Droning Rock for the Weekend

Here are two albums of rock drone from the Russian Association of Independent Genres (RAIG) to clear work from your mind this weekend. Prepare for space out.

A Foggy Realm (Ilya Lipkin) - Twilight
[mirror]
Electric Guitar Drone
© All Rights Reserved
Artist Location: Moscow, Russia

Psi Corps (Alisa Coral) - Shadow Creatures
[mirror1, mirror2]
Dark Space, Drone
© CC BY-NC-ND
Artist Location: Moscow, Russia

Gorgeous Jazz Combo Album

The Natalia Skvortsova Band offer you their gorgeous contemporary jazz album Summer Time, released on top-notch Moscow label, top-40.

"Summer Time is a project of an acclaimed Russian jazz pianist and composer Natalia Skvortsova. With this album, Natalia and her band attempted to create a music, inspired by very specific images and appearances, described in the track titles: a rose, a train, a sleeping boy, etc. Obviously, the musical form of their choice is jazz. So the resulting album is a very nice piece of melodic, soft and groovy contemporary jazz – a perfect soundtrack for your summer laid-back listening session."

Music License: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND
Artist Location: Moscow, Russia

New Soundtrack For Historic Silent Film

As posted at the FMA last week:

Battleship Potemkin Revisited
katya-oddio of Oddio Overplay

Members of the international avant-garde collective Apskaft worked together to create a soundtrack for Battleship Potemkin, one of the most important films of all time. The soundtrack is now hosted by the Free Music Archive.

Battleship Potemkin (Russian: Броненосец «Потёмкин», Bronenosets Potyomkin) is a 1925 silent film directed by genius filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the 1905 mutiny of the crew of the Russian battleship Prince Potemkin against its Tsarist regime officers.

Battleship Potemkin [IMDB] is considered one of the most important silent films and one of the most influential propaganda films. It was named the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. The film continues to be a standard in film courses for Eisenstein's emphasis on montage, his depictions of violence, his stress of intellectual contact, and his treatment of the masses rather than the individual as protagonist.

Each scene of the film was scored by Apskaft artists and can be viewed with the full-length film below and at the Internet Archive. An Apskafters e-magazine also accompanies the release of this soundtrack.




image: Battleship Potemkin 1925 film poster by the Stenberg Brothers (one of the highest price valued film posters of all time)

soundtrack license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Slavic Girls in Dissonant Harmony

Women and girls singing in traditional Eastern and Southeastern European dissonant harmonies are featured in this free compilation of Free Music Archive tunes.

licenses: see individual track info

painting:  A Northern Idyll, by Konstantin Korovin, 1886, oil on canvas, housed at The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

My Russian Bride, a Nutcracker Reworking

Did you know that Tchaikovsky didn't like the score he composed for THE NUTCRACKER ballet? Yeah, for starters, he didn't even want the job. Evidently he made too many concessions for the ballet producers and didn't feel it was true to his original concepts and nowhere near as good as his last ballet score, THE SLEEPING BEAUTY.
Isn't that remarkable when so many movements from the composition are instantly recognizable classical masterpieces?

Now, let's say that more than 100 years later we give his score a Tim Burton - Danny Elfman - PDQ Bach treatment. Not talking HOOKED ON CLASSICS here; instead, reworking the whole composition and giving it some bounce, bleeps, bloops, and even more music box charm*. This is exactly what Lanark, our friend in Argentina, has done on MY RUSSIAN BRIDE, now available on the Free Music Archive. One can't help but wonder what the old boy Tchaikovsky would think of this reworking.

Lanark has a passion and a gift for reworking classical pieces. This is one of his earliest, if not the first, releases of his deconstruction and reconstruction of classical works. It is especially fun in winter when we are most likely to hear THE NUTCRACKER SUITE.

Here's hoping this charming little electronic music box from Lanark brings you joy this season and all year.

Download MY RUSSIAN BRIDE Here's a taste:



* The original score got its music box charm from the celesta (pronounced chelesta, ch as in cello), an idiophone that strikes metal rods via a keyboard. It is one of the most wonderfully otherworldly sounding instruments ever created. In fact, the name of this 1886 invention is derived from its "celestial" sound.

Here's a great audio piece on the celesta from NPR.

Tuesday's Dozen

Tuesday is a real good news day. Here you have a new set of 12 free and legal collections and CDs to get you through the work week! Eat up and be sure to spread the love by supporting these artists!

