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03 mai 2008

Peter Gabriel makes his peace with MP3 - and launches a site that second-guesses your taste

Back in 2003, we ran an interview with Peter Gabriel in PC World's sister publication >>FFWD, in which the singer, best known for his solo effort So, railed against "the mediocrity of MP3" saying, "I feel sad about is the acceptance of MP3 as the standard, particularly for young people".

The ex-Genesis front man was not anti-technology by any means; it's just that he preferred uncompressed, full-blooded discs to the quality compromises inherent in compressed downloads. To wit, his interview was to push a Super Audio CD (SACD) remix of his back-catalogue, and his enthusiasm for that higher-resolution disc format. SACD went no where, and personally I didn't miss it. The format did offer a fuller range of sound, but most of it at frequencies that only dogs and teenagers can hear. Nor did I particularly take to SACD's (or DVD-Audio's) 5.1 gimmicky surround sound capability. After all, you don't stand in the middle of a band during concert; you sit out front.

I was reminded of Gabriel's comments when I recently downloaded Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" from iTunes. I was inspired by the TV series The Seven Ages of Rock (just winding down on Prime) which carried an interview with Rolling Stone's David Fricke, enthusing about the thwack! of snare drum that introduces Dylan's signature tune. I downloaded the track, then heard a tinny "phssst" as it started to play on my iPod. Yup, mediocre.

Anyhow, Gabriel has now apparantly got over his aural objections to digital downloads. With others investers, he's poured $US5 milllion into thefilter.com, a new search engine-cum-service that learns your music preferences, then suggests tracks you might like from its catalogue of 5 million songs.

In its first iteration, The Filter "learned" about your taste through a combination of saving your searches through its search engine (which otherwise looks pretty much like Google or any other), plus a downloadable app that sifted through your iTunes or Windows Media Player playlists. This month, Gabriel and co. are extending The Filter to cover TV and movies too, and the musician sees them as complemenatry with the services musical AI. He reckons that if The Filter knows what movies you like, then it can make a reasonable stab at what music appeals - and vice versa.

It's a good theory, but on their blog, The Filter's developers admit "things on the site are a bit slow, sometimes ugly and certainly buggy" as it struggles to emerge from beta to a live public launch scheduled this month. I agree. It's often taken me two or three attempts to log-in as various bizzaro error message are spat out by The Filter's home page. But once you're in, it's now looking pretty slick and user-friendly.

Entering Gabriel himself as an artist, I found The Filter quite free-ranging, suggesting tracks from everyone from Beth Orton to Hawkwind, The Police and, horrors, James Blunt

There are easier way to discover what people with similar taste are buying, such as the "people who bought this also bought XYZ" lists that Amazon.com and others offer. And The Filter's constant requests for you to rate artists (and TV programmes and movies) using a sliding bar can become onerous. But you do get more options, such as to only recommend artists from a particular time, or close or far thematically from your favourite. It makes for a fun browse.

/ PCworld New Zealand

Tom Diakité le 31 mai

Dans l'Agenda des actions africaines en région parisienne de mai 2008

Samedi 31 mai à 21h30 - Chanson World avec Tom Diakité, de souche royale. Tom Diakité est originaire du sud du Mali. A la fois chanteur, compositeur, et multi instrumentiste, ses qualités d’artiste polyvalent lui valent de riches collaborations dont Salif Keïta, Chico, Sushela Raman, Kanté Manfi la, Almade Noche, Mory Kanté, les Gipsy King . Après deux albums sous le label Real World de Peter Gabriel (Nostalgie et Espace) pour son groupe Tama, Tom nous revient avec un nouvel opus, dans son univers multiple.

Chanter pour les autres, participer à une aventure collective, c’est bien, écrire sa propre histoire, c’est encore mieux. Avec « Fala », Tom Diakité renaît une nouvelle fois. En s’accompagnant à la kora et au donzo n’goni, l’instrument des chasseurs au Mali, entouré de quelques amis au talent sûr, il impose à l’évidence sa différence.

Tarif: 7€ - http://www.myspace.com/tomdiakite-
Rens. L’ADEAC/L’entrepôt, 7/9, rue Francis de Pressensé, Paris 14è -
Rens. 01 45 40 64 74 , 01 45 40 07 50
musique@lentrepot.fr
www.lentrepot.fr

I Can End Deportation - ICED

On Petergabriel.com :

Through contacts at Witness we've been asked to point people at ICED.

ICED is a free 3D downloadable game about U.S. immigration law - step inside the shoes of one of five immigrant youth to the USA and try and become a citizen.

