Milonga del Angel by Astor Piazzolla y su Quinteto Tango Nuevo. Concert in Utrecht, Netherlands, 1985.
Astor Piazzolla – Milonga del Angel
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Category Archives: Art
PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
To commemorate the 2011 International Day of Peace, I thought it would be a nice idea to create a playlist that features all the songs of PJ Harvey‘s latest album Let England Shake. Its theme is war, so that makes it quite apposite for this day.
The album has generally garnered critical acclaim as well as PJ Harvey’s second Mercury Prize. Recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset with long time collaborator Flood who co-produced the album with PJ Harvey, John Parish and Mick Harvey. Let England Shake was also mixed by Flood.
It was also accompanied by twelve videos for all the songs which were made by photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. The playlist below contains all those videos in the order in which the songs appear on the album.
The songs are, in order (the links open up the lyrics for each song from pjharvey.net):
Let England Shake
The Last Living Rose
The Glorious Land
The Words That Maketh Murder
All And Everyone
On Battleship Hill
England
In The Dark Places
Bitter Branches
Hanging In The Wire
Written On The Forehead
The Colour Of The Earth
The titles in bold above were released as singles and contained the ‘B-sides’ The Nightingale and The Guns Called Me Back Again respectively.
More: Interview video (The Guardian)
Birdsong and Music
Via Gresham College, a lecture by David Matthews:
Many composers have been influenced by birdsong. Mozart treasured the songs of his pet starling, even giving the bird a ceremonial funeral.
David Matthews, one of Britain’s leading composers, has always been interested in the incorporation of the natural world into his music, recently even including birdsong in some recent compositions.
This lecture offers an opportunity for reflection on the relations between music and the natural world and how a composer can be brought closer to one through the other and vice versa.
Length: 53 minutes 56 seconds
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown
Via SnagFilms, a 90-minute documentary from 2008:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is Fear of the Unknown.
“H.P. Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror fiction having inspired such writers as Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Neil Gaiman. The influence of his Cthulhu mythos can be seen in film (Re-animator, Hellboy, and Alien), games (The Call of Cthulhu role playing enterprise), music (Metallica, Iron Maiden) and pop culture in general.
But what led an Old World, xenophobic gentleman to create one of literature’s most far-reaching mythologies? What attracts even the minds of the 21st century to these stories of unspeakable abominations and cosmic gods?
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown is a chronicle of the life, work and mind that created these weird tales as told by many of today’s luminaries of dark fantasy including John Carpenter (The Thing), Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Neil Gaiman (Coraline), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), Caitlin Kiernan (“Daughter of Hounds”) and Peter Straub (“Ghost Story”).”
Preview below, view the rest at SnagFilms:
Drew Berry: Astonishing Molecular Machines
Molecules are really, really tiny … so small no-one can show them to you. That’s where Drew Berry comes in. He’s what’s known as a “biomedical animator”. His job is to build scientifically-accurate and aesthetically-rich computer graphics which reveal the microscopic world inside our bodies.
Berry brings a rigorous scientific approach to each project, immersing himself in relevant research to ensure current data are accurately represented. His animated renderings of key concepts such as cell death, tumour growth and DNA packaging show molecular shape, scale, behaviour, and spatio-temporal dynamics in action.Berry’s animations, made to enlighten both scientists and the scientifically curious, have been exhibited at prestige venues like the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York and have won him an award for being a ‘Genius’. His illuminating TEDx Sydney show-and-tell includes wild graphics of DNA moving through the body and malaria infiltrating a baby’s vital organs after a mosquito bite.
Drew Berry trained as a cell biologist and microscopist, and has worked as a biomedical animator since 1995, most recently at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. Drew received his BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Melbourne. His animations have appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Royal Institute of Great Britain, and the University of Geneva. In 2010, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Thelonious Monk: Straight , No Chaser
A documentary film about the life of pianist and jazz great Thelonious Monk. Features live performances by Monk and his band, and interviews with friends and family about the offbeat genius.
The story behind ‘Straight, No Chaser’ began in West Germany in 1967 and ended more than two decades later in Kansas City, Hollywood and New York.
It had its beginnings in 1967, when the film-maker Michael Blackwood was commissioned by West German Television to make a film about Thelonious Monk. Over a six-month period of time that stretched into 1968, Michael and his brother Christian Blackwood, acting as cinematographer and co-director, followed Monk around, capturing him on and offstage, in the studio and on the road, at work and at rest in New York, Atlanta and several European cities.
In total, fourteen hours of film was shot and edited by the Blackwoods down to a film that was broadcast only once in Germany and never again anywhere else. From time to time, talk would surface in the jazz community about the existence of this precious footage, often described as ‘the Dead Sea Scrolls of Jazz’.
In 1981 the Blackwoods, joined with director Zwerin and producer Ricker, planned on turning all this material into a film. But they had to wait until 1987 for their (financial) breakthrough. Clint Eastwood, a lifelong jazz fan, was producing and directing the movie ‘Bird’ about Charlie Parker and heard about this project.
After viewing the samples, he was prepared to step in as executive producer, arranging for the financing to complete and for its eventual release through Warner Bros in the summer of 1988.
PJ Harvey – The Glorious Land (Live on Later? with Jools Holland)
Music video by PJ Harvey performing The Glorious Land from her 2011 album Let England Shake on the BBC show Later? with Jools Holland.
BBC: The Story of Science – Who Are We?
Who Are We? is the title of the final episode from the BBC series The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion.
Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society’s historical path.
We now know that the brain – the organ that more than any other makes us human – is one of the wonders of the universe, and yet until the 17th century it was barely studied.
The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires.
And the search to understand how our brains work has also revealed that we are all – whether we realise it or not – carrying out science from the moment we are born.