Sun Araw + M. Geddes Gengras + The Congos

RVNG INTL‘s FRKWYS series is a humble homage to the sounds of yore, with even its name serving homge. “In typical Rvng fashion,” they write on their website, “add an E and a couple As to those consonants and you’ll see a play on the name of the legendary Folkways record label founded by Moses Asch in the late 40s to document sound and movement in music from around the world.”

Coming out April 10th, 2012 is the 9th volume from FRKWYS, a long-awaited collaboration between Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, and The Congos. Sun Araw, in a note to dublab, said the following: “totally banancakes start to finish. dude the CONGOS record is so insane… GED and I made the rhythms, CONGOS wrote the lyrics and melodies, singing and chanting in 4 part harmony.”

If this initial track is any indication, this release is going to be incredible!

Sun Araw

+
M. Geddes Gengas

+
THE CONGOS

=
Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, & The Congos – Happy Song by RVNG Intl.

Sidi Touré

Hailing from Gao in the north of Mali is singer-songwriter and guitarist Sidi Touré. Thrill Jockey will be releasing his second full-length album, Koïma (To Hear), which takes the best of Western blues and infuses it with inspiration from Mali religion and culture. Incredible dual vocals, incredible spirit.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE
Gao is center of the former Songhai empire, a powerful West African empire that was one of the largest in history.

The track below, “Tondi Karaa,” translates as “The White Stone” and refers to a legendary stone that sat in the center of Gao for 500 years as a symbol of purity and prosperity. It went missing in the 1970s. “Tondi Karaa” is a reflection on the misfortune that has befallen Mali since the stone’s disappearance, and how it represents the individuality and greed that have damiged the unity of Songhaï culture. In Malian folklore, Koïma is the meeting place for the most poewrful wizards of the world. This album is an offering to the mystical power of that place.

Listen to Sidi Toure – “Tondi Karaa” – DOWNLOAD MP3

KOÏMA TRACKLISTING
1. Ni See Ay Ga Done
2. Maïmouna
3. Aïy Faadji
4. Woy Tiladio
5. Koïma
6. Ishi Tanmaha
7. A Chacun Sa Chance
8. Kalay Makoï
9. Tondi Karaa
10. Euzo

ABOUT KOÏMA
FROM THE PRESS RELEASE
The winner of two Malian national awards for best singer, Sidi was leader of Gao’s regional orchestra, The Songhaï Stars, and is a nationally renowned figure in his home country. In 2011, Sidi released Sahel Folk, his debut album for Thrill Jockey, and toured North America for the first time. This tour took him to prestigious venues and festivals, including New York’s Lincoln Center, Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and the Chicago World Music Festival. Through Thrill Jockey’s introduction of Sidi to new audiences, he is beginning to achieve well-deserved success and critical acclaim abroad.

Koïma is the natural progression from Sahel Folk, as Sidi has moved from an album of duets, recorded all in one take in his sister’s home in Gao, to a quintet recorded in a studio in Bamako. With Koïma, the intent is to record a different side of Songhaï music from the sparse style captured on Sahel Folk. The music is still distinctly Gao, but represented this time in a much richer and luxuriant way. We move from the intimacy of a quiet meeting between friends to the celebration of an evening of dance. On Koïma, Sidi is able to more fully realize his vision for his music.

Incase’s Room 205 is a rare company-sponsored series of music videos that actually makes sense. For starters, they actually pick good musicians and actually seem to know what they’re doing in terms of video work. They’ve just released this new session, for Chelsea Wolfe’s “Pale On Pale.” I’ve had this blues and doom track on repeat all afternoon. Though the video seems little more than a succession of layers blended atop one another using various layer filters, it is entrancing, channeling witch vibes and transforming a simple cloth-draped room into a moody, otherworldly space. Her voice is so, so captivating, but in the most earthly of ways.

Below, you can also see the vocals-heavy video session for “Movie Screen.” Beautiful!

Says Incase:

Seer/director Michael Reich, wizard/editor Forrest Borie, and white witch/set designer Tamarra Younis tapped their deepest inner goth vibes to film doom-folk artist Chelsea Wolfe. To enjoy this truly spellbinding performance we suggest you turn down the lights, don headphones, relax and get yourself into a gloomy Portishead-meets-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein state of mind… just let the grime and the glow wash over you.

“PALE ON PALE” LIVE PERFORMANCE VIDEO

“MOVIE SCREEN” LIVE PERFORMANCE VIDEO

See more Room 205 sessions here.