29 avril 2008





Big Blue Ball

http://bigblueball.realworldrecords.com/

Coming Soon on Real World Records

One week in the middle of summer this craziness exploded in our Real World Studios. We had this week of invited guests, people from all around the world, fed by music and a 24 hour café. It was a giant playpen, a bring your own studio party. There’d be a studio set up on the lawn, in the garage, in someone’s bedroom as well as the seven rooms we had available. We were curators of sorts of all this living mass. We had poets and songwriters there, people would come in and scribble things down, they’d hook up in the café. It was like a dating agency, then they’d disappear into the darkness and make noises – and we’d be there to record it.
Peter Gabriel, producer and performer

The first single 'Whole Thing' is available from iTunes in the USA.
Big Blue Ball - Whole Thing - Single - Whole Thing (feat. Francis Bebey, Alex Faku, Tim Finn, Peter Gabriel, Karl Wallinger, Andy White)

Rencontres autour du oud : Adel Salameh

Nous débutons ici une série de rencontres autour du oud, le « luth arabe ». La proposition est de s’entretenir avec des oudistes principalement, de différentes traditions et approches musicales, mais aussi avec d’autres personnes liées à l’instrument (fabricants, autres musiciens, etc). Au-delà de l’instrument, le but est d’explorer la richesse et la complexité des musiques arabes et leurs développements contemporains. Notre premier entretien a pour cadre les docks de Marseille, dans lesquels nous rencontrons Adel Salameh à l’occasion du salon Babelmed.

Votre dernier disque s’appelle Rissala. Ce mot a-t-il une signification précise ?


Adel Salameh Oui et c’est très important, ça veut dire « message », message de paix et d’espoir, pour nous les Palestiniens, mais aussi pour le rapprochement des individus, quels qu’ils soient. Ce disque est le résultat d’une collaboration arabe : moi-même au oud, Palestinien vivant en France, ma femme la chanteuse algérienne Naziha Azzouz, le Tunisien Ali Mnejja à l’accordéon, le violoniste marocain Mohamed Zeftari et l’Egyptien Adel Shams El Din au riq.

Vous parlez de message de paix et la presse vous donne souvent le titre d’ambassadeur de la culture arabe. Voilà qui rappelle, par exemple, la démarche de Marcel Khalife ou celle des Frères Joubran...

Chacun a sa propre démarche. Je suis engagé par la cause palestinienne car je suis né là-bas et ma famille y vit toujours. J’essaye d’y aller le plus souvent. Mais il y a une autre dimension, c’est celle de la collaboration entre artistes du monde et c’est vital pour les artistes palestiniens. Vous savez, les frontières sont fermées, mais la musique est là pour atteindre à l’international, pour créer l’ouverture. J’ai eu la chance de voyager au Japon, en Nouvelle-Zélande, aux États-Unis, en Europe. Transmettre des messages est un devoir pour moi, ainsi que de donner une image de la culture palestinienne. L’enjeu, c’est affirmer que le peuple palestinien existe, c’est fondamental. Pour moi, la résistance palestinienne à l’occupation n’est pas différente de la résistance française à l’occupation durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

À cette différence que cette occupation dure depuis soixante ans...

En effet. Nous voulons en vivre en paix dans notre pays, avec tout le monde, mais ça ne sera pas possible tant qu’on niera notre identité.

En concert, vous dites ce message uniquement avec la musique ou aussi avec des mots ?

Je laisse la musique parler. Avant tout, nous sommes des artistes engagés. Je ne peux pas oublier que je suis né à Nablouse et que j’ai grandi à Tulkarem. Je ne peux pas oublier ma famille ni la destruction de mon peuple. Je suis toujours face à ce monstre, mais je laisse la musique l’exprimer.

D’où votre carrière internationale, notamment dans les festivals Womad.

En effet, j’ai collaboré avec Peter Gabriel et Real World durant plus de dix ans. J’enregistre actuellement pour le label Enja, aux côtés de musiciens comme Rabih Abou-Khalil, Louis Sclavis, Renaud Garcia-Fons... C’est un excellent label distribué en France par Harmonia Mundi. (...)

28 avril 2008

We7 Adds Sony/BMG Tracks to Free U.K. Music Service

We7, a Peter Gabriel-backed online music service that launched about a year ago, will offer 500,000 songs from Sony/BMG for free streaming on its site. Along with indie labels and bands who have licensed their songs, this brings the total number of tracks available on the free music service to around 750,000.

However, as we just confirmed with a We7 spokeswoman, the company's license is currently limited to the United Kingdom. None of these new tracks are currently available stateside, but if Sony/BMG likes the way the service works in overseas, that could change within a few months.

All songs on We7 can be streamed for free with a 10-second ad in front of them. Some tracks (but not Sony/BMG's) can also be downloaded in the MP3 format for free with an ad appended to the beginning of the song or for a fee -- $1.40 in today's weak dollar.

