Viking

2011 was a pretty busy year for me. In between trying to raise funding for goby, as well as eventually selling the company to Telenav, I spent an enormous amount of time on the road. That gave me the opportunity to listen to huge quantities of new music, and to see some great music live. This year I really discovered electronic music in depth. I also re-developed a love for acoustic music, in particular roots and Americana….and continued to explore African and Middle Eastern music. Here are some of my favorites.

On one of my trips west, I stayed in San Francisco and got a chance to go to 1050 Folsom, one of the epicenters of west coast Dubstep in particular and electronic music in general. I saw Mary Anne Hobbs, one of the legends, and discovered Minnesota, and one of my favorites, Lorn. Check out one of his 2011 tracks, Obsidian – feels straight from the Blade Runner soundtrack. Subscribing to the newsletters of the electronic music labels is a great way to get free tracks and be introduced to a variety of cool artists – I found Mux Mool and his track Raw Gore that way.

Kraddy used to be a Glitch Mob member (more on them in a minute). His music’s been on near continuous rotation for me this year. He calls it Led Zeppelin 3000. Check out the mythologically-inspired Minotaur. Another great DJ/composer I ran across is Eskmo. He produced an amazing remixed setlist exclusively for Google music (check it out here). If you don’t have a Google Music account, have a listen to Moving Glowstream for a taste.

One of the pioneers of the dubstep movement, the nearly anonymous Burial, returned this year with an EP, full of dark atmospherics, beats and scratches, and spooky voices. If Aliens ran factories, Street Halo is what they would sound like.

Long timers Glitch Mob (with whom Kraddy used to play), also dropped an EP, We Can Make the World Stop. The anthemic We Can Make The World Stop is full of great melodies and powerful drops.

Battles’ first disc, Atlas, completely blew me away. Aliens would make music like this. If you haven’t heard the first disc, start here with Tonto. Groundbreaking stuff. They lost their lead singer, but returned with a second disc that, while perhaps not as a strong as Atlas, does contain some great tracks, like Futura.

OK. That’s enough electronic stuff. How about some music played on real live instruments and sung with real voices? Well, Fink provides a great transition. He used to be an electronic musician, but made the switch to acoustic guitar and put out a great disc this year, Perfect Darkness. Check out the title track, Perfect Darkness.

Gillian Welch and her collaborator Dave Rawlings have produced 5 albums, all of which feel like they would have been at home in the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl. They have some of the most heart-breaking lyrics, intricate guitar work, and hair-raising vocal harmonies being made today. If The Way It Goes is to your taste, get the full disc, The Harrow and the Harvest. The Civil Wars also burst onto the Americana/roots scene this year. Barton Hollow is a good place to start; more electrified than Welch & Rawlings, but cut from a similar cloth. I also had a chance to see Chris Pureka live at the Middle East in Cambridge. Burning Bridges is a great intro to her acoustic chops and powerful lyrics.

Indie band Dispatch regrouped and retoured this year, I saw them in Boston with my son, which was really cool. They threw off a few new songs as part of the effort, including Melon Bend. Seeing them in concert was really neat – since their last tour in 2002 they have really improved as musicians.

Well, the Occupy movement made big news this year. Occupy Boston was right down the street from the goby offices. Whatever you think of the movement, the spotlight shined on Wall Street and corporate corruption wasn’t pretty. Mark Knopfler was way ahead of these guys. Punish The Monkey was surely written about some mid-level manager in a Wall Street firm, about to get the whole thing pinned on him….

I had a chance to see some great Irish music live this year, in particular Solas at the Somerville Theater. I’ve since discovered John Doyle, who used to play with Solas. He has a great new disc out this year, and while Crooked Jack is from a previous disc, I think it’s the best introduction to his modern, yet traditional, Irish music.

Channeling traditional blues & soul singers from a bygone era, Adele took the market by storm this year. You probably don’t need me to tell you about her, but listen to Rumour Has It anyway.

Moving from someone everyone has heard of to someone nobody’s heard of. The oud is a fretless Arabic lute used in traditional music. Electrified, and in the hands of Mehdi Habbab, well, it’s anything but traditional – middle eastern rock with a hard-edged beat. Have a listen to some Algerian Rai, courtesy of Speed Caravan; the track is called Aissa Wah (Mo DJ Remix).