Magestik Legend Detroit, Michigan rapper shares 15-track Free CD; shared stage with hitters like George Clinton, Wu-tang, Ludacris, De La Soul, Rakim [rap, gangsta]	Crate Kings enjoy the mixes (pictured: Crate Kings vs. Henry Mancini), breaks, tutorials and network offered up by these master hip-hop DJs [hip hop]	Ne Zhdali Estonian group pairing "punk energy with the complexity of true progressive rock" (Allmusic.com) shares much of their discography [rock, prog]
Mercury Theatre finest radio drama of 1930s, famous for War of the Worlds broadcast, featured acclaimed drama company founded by Orson Welles [spoken, OTR]	Marxist.org interesting respository of Soviet history, including national anthems and soviet songs [soviet, war, Russia]	Tasmin Little star violin soloist and orch director shares her The Naked Violin CD with works by Bach, Patterson and Ysaye [violin, classical]
Jason Ferris this guitarist and singer-songwriter based in New South Wales, Australia shares his 8-song acoustic rock CD titled All I Said online for free [pop, rock, acoustic]	Da ! Heard It fun netlabel "influenced by electronic, 8 bit, Easy-Listening, Acid, Toyz-Pop, Breackore, Electro Surf, Electro bass, Miami Bass" [electro, chiptune]	Foolk from the Slovak Republic comes "lo-fi hip hop, beats, jazz cuts and bleeps... with live musical instruments and weird electronics" (aka Foolcut)
Lokua - Trails listening to the urban beats Lokua (Joshua Keckner) lays down, it is easy to connect he is a Chicago native [electro, hip hop, downtempo, house]	Animic - Hau o Hiu stirring together the sounds of their home with folk music and electronic sounds in Catalan, Spanish and English [folk, lo-fi, pop]	Crate Digger Death-Match "What (albums) can 12 musicians create in 12 hours with only $12 of thrift store finds?" Whole albums of fun jams! [sampling, varied]

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A Doozy of a Dozen

Yuri Lane the mindblowing human beatbox [hip hop, turntablism]	Lo-Kiwi the cool "comfort music" netlabel [downtempo, dub, jazz, soul, chilled electro]	Budweiser the Real Men of Genius radio ads [commercials, humor, comedy]
Machinae Supremacy Swedish legends share songs and soundtrack [metal, soundtrack, video game music]	Filewile present their first two releases, remix CDs and other delicious surprises [electronica, big beat, trip hop]	Curtis Eller "New York City's angriest yodeling banjo player" [old-time, vaudeville, downhome, folk]
Joe Sparks nutty Alternative Tentacles artist behind the Radiskull & Devil Doll and Dicky & Jackie cartoons [silly, rock]	Various Artists - Children's Songs a Song Fight comp distributed in packages to chronically ill, hospitalized kids [children, silly, pop]	Spheriot shares his solo Livingroom Orbits release through WM Recordings [electronica, pop, acoustic, dance]
Ural Rock recordings by up and coming bands from the Ural Mountains of Western Russia, click for band list [rock, pop, alternative]	Ian Ritchie portfolio highlights from composer, producer, and saxophonist, including work for TV soundtracks [varied]	Matmos a pair of electronic collage artists standing out as innovators in a field noted for innovation [experi, collage]

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Various Artists - A Place to Live

stream / Flash player

another superb sampler from that excellent netlabel Electrosound:

Russian Federation, a place to live for more than 150 million people, a territory of 12 time zones and 17 million square kilometres.

This compilation is a collection of tracks from various musicians from eleven Russian cities. The booklet (in Russian language) contains the authors’ photos and text descriptions, to read and to feel.

artwork: Grigory Kochenov

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Gogol Bordello on N. Amer TV Tonight

Your favorite gypsy punks, Gogol Bordello, will be appearing as the musical guest tonight on The Late Show with David Letterman. The show airs tonight at 11:35 pm on CBS. Check it out!

Enjoy Gogol Bordello and many other Eastern European and Russian artists on the free Red Army Favorites comp on Oddio Overplay.

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Red Army Favorites Updated

Updated: Red Army Favorites
Features songs covering multiple genres from
Holy Mother Russia and her neighbors,
mostly new pieces with a few traditional favorites
Tracks: 19, Time: 72.02 minutes
Original: 2004, Updated: 2007