Steve Purdham, co-founder and CEO of We7, said his company lets people pay for free music with their time. "To date, music fans have really only had two choices to get the music how they want it -- buy or steal," he said. "Today we're changing that by putting the fans and artists first to deliver a fresh new alternative. Simply fans get the music they want and now have the choice of paying with their money or paying with a small amount of their time. So everybody is happy."

We're not happy yet because, as mentioned above, the new Sony/BMG content is not available to U.S. users. Assuming Sony/BMG's experiment goes well and the other labels sign on to a U.S. version of the service, We7 could could become a DRM-free alternative to SpiralFrog.

27 avril 2008

San Lazaro

Billed as “the tightest Latin outfit to come from Australia so far” San Lazaro certainly lived up to its reputation. This is a hybrid group of some eight different nationalities, all based in Melbourne, coming together to make a wonderful mish-mash of reggae and hip hop-ish music on a distinctly latin base. Or in their own words, an “unrestricted melting pot of urban latin funk”.

“I could be 26 again!”, my gyrating wife enthused as the visceral sound and enthusiasm of these ten musicians enwrapped us and made it virtually impossible to keep still.

Complex and hypnotic rhythms abound, together with polished unanimity and apparent exuberance in performance, and Adelaide welcomed them back from WOMAD with enthusiasm. A song called Justicia (Justice) was a nice link with Anzac day, because, it was explained, we are involved in a war that the Anzac spirit is not all about.

This band has fortitude and drive, and an infectious musicianship which shows through in spite of the volume. Spain has a lot to be thanked for in giving the world these invigorating rhythms. This band has mastered and adapted them well through its marvellous mix of cultures. We could do with more of it in this country.

BUT - and this is a real concern - what possesses any band to set its volume at a level only marginally below the pain threshold? When it is deemed necessary to mike even the congas - certainly not the gentlest of the battery of percussion featured - and when the strident trumpet has to be blown directly into the microphone, then surely everything is too bloody loud! San Lazaro is not alone in this modern aberration, but it shares the culpability for the impending hearing loss of present and coming generations.

So it was not just with the fine music ringing in their ears that the audience left with - it was blending with their jangling and battered auditory nerves, together with the excitement of music that would have been even more enjoyable several notches softer. I’m sure St Lazarus, the Patron Saint of healing, would approve.

San Lazaro

Venue: Piano Bar, Adelaide Festival Centre
When: Friday 25 April, from 8pm
Cost: All tickets $20
Bookings: BASS on 131 246 or online at www.bass.net.au

Laurie Anderson's new show Homeland raises ideas

For an artist impatient with black-and-white thinking, Laurie Anderson certainly knows a lot about badgers

If Laurie Anderson didn’t already exist, some New York novelist would have to invent her. Artist, musician, singer, storyteller,intellectual, inventor and one-time pop star, she lives with a real-life rock god – Lou Reed – and works from an almost parodically perfect loft in the TriBeCa area of Manhattan. She’s four decades of downtown art scene in a lullaby voice.

At her front door, the yellowed, typewritten nametag “Anderson” gives a clue that she’s been here since 1975, when the area was mangy and the apartment lacked water, electricity or even a roof. Now there are chichi art galleries and a 24-hour pet grooming parlour around the block. Inside, it’s all ergonomic furniture, framed photographs on the walls – there’s one of Reed, another of Lolabelle, her rat terrier – and well-drilled filing cabinets and bookcases.

Trying to break the ice, I compliment Anderson on her bookcases – after all, shelves are what separate us from the beasts. She looks at me steadily, her big eyes glowing under her trademark spiky hair. “Badgers,” she replies. I’m sorry? “Badgers,” she says again. “They have shelves too.”

Anderson studied medicine and then sculpture before her performance career took off, and decades later she remains the eternal student. Steady in tone, wide of eye, she is fascinating because she is fascinated. You may or may not be seduced by the stripped-back staging of her new show, Homeland, when it comes to the Barbican this week. You may or may not fall for her undulent performing voice – slightly heightened from her everyday cadences – or for the manicured electronica of her music. But as she speaks and sings and speak-sings about the images that burrow their way into our brain, from Aristophanes to underwear models, from presidents to terrorists, there’s no denying she’s an American determined to look beyond her own backyard.

Homeland is a different caper to her previous shows, though. The journalistic Happiness (2003) saw her telling stories, from behind her keyboard, about working at McDonald’s, about how she broke her back when she was 11. The End of the Moon (2005) covered her stint as Nasa’s artist in residence. This time there’s no reportage, just new songs. And while her impatience with black-and-white thinking is a theme bubbling under, she’s raising ideas rather than investigating them. “I don’t really have a message,” she shrugs, “and if I had one I wouldn’t try to force it on people. I hate it when people do that, hate it.”

