A couple of weeks ago, Denise and I went to the Toadstool bookstore to hear some music in a series that has included psych-folk, electronic and experimental performers. This was live performance at its best, and can't be reproduced on a CD or a DVD. The highlight of the evening for me was Miss Olivia Kennett, (http://www.myspace.com/missoliviakennett/) about whom more will be said below.

The headliners were Moving Pictures (http://www.myspace.com/mopicsnh/), a band I had heard and been impressed by on the internet: they do some intricate meditative blends of feedback in their music, but I didn't expect the high-volume…

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jude Cowan on the radio last Wednesday. You can hear it (for a while at lteast) at http://halfredhouse.biz/wordpress/2010/06/23/wuml-interview-with-jude-cowan-2010-06-23/. Also, Jude now has a blog independent of MySpace at http://judecowan.blogspot.com/, and since MySpace has a cold war going on with blogspot, she hasn't been able to share the link there, so I'm sharing it here :)

Two tracks from an album entitled North Acton 18/09/08 are freely playable on last.fm. Track 3 is really an early solo recording of Doodlebug Alley, and Track 2 is an early solo recording of Club Apache.

Doodlebug Alley, by Jude Cowan

This is an album that will amply repay every bit of attention given to it. Each song is a short-short fiction, densely packed with literary, artistic and historical allusions. All but one are original, and that exception, She Sits at the Window, is actually not a song at all, but a poem in the form of a duet with musical accompaniment. Each song stands alone.

As with most new music worth listening to, this album defies genre classification. All the songs are through-composed. This is music to listen to and absorb.…

(cross-posted from my LiveJournal blog)
We took a leisurely trip to the Marlboro College in the Green Mountains of south-central Vermont on Saturday and saw Anaïs Mitchell, Michael Chorney, and several of the brilliant musicians from the current production of her folk opera Hadestown. While on the newly released CD Greg Brown sings Hades in his deep bass voice , Ani DiFranco sings Persphone and Justin Vernon sings Orpheus to Anaïs's Euridice, in Saturday's production, Anaïs sang all the parts. The opening act was a young singer-songwriter and Marlboro alumna, Helen Hummell, accompanied by a fine…

Kim Guy has been part of many musical formations over the years, but until last month, she had not put out a CD in her own name Her debut album, Wednesday's Child, is a collection of covers of traditional ballads and a selection of mostly obscure songs by other songwriters, all arranged, played and sung in a distinctive style that is hard to describe in words. Nevertheless, since words are all that we have, here goes.

In most versions of the nursery rhyme, Wednesday's Child is full of woe, and Kim describes herself as “looking at the…

Sandwitch (http://www.myspace.com/sandwitchfolk) is a folk-based duo living in Wales, consisting of Buddy Freebury and Andrea Freebury. They've been making music together and in other configurations for many years and just issued their fourth CD, Going 4th ........ On to New Horizons, after a few years of being largely outside the music scene.

This is a rather long review, so let me make it clear before I start (over-)verbalizing that I absolutely love this CD and strongly urge everybody to get hold of it.

I first encountered them when Red Shoes (http://www.myspace.com/redshoes1), one of my favorite musical…

Here's a poem about what might happen at the Copenhagen Climate Summit by my friend Elizabeth Barrette. I set it to music (it was a rush job, because this is what Ani DiFranco calls an "urgent napkin poem") and you can hear it here: All The Sleeping Heroes
(http://www.last.fm/music/Jim+Giddings/Less+than+350+PPM+CO2/All+The+Sleeping+Heroes) in Jim Giddings's album Less than 350 PPM CO2. See http://www.last.fm/group/350+Songs+About+Global+Warming and http://www.350.org for more information.

All the Sleeping Heroes
by Elizabeth Barrette
(For the improbable but necessary success of the Copenhagen Climate Summit)
http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/873675.html

They came from their caves all together,
a great army of heroes
roused from…

I am delighted finally to have received Wendy Arrowsmith's new CD Seeds Of Fools in last week's mail. This has been another case (along with that of Red Shoes's CD Ring Around The Land) of watching an album come together gradually on MySpace and take on a concrete form that is even better than the initial bright sparks of song heard in the player had led me to expect.

I don't remember whether she befriended me on MySpace or I befriended her, but as soon as I heard the songs in the music player, mostly from her…

There is a wonderful harmony-based trio that has been recording gentle folk music since the 1960s.I have some of their LPs and CDs, but the good news is that you can hear a lot of ther best tracks here on last.fm. The bad news is that finding them is still a major headache. Here is a description I wrote for one of the umpteen artist profiles they have on last.fm, and it might help you find some of their music if you're persistent :)
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Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir and Ed Trickett are three folk musicians with their…

Red Shoes are Carolyn Evans and Mark Evans of Birmingham, England, and they are a whole lot more. Returning to the music scene after an absence of a couple of decades, they discovered that the way music is produced and distributed has changed radically. Nevertheless, in less than two years they have assembled original material and put together a CD (http://www.last.fm/music/Red+Shoes/Ring+Around+The+Land) that is a true triumph, both technically and artistically, with the help of a large group of friends they didn't know they had before they set off on this adventure. Carolyn's youthful dream had always been to work with…