This year, the day has also been nominated as Record Store Day (RDS). The actual RDS is the third Saturday of every April but this extra date has been added probably not with any real expectations of a boom in customers but more as an additional reminder that record stores still exist and are worth preserving. They serve a valuable social function that cannot be met by blogs, mail order sites and P2P file sharing. Continue reading
cherry trees, Portland Oregon
If I Were a Genre of Music… I would
Portland Oregon based singer songwriter Marco Mahler has a great new album out on June 29th 2010 entitled Laptop Campfire Speed.
You can read my glowing review of it on Whisperin’ & Hollerin’ here.
Marco has kindly offered three free downloads from the album to be posted. These are the tracks I have chosen:
The masterstroke of this record is a brilliant cover version of Richard ‘Rabbit’ Brown’s double-edged love song dates from 1927 which featured on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and here takes on a highly contemporary and kindlier resonance.
The quirky album title comes from a line in this song : “you stare at your laptop like it’s a campfire”. Marco’s lyrics betray hints of a scepticism towards what poetically dubs the “entertainment transport machines”, but should not be construed as misanthropic or technophobic. The campfire is, after all, quite a comforting image – we gather around it for warmth, company and communication.
A kind of wayward nursery rhyme which opens with the line “nip nap where’s the bubble at” and, on first hearing at least , appears to be taking pleasure in its own absurdity. But there is method in this apparent madness. Marco says “The whole bubble idea came from the economic bubbles that we keep going through and then I thought about how we all have our own personal bubbles that we keep creating then popping”.
I’m currently using this photo of graffiti I took in Portland as my screensaver image – a real work of art by person(s) unknown. It’s located off Hawthorne in a side street opposite Ben & Jerry’s if memory serves me well. A great advert for an area which a brochure describes as a “popular and eclectic close-in neighborhood known for its mix of funky counter-culture with a vibrant bohemian flair”
PDX is one of the pseudonyms for the city of Portland, Oregon in America’s North-West. It comes from the abbreviation used for the train and airport terminals. More evocatives nicknames for the city are Stumptown, a reference to historic links with the logging industry, or Bridgetown , so named because of the sequence of bridges that cross the The Willamette River into the city’s downtown area.
As far as Portland’s musical identity is concerned, the double CD PDX Pop Now! gives a tip of the iceberg hint on what to expect. It’s a budget price compilation released to coincide with the annual free, all ages festival which this year took place between July 24-26th. This event, now in its 5th year, showcases artists from or based in the city and ,in the words of the organisers, its aim is to “advance a sustainable community which values inclusivity and a high caliber of artistry”. Continue reading
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