Finally, I had a chance to see Tinariwen at the Paradise this year. Tinariwen started as a Tuareg protest music band in Mali, and have since become something of a worldwide sensation in the world music community. I’ve been following them for awhile. One of my “bucket list” items is to see them play at the Festival in the Desert in Mali, but Al-Qaeda seems to be operating in Northern Mali at present so this year probably isn’t in the year. Aldachan Manin, from the Festival in the Desert CD, will have to do for now.

(cross-posted from the goby blog)

Did you know Goby is a kind of fish? Did you also know Mr. Goby was a character in an Agatha Christie novel? More importantly, did you know Goby is an instrumental guitar solo by Kaki King? Great song, unique artist. Check her out at the Natick Center for the Arts on Friday.

Somewhere in the sonic neighborhood of Jack Johnson, Amos Lee is at the Wilbur Theater on Sunday.

Gypsy Punk. How can you not be interested in the sound of that. Gogol Bordello. Even more interesting sounding. At the House of Blues, Friday.

Toad the Wet Sprocket has been making great indie/folk music on and off since the mid 80s. They’ve got new music out and are Showcase Live in Foxboro on Saturday.

Re-formed and at it again, Wire is a post-punk band that started in the mid 70s, and also has been on-again, off-again. They’re currently on, and playing Downstairs at the Middle East on Sunday. Can 50 years play punk? Go see them and find out.

Last but not least, the Mountain Goats are at the Paradise. Recommended.

You can see this list in more detail here.

As always, drink responsibly (or better yet get a driver!), drive safely, and information on all this and more can be found at boston music this weekend.

(crossposted from the goby blog)

Here’s the lineup for Boston concerts this weekend.

Self-described as “Victoriandustrial”, Emilie Autumn was Courtney Love’s violinist. Corsets, Glam Rock with strings and edges. Whether you like the music or not, it’s going to be a unique show. At the Armory in Somerville. You have been warned. (update: I think this show is sold out. bummer.)

Patty Larkin. A dependable folkie at the Homegrown Coffeehouse in Needham. If you’re in the ‘burbs, a great night out!

Cowboy Mouth is at the Middle East on Saturday night. This act is way too big for this venue; don’t miss a chance to see them in such an intimate venue!

Touring around his highly regarded new release, “So Runs the World Away”, Josh Ritter is at the House of Blues. Intriguing, unique, but accessible.

Mary Gauthier is the classic singer from the wrong side of the tracks. She didn’t start performing until later in life, and the earlier part of the life was apparently pretty rough. If you’re free Friday night, take a drive up to Marblehead, have a nice dinner and take in some gravel-voiced, honest stories.

You can see this list in more detail here.

As always, drink responsibly (or better yet get a driver!), drive safely, and information on all this and more can be found at boston music this weekend.

OK. It’s snowing. It’s been snowing. It will continue to snow. Snowmageddon, Snowpocalpyse, #snow, whatever you want to call it, it’s here. In honor of all the snow, here at goby we’re checking out music from a place that’s warmer than Boston. Iceland. Seriously. It’s warmer in Reykjavík than Boston today. Anyway. Check out this documentary about Icelandic music – there’s some cool new music here. http://www.seriousfeather.com/iceland/index.html. Ok, now back to our regular programming, Boston concerts this weekend.

Combining Latin, Hip Hop and World beats, Ozomatli comes to the Royale Friday night. Your feet will move whether they want to or not.

Robyn. Friday. House of Blues.

Wavves, Best Coast and more at the Paradise on Friday night.

If your tastes run this way, 15-time Grammy winner and international treasure Tony Bennett will perform at the Wang Theatre on Saturday.

Joshua Bell might be one of the best violinists in the world. Check this out. His violin is a Stradivarius that cost almost $4M. Seriously. He’s also been involved in some cool stuff, including this (via Wikipedia:).

