmer-feat-mia-doi-todd/ http://www.vosotros.com/2010/02/22/new-farmer-feat-mia-doi-todd/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:01:30 +0000 admin http://www.vosotros.com/?p=1967

About a month ago, John gave me an album entitled Follow The Music: A Commemorative Sampler of Elektra’s Pre-Rock Era. Essentially a collection of folk music, I quickly became enamored with a number of different elements of these recordings. The intentional: the simple forms of the songs, the directness of the lyrical meaning. As well as the elements inherent of the time period in which they were recorded: The fuzzy, consonant-shy vocal sonority, the time constraints of recording vinyl, the hiss and scratch of vintage technology. Using all these elements as criterion for the composition, I began. This simple song encapsulates an entire relationship in three and one half minutes, and features one of Los Angeles’ most creative musicians, Mia Doi Todd.

I hope you enjoy “New Farmer”.

gabe

(released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

enter your email for a free download ::

vosotros

Mia Doi Todd- Vocals
Rob Hardt- Flutes
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson- Viola
Marcel Camargo- Guitar
Larry Goldings- Celeste
Nat Mcintosh- Tuba
Gabe Noel- Programing

written, recorded, and mixed by Gabe Noel. mastered by Nate Wood.

artwork courtesy of Allison Grant.

This is the first in a series of five songs – released weekly – culminating in an upcoming EP entitled vosotros presents: Rhoda.

1. Mooey Moobau – All Murmur Of Our Mothers’ Waters // Live Bloody Live  (link)
2. Headlight (link)
3. Mooey Moobau (link)
4. Restarvant (link)

All Murmur Of Our Mothers’ Waters // Live Bloody Live is available now.  The physical release is limited to 81 handmade, numbered copies.  Order now from the vosotros shop.

Or buy it digitally from:  Amazon :: iTunes :: Waxpoetics

“Trap Door” from All Murmur Of Our Mothers’ Waters // Live Bloody Live (vos008, 2010)

Stop.

These two albums are like nothing else you’ve heard.

They are overflowing with poetry and pathological stuttering.

They are laden with natural speech rhythms and melodies, intuitively blurted by some of L.A.’s avant-jazz heavyweights.

They are the sound of the 21st century finally breaking its leash. They were made by someone named Mooey Moobau, whose real name is Joseph Tepperman.

He has a day job doing experiments on speech.

He once published a serious research paper about automatic sarcasm detection.

He hears abstract sequences of phonetic sounds come to him like whispers from Old English spirits.

He sings his live shows to these sounds as he realtime cassette edits them, rocking the pause button.

He also plays trombone like Eric Dolphy played clarinet: verbally.

He’s done this verbose tromboning with lots of different people from L.A. – most often Killsonic.

And it is mostly Killsonic who back up Mooey Moobau’s jagged live shows.

And it was also mostly they who accompanied him on his first album.

And All Murmur Of Our Mothers’ Waters is the title of that album.

And that title refers to the place we are in before we are born, insofar as it is a place.

It came out in 2008, and is included here as Disc 1.

Live Bloody Live is its companion piece, Disc 2.

It is a live album among live albums, and it is not really a live album at all.

It was recorded all over Los Angeles over 2 years, at 12 venues on 16 dates, with 19 musicians.

It sounds like violas.

Like violas that bleed all over pianos.

Like bloodied pianos that, with their many keys, aren’t too different from sputtering computers.

Like computers that sputter and bubble until they start to sound like a gang of epileptic drummers.

Like epileptic drummers who exhaust themselves trying to breathe under layers and layers of applause.

It is as ambitious as it is disorienting.

It is a document of a truly shameless performer.

It is what you have been missing, whether you’ve seen Mooey Moobau live or not.

i made the new mooey moobau album by cutting up recordings of all of my live shows so far. or almost all of them. from the last 2 years.

it is called “Live Bloody Live” and my friends at Vosotros are putting it out an…d it sounds like a big messy birthday cake, with maraschino cherries and three kinds of frosting and rum and pieces of raw cacao baked into it. truly rewriting the songs from scratch. every possible instrument, every possible arrangement – all at once.

almost all 18 or so people who played on it will be there for this show. we are going to replicate the cutting-up i did with a computer at home, but live! in front of an audience! with iPods and CD players and even cassettes. imagine the massive roving mists of delay and orchestrated glitch possible…

my dreamy electronics friend Headlight will also play a set, and so will an excellent band i have only just recently heard for the first: they are called Restavrant. with a ‘v’, like in ancient rome.