ABOUT CHELSEA WOLFE
FROM INCASE WEBSITE
California native Chelsea Wolfe has always embodied both the darkness and the light. Although her music is a raw strain of electric folk tinted by black metal and deep blues, it never wallows in despair. Instead, it wraps itself like a cloak around the human experience, encouraging uplift and seeking triumph. Her voice is a haunting call, warm and lingering, and her lyrics acknowledge life’s obscure and melancholy moments in service to the unlikely truths and beauty they so often reveal. It makes sense then that her influences run from Nick Cave and Selda Bagcan, to directors as varied as Ingmar Bergman and John Waters, with nods to the dramatic flair of Antony and Patti Smith.

Sometimes there are images that speak volumes despite their complexity of form, or even of concept. It seems photographer Eric Cahan gets around — and his minimal photographs of the sky, which document sunsets on the East Coast, West Coast, and locations in-between, present a spectrum of natural variety that defies expectation. Surely everyone knows that sunsets can be breath-taking, but when isolated sunsets are viewed with an entire collection of same-but-different relatives, they daintily scratch an itch you may have never noticed before.

Flying Point Beach, Southampton, NY
Sunset 7:51pm

Sea Cliff, San Francisco, CA
Sunrise 6:57am

Fort Pond Bay, Montauk, NY
Sunset 8:10pm

Palm Beach, FL
Sunrise 6:33am

San Paulo, Brazil
Sunrise 6:55am

Bridgehampton, NY
Sunset 7:48pm

“Synthesizers were finally fully integrated into ['80s] pop culture, music and movies. It was a unique period of musical experimentation in a very broad context.” – Sean Haley of Com Truise

Artists! The secret is out now, for everyone to actually see. A recent influx of works have certainly inferred that mirroring an image is satisfying to the mind’s eye, and that mirroring it and reversing it is arguably even more satisfying. Something about symmetry just fits in snugly into compartments of the brain, like a file cabinet of matching images. Well, Geographer is really, really exploiting this with his new track, “Kaleidoscope,” which comes with a phone app and website that takes the aforementioned satisfying image-creation clauses and executes them.

Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical when I first saw that the track was named “Kaleidoscope.” It seems a bit too overt. And am still skeptical, considering you get your image on the website if you hash-tag an image on Flickr or Twitter with #geographer (social media genius or a bit too overt?). Still, though, the point remains that this is just good wholesome fun. Here’s a miniature gallery below, which seriously proves that just about any photo dragged through this filter is immediately satisfying. It’s a love it or hate it thing, but I imagine that it will encourage artists who manually do a lot of this kind of work will soon find it too mainstream and look towards alternative patterns of art-making…

You can view the rest of this application at myth.geographermusic.com… where you can also listen to your record, if you don’t get overly distracted by the endlessly entertaining app.

Oh right, and about the music… I guess all there is to say is that there is an upcoming Modern Art tour, which begins March 1st, with Geographer, Miniature Tigers, The Chain Gang of 1974, Pretty & Nice and SPEAK…

MODERN ART TOUR DATES
3/1/12 Tractor Tavern Seattle, WA
3/2/12 Branx Portland, OR
3/3/12 The Independent San Francisco, CA
3/4/12 Troubadour Los Angeles(West Hollywood), CA
3/6/12 The Casbah San Diego, CA
3/7/12 Club Congress Tucson, AZ
3/8/12 The Crescent Ballroom Phoenix, AZ
3/16/12 The Prophet Bar Dallas, TX
3/17/12 Fitzgerald’s Houston, TX
3/19/12 The Social Orlando, FL
3/20/12 The Masquerade-Purgatory Atlanta, GA
3/21/12 Nightlight Chapel Hill, NC
3/22/12 DC9 Washington D.C.
3/23/12 Milkboy Philadelphia, PA
3/24/12 Brighton Music Hall Boston(Bridgton), MA
3/25/12 Bowery Ballroom New York, NY
3/27/12 Club AE Pittsburg, PA
3/28/12 Grog Shop Cleveland Heights, OH
3/29/12 The Intersection Grand Rapids, MI
3/30/12 Schubas Tavern Chicago, IL
3/31/12 Off Broadway St. Louis, CO
4/2/12 The Black Sheep Colorado Springs, CO
4/3/12 Marquis Theatre Denver, CO
4/5/12 Beauty Bar Las Vegas, NV