In a curious experiment initiated by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, Bell donned a baseball cap and played as an incognito street busker at the Metro subway station L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. on January 12, 2007. The experiment was videotaped on hidden camera; among 1,097 people who passed by, only seven stopped to listen to him, and only one recognized him. For his nearly 45-minute performance, Bell collected $32.17 from 27 passersby (excluding $20 from the passerby who recognized him). Weingarten won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for his article on the experiment.

Bell plays Friday night at Symphony hall.

Viktor Ullmann and poet Petr Kien were prisoners in the concentration camp Terezin, where they created this almost inconceivably wry and touching opera, entitled The Emperor of Atlantis. They died at Auschwitz. Their opera survives – an allusive, haunting, texturally rich testament to their spirit. At the Calderwood Pavilion of the BCA in the South End.

Breaking with our usual rules, there are a few Thursday shows important enough to bring to your attention:

When you were younger (a long time ago!), do you remember the guilty pleasure of “Play that funky music” by Wild Cherry? If so, go see Chromeo at the House of Blues on Thursday.

John Mellencamp. Nuff said, you like him or you don’t. In Lowell.

Neko Case – folk? country? bluegrass? alt-country? indie? rock? who knows? who cares? she’s amazing. go see her. At the Wilbur Theater.

You can see this list in more detail here.

As always, drink responsibly (or better yet get a driver!), drive safely, and information on all this and more can be found at boston music this weekend.

This is a really cool visualization of “similar artists”, as captured by the Last.FM API. Genres are represented as colors. Very tasty.

With the year coming to a close, here’s a collection of my favorite music from the year. In addition to listening to a lot of new discs, working on goby this year has led me to see a lot more concerts in person. Some favorites: Trixie Whitley, Rodrigo y Gabriela and Los Campesinos in NY, Solas, Eddie from Ohio and Angelique Kidjo all at the Somerville Theater and Jack Johnson down at the Comcast Center. A good year for music.

Black Dub – Black Dub – Black Dub is the new collaboration between legendary producer/musician Daniel Lanois (Dylan, U2, Peter Gabriel), and Trixie Whitley (daughter of the late great bluesman Chris Whitley). Trixie’s incendiary vocals bring to mind Janis Joplin or Billie Holliday. The album is a fantastic collage of jazz, blues, reggae and searing guitar work.

Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers – Developed a taste for electronic music this year. Mount Kimbie threw off a hypnotic, ambient sound that periodically surfaces hooks and melodies that would be at home in much more mainstream music – but the melodies disappear as soon as they arrive, leaving you wanting more. Also the first time I’ve heard of the genre called “Dubstep”. Still don’t know what means, but I like it.

Solas – The Turning Tide – I got turned on to Solas (again) by seeing the newly formed lineup with a new vocalist play at the Somerville Theater. Irish acoustic music with a contemporary flair, these folks can jam. The band has been around for almost 15 years but the new lineup gives them great freshness.

Rush – Caravan – Not really a full disc, but even a couple of new songs from Rush are worth celebrating. No surprises here, you get just what you expect – thoughtful lyrics and tight, hard-driving rock from guys who’ve been playing together for 30 years.

Robert Plant – Band of Joy – Robert Plant has that “Lion in Winter” thing going. At a time when he could be sitting by the pool counting his millions, he’s constantly re-inventing himself and exploring things. Check out “Monkey”, then buy the disc.

The Aqua Velvets – Tiki Beat – Surf Noir California Beach Music. No vocals, just dreamy, often dark sounds.

Zoe Keating – Into the Trees. “Solo” cellist. I say solo in quotes, because there’s a lot of layering onto this disc. If the Lord of the Rings didn’t already have a soundtrack, this would be it. Hypnotic. I think it’s supposed to be “classical” music but way more accessible than that. Tip of the hat to Thomas (http://twjensen.blogspot.com/) for recommending.

OK, a couple of cheats – these aren’t from 2010, but I discovered them this year and I haven’t been able to turn them off.

Fink – Biscuits for Breakfast (2006) – Acoustic roots music with a Funk/Soul edge. Some wicked guitar playing and often-disturbing lyrics. Pretty sure that “Pretty Little Thing” is about a serial killer. “All Cried Out” is one of my favorite tracks this year.

