Category: NPR

Tiny Desk Concert: Lightning Dust (and more…)

Over at NPR Music, I continue my reign of recent Tiny Desk Concert videos that I’ve helped put together. This week, is Lightning Dust, who put out one of my favorite albums of the year, Infinite Light. This video is infectious thanks to the wonderful harmonies of the two female singers, presumably sisters.

Take a look below, and read my little write up here on the website.

Also on NPR Music today, I contribute to the Take Five series’ Top 10 Jazz Records of 2009 list as part of our end of year coverage. Here I write about one of my favorite guitarists, Nels Cline — notably of Wilco fame — who put out a great jazz/rock/folk/minimalist album Coward.

Another Minor Project I Was Tangentially Involved With To Shamlessly Plug

Late last Friday I was asked by a member of NPR’s Multimedia team to come watch a video project they were working on and find some background music to match. All I knew ahead of time was that it was to be about “driving.” As I was envisioning road trip songs I soon realized it was about driver safety and clearly folky ditties weren’t going to fit.

After watching once through, we determined that the music should be something in the realm of electronic music, percussive and repetitive to propel the narration and visuals but not be overly busy either as to detract… and definitely not acoustic instruments if we could help it. I went back to my desk, quickly scanned through my collection to compile a short playlist of songs that fit those qualities.

We wanted something like Moby, but not Moby, not that distinctive that might distract the viewer. On my list of choices was a nice mix of mellow electronic and atmospheric music: Atlas Sound, Mum, Manitoba (now Caribou), Four Tet, The Books, Brian Eno, Benjamin Biolay, Stereolab.

After playing through all of my choices, we finally settled on a version of Nick Drake’s “Cello Song” performed by The Books and Jose Gonzalez from the awesome Dark Was The Night compilation from earlier this year. I quickly looped the intro a few times and then cross-faded it into the ending of the song.

You can check out the final results below:

This video is intended to be an introduction into a week-long exploratory series about driver safety. You can see the rest of the series, with more infographics, radio pieces and photo galleries here.

Tiny Desk Concert: Bowerbirds

Way back in July, I invited one of my more recent favorite groups Bowerbirds to perform at the NPR Music offices for a Tiny Desk Concert.

Many, many (MANY) months later, after getting buried in an almost insurmountable backlog and actually having the raw HDV tapes go missing for a few weeks, the video has finally gone live, produced and edited by yours truly. This is my second real foray into video editing, but I think the video looks pretty good.

Check it out below and read my short write up at NPR Music here.

Reblogging: NPR’s Decade In Music ’00-’09

Last week we at NPR Music launched a two-week long jaunt looking into the decade in music from 2000-2009. Focused primarily on Carrie Brownstein’s awesome blog Monitor Mix, we delve into all sorts of topics regarding the most important news events, recording industry and business issues, technology changes, the relevancy of labels, big overarching trends and most important recordings of the decade…oh yeah and ‘American Idol.’ Plus so much more, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Here are a few of my own personal contributions:

— Interactive Multimedia Timeline: The Decade In Music

— Song Of The Day: The Decade In Music: OutKast’s ‘So Fresh, So Clean’ (2001)

— All Songs Considered: The Decade’s 50 Most Important Recordings (Here I write about TV On The Radio, The Flaming Lips and Animal Collective.)

— Monitor Mix: The Decade In Music Timeline: What Did We Miss?

— All Songs Considered: Missing The Cut: More Important ’00s Music (Here I nominate Girl Talk’s uber-mashup, Night Ripper)

— A Blog Supreme: The Decade In Review: Jazz And The Mash-Up (In which I considered Norah Jones, Ornette Coleman and Floratone — among others — as helping define the decade in jazz.)

Reblogging: 50 Great Voices Audio Slideshows

Here are links to two different promotional audio slideshows I made for NPR Music’s upcoming 50 Great Voices series. They are my two first multimedia projects to go live on NPR.org so they’re a tad rough (though the second one is substantially better than the first effort).

Functionally, these two videos were intended to let our audience hear a few teases of music and interact with some of the great musical voices in recorded history. Personally I don’t think they’re a complete success in the goal interaction because the user is more or less tethered to the viewing experience of rather static images for the duration of the video.

But the music mixes do give an effective sense of flow between the different iconic voices.

Anyway, take a look (click on the images below to go see the videos):

Reblogging: Flaming Lips First Listen

So I had the noble task of hearing the new album from The Flaming Lips, Embryonic, about a month ahead of time and then getting to write a short entry about it for NPR Music.

We are featuring the album on the website, in its entirety for the next few days, so take a listen and see what you think. Me? I think it’s awesome.

Reblogging: Jazz Now!

My cohorts over at NPR Music’s jazz blog A Blog Supreme have been curating a series of lists of some of the best jazz records from the last decade as a means to introduce new people to jazz. In the process we’re also sort of introducing a new modern canon of classic jazz records.

Now entering it’s second week, my list — which features MMW, Dave Holland, Marc Ribot, Dave Douglas and John Zorn — finally went up. Check it out here.

Reblogging: Jazz Labels That Matter And The Dead Weather

I had a few more things I’ve written go up in the last week to shamelessly promote. Here’s a three bulleted rundown:

On Monday, All Songs Considered asked the question ‘Do Labels Matter?‘ While they discussed that in their show and blog, I helped spotlight two jazz labels that DO still matter for A Blog Supreme: Tzadik and Nonesuch.

Then today, we put up a ‘First Listen’ for The Dead Weather’s fiery new album Horehound. You can hear that here and read what I had to say about the record.

Here is the video for their single “Treat Me Like Your Mother:”

The Dead Weather – Treat Me Like Your Mother

Oh and if you haven’t checked out my John Vanderslice review on Song of the Day, here it is again.