Alan Lomax - ANIMAL MY SOUL

Tag Archive: Alan Lomax

ALAN LOMAX: FROM THE FIELD TO YOUR HOME

Filed under: Music — 1 Comment

February 1, 2012

Lomax recording in Mallorca, Spain , 1952

Great news that Alan Lomax’s field recording archive will soon be available to stream in its entirety for free.

From March, all 15,000 recordings will be available in full.

Files will apparently include session and recording notes, full lists of performers, locations, and dates. In other words, little short of a digital goldmine. The project is run by the Global Jukebox label, part of the Association for Cultural Equity, who deal with the digitisation of Lomax’s archive.

As if I don’t already have enough music to listen to, this collection should see out the rest of my natural life.

Related links:

Alan Lomax’s Archive to Stream For Free (rollingstone.com)
Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox goes online (guardian.co.uk)
Digitizing and opening access to Alan Lomax’s archives (mixingplatforms.wordpress.com)
‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’ (nytimes.com)

Tags: Alan Lomax, Field recording, Global Jukebox

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HYPNAGOGIC POP vs POPLORE

Filed under: Books, Music — Leave a comment

September 7, 2009

I like the letter to this month’s Wire magazine by Vivien Priestley of Walsington, UK who wrote in response to David Keenan’s provocative (and, I have to say, confusing) article on what he calls Hypnagogic pop. This is the name he gives to the strand of (mostly) American music which blends together elements of the nation’s old weird past and more recent pop culture. (It has already been nominated by some as the ‘worst genre created by a journalist’)

The letter points out that musicians like The Skaters, Pocahaunted & Ariel Pink are “wrestling with various versions of the past and trying to get beyond a merely nostalgic revivalism”. The writer asks “……has there ever been a moment in music before now where sound has been so completely soaked in traces of the past without actually sounding like anything other than the present, or the future?”

This question ties in well with a book I’ve been reading by Gene Bluestein on folk and pop in American culture called ‘Poplore’ (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

It’s a study which looks at what we mean by these catchall terms ‘Folk’ and ‘Pop’ and, in part, also seeks to lay to rest the myth that the US has no authentic Folk tradition.