Crystal Method – Divided by Night – Continuing the electronic theme. Mount Kimbie is the new school. Divided by Night is the old school, done perfectly. Drown in the Now is another one of my favorite tracks this year.

One extra track that’s stuck in my mind. Following a tweet from science fiction writer William Gibson I landed on Johnette Napolitano. “Poem for the Native” from the “Scarred” disc is another of my favorites this year. Dark, mystical song about the desert. The vocals are powerful and the guitar work. How a song manages be dark and funky at the same time is beyond me, but it is.

(cross posted from the goby blog)

Some good stuff this weekend. Yours truly is going to hit up Eddie from Ohio, playing at the Somerville Theater. They play a great rock/folk mix. Nobody as small as lead singer Julie should have a voice as big as she does, she can fill a stadium without a mike. Great tunes, great lyrics, good fun.

You can Experience Hendrix at the Orpheum, Sunday at 8PM. A pretty astounding lineup will be there. According to the Experience Hendrix site, the lineup features “Billy Cox of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Band Of Gypsys, Steve Vai, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Eric Johnson, Brad Whitford of Aerosmith, Living Colour, Chris Layton of Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, Ernie Isley, Mato Nanji of Indigenous, Susan Tedeschi, and The Slide Brothers”. Holy cow. That’s a lineup.

If you are into modern classical music, or things experimental, Kronos Quartet will be playing at Northeastern. If you think you know what a classical string quartet sounds like and it’s boring, you’re wrong. These guys are amazing.

For some happy-sounding ska, kind of in the vein of Pepper, then check out Bedouin Sound Clash at the Middle East in Cambridge. Musician and DJ Bonobo will be the Paradise on Sunday night, turning out some tasty club music.

Please drive safely, and as always, information on all this and more can be found at boston music this weekend.

(cross-posted from the goby blog)

If you’ve read any of the background on goby, you probably know we started the company after I missed seeing Jack Johnson play a gig in Hawaii. In the spirit of trying to help you not miss great shows, we’ve decided to start a tradition of a Thursday morning post letting you know about some of the great gigs going on every weekend (we’re starting in Boston). Without further commercial interruption, here’s some of our favorite bets for this weekend:

If you’re into old school, Blood, Sweat and Tears are playing at the Berklee Performance center.

A little closer to the current century, if you want some indie goodness, check out Deerhunter at the Royale.

Home town folkie girl Lori McKenna is at the Natick Center for the Arts.

Perennial classic acoustic jazz team Acoustic Alchemy is at the Scullers Jazz club.

Finally, Yoko Miwa Trio is playing some great jazz at goby’s home base restaurant, Les Zygomates.

Details of all of these can be found on my weekend music list.

And of course, to see all the Boston concerts this weekend, hit up this link.

On Wednesday, Apple introduced Ping, their self-described Social Music Discovery environment. It’s a micro Twitter/Facebook social media environment, embedded inside of iTunes. In one sense, it’s a huge statement – Apple is moving into social media, trying to play in the universe where Facebook and Twitter reign supreme and Google Buzz and Googleme and …. are trying to keep up. It’s rumored that this is the output of taking on the Lala development team, and shutting down lala.com. If that’s in fact the case – bad move, Apple. Ping does have a few things going for it, but in general it’s really lame.

Unsurprisingly, it’s embedded inside iTunes. For those of you who don’t use iTunes as your media player, you can stop reading now, Ping isn’t for you. Even for those who do use iTunes, this feels like a poor decision – it’s cut off from all the power of all the other environments we know like the web, email, twitter, Facebook, or even things like RSS.

The basic idea is Twitter + music – you can follow artists, follow individuals (iTunes differentiates between the two, where Twitter does not), and you can invite your friends to participate. You can “like” artists and write reviews or posts, and see your activity (or others) on a wall. You can declare what music you like – either manually or via automation. That’s it. I don’t really see how this is a discovery tool – just one more place to read reviews. Ping will recommend artists you should follow, but these recommendations seem rote, editorial and depersonalized – for me it recommended I follow Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber, and Kenny Chesney – really Ping? Kidding right?