Come celebrate the release of Mooey Moobau’s “Live Bloody Live” – a live mashup album recorded all over Los Angeles over 2 years, at 12 venues on 16 dates, with 19 musicians. Most of those musicians will be performing live with Mooey Moobau. At this show. On this night.

A historical moment at a historical monument.

Also performing: Restavrant & Headlight (with DJ sets by vosotros)

This Saturday – Feb 20th @ HM 157 (3110 N Broadway 90031)

$5. Doors at 8. Music at 9. Cash bar.

http://www.myspace.com/mooeymoobau
http://www.myspace.com/restaurantmusic
http://www.myspace.com/inheadlights

http://www.myspace.com/hm157

Free with Facebook RSVP

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=301252057607

VOLUME 1
Sounds Like A Movie – These Palms
They Marry – Mi & L’Au
Wetter – Julian Shah-Taylor
To The Moon – Fort King
Valentines Mix 1 – The Pity Party
Tonight (Back To My Place) – Learning Music
Innuendos – howardAmb
Light Lost – Seasons
Modern Lust – Veil Veil Vanish
If I Get You That Surgery – Random Patterns
The Cat Scratches – Forest Of Tongue
I Fell – Sandra Sarra
Cheer Up Blue – Generous Alzir

Download Volumes 1, 2, and 3 HERE.

(via LA Record)

French producer and 7X7 series alum Fulgeance will be visiting L.A. and O.C. (at Low End and the Crosby) next week and he’s given us an exclusive mix (featuring Brainfeeder and Friends of Friends friends like Tokimonsta and Shlohmo as well as tracks from Vosotros’ The Years album!) plus his own work and a great sampling of artists on his Musique Large label, too! Thanks to Fulgeance for this and watch for his interview with us online soon—and in print now!

Download The Mix

The final Learning Music album of season two is available now.  For their 24th release, they invited some special guests into the studio, including Gabe Noel on bass/guitar and Mike Green on drums.  TendaLoin also produced a few tracks.  Enjoy these samples – or follow the link below for a free stream + download of the full album. Don’t miss this one…

LMM 2.12 is an album about sex. As a musical subject, the topic is not uncommon. But it’s one that I’ve for the most part neglected until now. This work attempts to take the common pop-music perspective on sex and expand it to include (and in fact tell a story of) the entire reproductive process. If you want, you might think of it as a tribute to humanity’s oldest and perhaps greatest creative (artistic) act.
:: John Wood

Download the full album for free at LearningMusicMonthly.com.

#1.  Learning Music @ Pehrspace – 9pm
• 325 glendale blvd / los angeles ca 90026  // $5

#2.  Larry Goldings @ The Bootleg Theater – 10pm
(with Gabe Noel on bass and Mike Green on drums)
• followed by Obi Best at 11pm
• 2220 Beverly Boulevard / Los Angeles, CA 90057 // $10

#3. Bobb Bruno @ Echo Curio – 12:30am
• 1519 Sunset Blvd / Echo Park, CA 90026 // $5(ish)
• BOBB BRUNO’S RETIREMENT SHOW – NO JOKE – NOT TO BE MISSED…

It’s hard to believe that an entire year has come and gone – but the release of LMM 2.12 marked the end of Season Two.  Thank you to John Wood and the entire laundry list of Learning Music contributors, collaborators, and supporters for their unrelenting dedication to the project.

In preparation for the off season, we decided to make some improvements to the website. The entire Learning Music catalog – all 24 albums – is now available for free streaming and download.  There are also integrated liner notes with each album and direct mp3 links in case you want to share a song (or 20) with a friend.

Our sincere thanks to Jesse von Doom, the executive director of CASH Music, for lending his expertise during its development. We’ve blogged about CASH frequently in the past – and we will continue to do so. CASH is building a platform of web tools designed for musicians and music organizations – and their open-source codebase is the foundation of the new site.

www.learningmusicmonthly.com

Season Three begins May 1st!

(That gives you a few months to catch up … there’s a lot of music to be heard).

PS. Effective immediately, we will be tweeting a free Learing Music MP3 every day.  Maybe twitter will be out of style by the time we run out of songs in 2011 sometime.  Follow: @learningmusic

PPS. Learning Music plays this Saturday at Pehrspace!  They’re on early – followed by Ing, Detangler, Josh Ottum, and Rats (most likely not in that order).  Details at pehrspace.org.