Anderson grew up in a small town outside Chicago before going to New York in 1967 because it looked to her like it would be the centre of the world. “I got to college and it was turmoil,” she says. “It was fantastic. A wonderful time to be a kid.”

Within two years she was performing her first symphony – on car horns. A few years after that, she was performing performance art pieces such as Duets on Ice – in which she played her violin while standing in ice skates on a block of ice. The performance ended when the ice melted. Hey, only in New York. Was downtown in the Seventies really the boho playground it has been painted?

“It really was,” she coos. “The city back then, it was dark, dirty, exciting, you could eat, drink, dance and smoke in the same place. No longer possible! And I was just part of this whole wonderful arts scene where people helped each other. There were no stakes then. Nobody did art to make money. Rent was low, we had the run of lower Manhattan, we were conscious that we were making a scene. Then in the Eighties what happened was, like jazz musicians before us, we went where the work was. Which was Europe.”

And in Europe Anderson became – briefly, bizarrely – a pop star. Her seven-minute single O Superman reached No 2 in Britain in 1981. Sounding both electronic and maternal, like a voicemail message from robot heaven, its success surprised everyone. “Somebody called and said ‘You’re in the charts in England’,” she says. “I didn’t even know what the charts were.”

Her success was too freakish to turn her head. “When you get something that you didn’t work for, and you don’t really know what it is anyway, then you have a very different attitude than if you’ve been scrabbling for it. Plus I was, and still am, a snob. Pop culture is not of interest to me, except as a source of material. I tend to think the more that people like something, the worse it is.”

She continued touring and recording for the next two decades. But she barely troubled the mainstream again, save for co-writing a song on Peter Gabriel’s squillion-selling album So (This is the Picture), and playing now and then with Reed, whom she moved in with in 1995. She has never scrambled for success, she says.

Being from a family that had money, I knew that money wasn’t going to solve anything,” she says. “People with money weren’t happier, they weren’t having a better time, they weren’t laughing more. It was the biggest advantage I was given as a kid. You don’t have to scramble and get rich, you don’t have to do that.

“I have two younger brothers who are identical twins. They are really happy, they live together, they have matching cars, matching birds. They are not married. Just live with each other. We have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in our family: ‘Go ahead, you have never had girlfriends, go ahead, you don’t see us asking us, do you?’ They are happy. They are great conversationalists. It makes you think, what do you want in life, what are you really doing this for? The money mill, the fame mill, they grind people out. There’s a quote from Balzac, ‘Fame is the sunshine of the dead.’ And that about sums it up.”

But, like it or not, Anderson is pretty rich and fairly famous. She shares a home with Reed a few blocks north, returning to her loft when he’s on tour. Does she ever feel that other people envy her and Reed’s lives? “I try not to look in the world in those ways,” she says carefully, “I really do. I don’t mean to retreat from things, I like to be part of things, but I try not to be part of other people’s negative scenarios.” She pauses, then giggles. “That sounds a very self-help way to put it, doesn’t it? Very Oprah.”

Still, if you did want to steal someone’s artistic life, you’d do well to make it Anderson’s. She’s still gleeful about the time she and her band jammed with some Tuvan throat singers recently: “Just these downtown New York cats and these Mongolian nomads! Beautiful. Wow. Fantastic.” She refers, in passing, to the talks she’s giving, including one for the Smithsonian Institute on Warhol, and one for the Museum of Modern Art on “can you collect performance art?” (“Nooo!”). She’s working on an installation for a new museum of Jewish Thought in San Francisco, which involves beaming some spoken Hebrew direct into people’s heads: she discovered the technology that makes that possible, hypersonics, on a fact-finding trip to the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Next year, she’ll finally turn Homeland into her first album since 2001.

She’s 61 and still fearsomely cool, daddio – or, in her own words from one of the new songs, “a self-motivated spy who lives by the river”. But with this life, how much self-motivating does she need to get up in the morning? Does she have a routine, is she disciplined? “I just love learning stuff,” she says, “that’s my only discipline. And it doesn’t feel like work, it really doesn’t – I’ve managed to make my hobbies my work.” One of her art projects was walking around California with her dog. “Yeah, stretching it, I know! But, you know, why not? I don’t think we’re here to suffer.”

“My dream,” she says, “is that one day everyone would be an artist. We’d all learn how to pay attention. And no one would have to work any more.” Does she recommend it? “I do,” she says, her wide eyes twinkling. “It’s total fun. It’s just a blast!”

Homeland, Barbican Theatre, London EC2 (020-7638 8891 www.barbican.org.uk), Wed-May 3, then Norwich Theatre Royal (01603 766400), May 5, 2008