Annoyingly, the only way to invite people is through email – no way to leverage your investment in Twitter or Facebook. Do I really need to recreate yet another social network? By hand? Seriously Apple? I understand not wanting to empower potential competitors, but this feels like Ostrich behavior – Apple sticking their head in the sands and pretending the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

Ping’s idea of music you are engaging with is music you “rate, purchase, review or like”. In my experience, it actually ignored music I rated, and only reflected music I’d purchased (I purchase little music in iTunes because I don’t want to be locked into their music format). Since the last 10 songs I bought were for my son, Ping is pretty sure I like Lady Gaga and Eminem. One of the big problems I see with Ping is that it is based on what I do in the iTunes Store, and completely disassociated from my Library or what I listen to. Why do I have to tell Ping that I love Calexico? They can see from what I play all the time that I love it – it completely ignores my listening behavior. Ping also seems disassociated from Genius, the current “Discovery” environment inside iTunes. iTunes has so many assets it could use to enable music discovery or let me create a social presence around my musical identity – none of which seem to be used! Which bands do I like? I shouldn’t have to tell them. Why doesn’t it suggest concerts nearby for bands I listen to? It could. Instead I have to go manually to each artist’s page to see that info. Just a few examples….

If this is what we get for losing Lala, bad trade. It’s like the Ping developers paid no attention whatsoever to what existing music discovery services have been doing for the last few years. Not even close to what Last.FM does for me for discovery and a social environment – can’t imagine giving up last.fm for Ping. Or why not do a deal with Pandora and do real music discovery? I don’t feel anything innovative here – just a somewhat lame ripoff of Twitter with cover art.

Kem Nunn is a genre unto himself. Starting with Tapping the Source and leading up to “The Dogs of Winter”, perhaps his best work, Nunn has blazed a trail with “surfer noir” – down on their luck old surfers, looking for that one last wave to bring them to redemption. Tijuana Straights is his most recent novel. Fahey is the aging surfer, living in Tijuana River Valley near the Mexican border, remembering the time he rode the Mystic Peak wave before he went wrong. Nunn rages about the destruction (environmental and psychological) wrought by the factories constructed along the border on the mexican side, and their impact on Mexicans and Americans alike. Magdalena is the woman who is trying to make a difference. She and Fahey are thrown together and….

Nunn is strong prose stylist, melding biblical cadence with modern sensibilities. Consider this Faulkner-esque masterpiece:

And just for that instant, sea water seeping into his socks, gun held loosely in the crook of an arm, was thoroughly transported…and beheld the boy, not yet sixteen, hunkered at the foot of these selfsame dunes, and the old Dakota Badlander right there beside him, surfboards like graven images of wood and fiberglass set before them, tail blocks sunk into the very sand upon which Fahey now stood, and the boy watching, as the old man waves toward the sea with a stick held at the end of one long arm corded with muscle, burnt by the sun, then uses the stick to trace in the sand the route they will follow and the lineups they will use to find their way among the shifting peaks that stretch into the ocean for as far as the eye can see, wave crests capped by tongues of flame as the mist of feathering lips flies before the light of an approaching sunrise…and this when the light was still pure, before the smog, before the fence at the heart of the valley, before the shit had hit the fan.

Magdalena and Fahey adventure together, and (trust me this is not a spoiler), have what passes for happy endings in Nunn novels. Tijuana Straights has many similarities to The Dogs of Winter – I found the Dogs of Winter to be slightly stronger – but Tijuana Straights is well worth the “2 in the morning” finish it will undoubtedly provoke.

[Update: This post was begging for a soundtrack. Here it is. The Aqua Velvets, Calexico, Chris Whitley, Joe Strummer - these guys were made for Kem Nunn.]

Surf Noir Kings Ride Again – The Aqua Velvets
Crooked Road and The Briar – Calexico
Quattro (World Drifts In) – Calexico
They Drive By Night – The Aqua Velvets
The Ride (Part II) – Calexico
Johnny Appleseed – Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros
Black Heart – Calexico
Ball Peen Hammer – Chris Whitley
Living With the Law – Chris Whitley
Crystal Frontier – Calexico
Dirt Floor – Calexico