#1
Social Science Recordings, home to LA’s Obi Best & Vincent Minor, has just released a digital EP from their remix contest.  vosotros is excited to kick off the collection with our remix of “Origami” by Obi Best.  The EP is available on iTunes and AmazonMP3 – but you can also download it free from Social Science for the remainder of January.

#2
AOL Music just featured our remix of “Your Powers Are Magic” by Apache Beat on Spinner.  Download it HERE.

Make some shirts.

We couldn’t think of a better fitting design than the faces that graced the cover of The Years.  Thanks to Alexis Demetriades for her incredible drawings.  They looked real good on an album cover – and they look damn good on a t-shirt.

The new shirts are available in our webstore a la carte or bundled with a copy of The Years (recently named the #6 best R&B album of 2009 by Amazon.com).  Buy the bundle and get the album for 1/2 off.

[ps. you can download all the faces as iPhone wallpapers HERE]

LMM 2.11 is a merging of artistic techniques dating from several relatively distinct eras of human history– as old as the 17th century B.C. (and even earlier) and as recent as 1982.

Mostly, this is a tribute to J. S. Bach’s fifteen two-part inventions. Written between 1717 and 1723, these thematic, contrapuntal pieces, following a simplified fugal form, were intended as etudes for keyboard and composition students. Likewise, writing fifteen brand new inventions was for me an intense study of Bach’s technique. Even with just two voices, this album is vertically dense and very German (in the sense that it is harmonically complex, even though #14 is intended as a melodious shout out to Rossini [Italian, 1792 -1868]).

Though these Learning Music inventions are written in the same keys as Bach’s, they follow a different order. Bach’s inventions are numbered by harmonic ascension (C, D, Eb, E, etc.). I chose to arrange mine following the order chosen by Glenn Gould for his recordings of the Bach inventions and sinfonias in the 1960s, moving through keys as they relate harmonically, much as the theme in each piece itself is modulated from key to key. Another unifying technique borrowed from Gould is the mathematical modulation of tempos from track to track.

Also concerned with math, Bach is known for building symmetrical shapes within his music, including the inventions. Symmetry is found in countless examples of art through the ages. It appears in Chinese bronze castings from as early as the 17th century B.C. It is aslo a recurring theme in religious and philosophical concepts from all over the world. This album as a whole uses a symmetrical structure. The inventions at the beginning and end are very traditional, following most closely the style of Bach. Moving toward the middle of the album, each piece becomes more abstract harmonically, moving more freely between keys, and stepping away from the rules of traditional counterpoint. Similarly, the first and last composition are both in a duple meter; the ones next to those are in triple; and as we progress toward the middle piece, which is in no set meter at all, we use meters of increasing odd numbers (5, 7, 9, 11). Time signatures of 5, 7, and higher prime numbers were uncommon in written music until the late 19th century (and are non-existent in Bach’s works), even though they were employed even before Bach’s time in pieces by Giovanni Valentini (1582-1649).

The recording of this album employed (obviously) much younger techniques than those studied to write it. Each invention was performed on a digital keyboard with rudimentary MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) capabilities, from which both the audio and MIDI information were recorded. The original MIDI protocol was developed in 1982 as a way for different digital instruments to work together. I used this technology to play back each performance through different keyboards (also dating from the early 80s) plugged into guitar amplifiers, using my now-free hands to twist the keyboard control knobs, and re-recording their sounds in sync with the original audio signal. I also used this MIDI information to trigger two samples of my voice in unison with the keyboards. All these sounds were combined together to create these odd resultant tones. The electronicization of contrapuntal baroque music began (famously) in 1968 with Walter Carlos’ (now Wendy Carlos) Switched-On Bach, which featured a handful of Bach compositions (including three inventions) performed on an early Moog modular synthesizer.

This month’s artwork is by “graphic artist, daydreamer, pseudo-scientist, wanna-be astronaut and untrained intellectual” Christopher David Ryan. Many thanks to Christopher, and to Autumn for getting him on board! To me, this image successfully represents all the things I find important about the album.

I hope you also find something in this collection. Please consider it as a candidate for semi-official theme music of 2010.

Here’s this month’s single, Invention #11 in A:

Thanks.

