ACROBATICS EVERYDAY

okay, summer 2009 is half over. bizarre! i can hardly believe it. august 1, a year ago today we were struggling to put a stage inside phoenix (then) grille for thao and her boys. feels like yesterday! i can feel the weight of 100 people bouncing along to her enveloping voice. that was a good night!

i’ve been working hard hardly working and it doesn’t really allow me to blog it as hard as i want to — believe me, i want to blog hard. this past wednesday on my radio program, 5 minutes before going on air and with no gameplan i devised a simple plan for my next month or so on air: an aural world tour, 1 song per country until all countries have been represented with music. i cobbled together enough for one program already, which you can download if you want. it’s a fun adventure in which i am discovering some amazing music. the world section at kuci is somewhat strange: in vinyl, we’ve possibly 100 or more african records, some of which have the gnarliest cover art ever, seriously, the aesthetics of african vinyl 70s/80s is hard to beat; then we have something like 75 israeli records, maybe 75 irish-flavored ones, and really just a handful of stuff from the rest of the world. strange, in my opinion! luckily our world CD section is a little more varied. in any case, i’m going to have to hit up some record shops sooner or later lest i skip papau new guinea or gambia.

anyway. one of the winners i discovered this past wednesday is a folk music vietnamese CD on an italian label felmay, which has apparently a large selection of very good ethnic musics. the artist is called “Gia Dinh <>” and the album is called “Que huong (homeland).” of course, there are all manner of accent and intonation marks on every letter so i have no idea how to accurately pronounce any of the song titles or anything. but here are two of my favorites:

Gia Dinh <> - Nho Mua Thu Ha Noi - que huong (homeland)

Gia Dinh <> - Hat Xam: Nuoc Chai Doi dong - que huong (homeland)

this is the ba pho in question, the leader of the gia dinh band.

you can buy the cd at various places on the internet, it is amazing.

what else. august is very show-filled. keep an eye at the main .com site for updates…highlights include a solo set from mr rob barber of high places in his THE URXED project which is ruling. i think that’s it for now.