Sincerely,
John Wood

Download the single “Invention #11 in A” on Soundcloud.
Download the album by subscribing to Learning Music Monthly.
Download a free Learning Music compilation at grilled.ch/eese.
Listen to Learning Music featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Bobb Bruno has been all over the interweb these days.  There are a few copies of his Dreamt On EP left in the vosotros shop – so grab one while you can! (release limited to 108 copies)

• Glenne Kotche of Wilco’s Top 10 albums of 2009 (via Brooklyn Vegan)

• “this is definitely not an album for everyone, but it won me over after a single listen.” – #19 –  Best of ‘09 list (via Mugpuerh)

• Bobb Bruno + Avi Buffalo @ the Echo – named one of the best shows of 2009 by Amnion’s Aaron Embry (via Radio Free Silver Lake)

• “this dude rules!” – (via Galatic Sounds)

• EVP’s 100 Favorite’s of 2009 – #35 (via Electronic Voice Phenomenon)

• “a collection of six vocalless sonic experimentations that emulate the fantasy, peacefulness and disorienting nature of dreams” (via Creamteam)

• “thoroughly peaced out keyboard ruminations” (via Rose Quartz)

• “Bobb’s just put out an EP for Vosotros that moves like water between spacey atmospherics, pop sheen and country clarity; even meandering down to the grit and vinegar of noise.” (via Raven Sings The Blues)

Bobb Bruno, we salute you!

Read more and listen to the segment on the NPR Music website.

Download “LMM 2.10 – (a telling of) The Greatest Event In Sports History” free from the Learning Music website.

In other terrestrial radio news, This May Also Be It, a compilation of tracks from their first six albums of the year, came in at #5 on the National CMJ Adds chart for college radio last week! Step 2: call up your local college station and request some tunes!

You can stream + download the compilation HERE.  Order a limited edition CD HERE. Or download it from iTunes HERE.

Physical copies should start floating around the LA area next week.
Join us this Monday at Cha Cha Lounge for the release party.
See you there!!

9pm, free, 21+ | 2375 Glendale Boulevard •  Los Angeles, CA 90039

When opened, the application connects to a server where the project’s resources are stored, automatically downloading sound loops (”EAR”) that are paired with visual circles (”EYE”). An Into Infinity logo serves as an anchor point to trigger sounds – users can drag and move circles with their finger and when brought into the logo’s orbit the sounds start mixing, creating new derivative works on the fly. Users can then share these mixes instantly by posting to Twitter or sharing via e-mail from within the application.
(via Cameron Parkins at creativecommons.org)

vosotros teamed up with Mooey Moobau earlier this year to create an 8-second loop for the project. Here’s our original loop [mp3]:

Here are some mixes we found on twitter from Japan. ¡ douzo omeshiagari kudasai !

• Kristof Krisztian x Vosotros x Lucky Dragons (3)
• Inner Science x KeepBullFighting (1) x Killer Bong (2) x Vosotros
• Azzurro x Vosotros x Riow Arai (2)
• Tamaki Roy x Ras G (2) x Rick Potts (2) x Vosotros
• Scriptones (2) x Suzanne Kraft (3) x Vosotros
• Hashim Bharoocha (1) x Teebs (2) x Vosotros x wavvy (3)
• Hashim Bharoocha (3) x Shing02 x Tropic of Cancer (2) x Vosotros
• Olololop (1) x Vosotros x Lucky Dragons (4)

To Do by How Long It Takes To Know [mp3]
[vosotros presents: the lazy susan]

Real Thang (vosotros remix) [mp3]
[Erykah Badu remix contest]

Way to go, Gerald!

In fact, this tie was purposefully created by the episode’s returning champion Scott Weiss, a puzzle-lover who must have been thrilled when he saw the opportunity arise (in the form of his tailing opponents being tied) in the Final Jeopardy round. Instead of wagering the customary one dollar extra needed to win, Weiss bet the exact amount required to tie, should all three contestants question the answer correctly, which they did.

When I saw this happen– coincidentally I was watching the show that evening, something I did rarely before and have barely since– it struck me as a profound gesture of good sportsmanship. All three got to keep their winnings and play again on the next episode.

Drawing on an amount of gathered research as well as formulated opinion on the event, we organized this twelve-song interpretation of the story, which takes place in ancient Greece. The album is entitled (a telling of) The Greatest Event in Sports History. As you might be able to guess by now, there is a fair amount of humor in this album. But also, I hope, a good and resounding lesson to be learned.” – John Wood

The cast:
John Wood as Alex Trebek
Lisa Tremain as the goddess Athena
Jeff Eliassen as Anders Martinson
Gabe Noel as Jamey Kirby
Douglas Pipes as the hero Scott Weiss

As a holiday gift to you-all, we’re offering the a free download of LMM 2.10 here:
http://www.learningmusicmonthly.com/archives/trebek.php

And as always, you can grab this month’s single on Soundcloud:
Round II – The Ancients by learningmusic