What are you listening to?

[Laird]

So here's this for some balance.

Such a great song!

Would your parents have approved?

Such a great song!

Would your parents have approved?

Probably not… would have considered the lyrics to be encouraging laziness or the shirking of responsibility!

Reminiscing, I heard both of these one evening on the legendary John Peel show,

Pizzica is both a rhythm and a dance, it belongs to Salento which is the most southern east part of Italy, in County Puglia. The roots of Tarantella (Pizzica is a style of it) are supposed to be in the greek-roman period in connection with pagan rituals. The time of Pizzica is 6/8, it is played with quick triplets with one strong accent on the first beat of the first triplet. The basic "ensemble" to play pizzica was Tamburello (Tambourine) Organetto (Diatonic Accordion) and Violino (Violin), but also guitar, mandolin and flute are played. One of the porpoises of this kind of composition was and still is (like other forms of tarantella) healing somebody "from the bite of the Tarantola" which is a spider, or from a general "sickness of the soul", the sick person dance hours till he fall down exhausted, the drum player often bleeding from the hand cause the beating on the drum. There are several interesting studies both in medicine and anthropology about that (the picture of this video comes from a documentary directed by Ernesto De Martino). In the old time in Salento this kind of music was also played during a duel where the two gentleman tried to kill each other with a knife in a sort of dance of death, it was known as "Danza delle spade" "Dance of the Swords". It was forbidden by law and after that it was (and it is) practiced just for fun using the fingers instead of knifes. Soon I ll post the lyrics with translation. Enjoy

I rediscovered this recently. It's the soundtrack to the 1988 animated feature film, Akira. The music is composed by Tsutomu Ōhashi and performed by the percussion and choral group he founded, Geinoh Yamashirogumi.

I saw the film in the mid 90s when I was, like, 13 or something. It blew my mind at the time. The storyline is also somewhat topical to matters Psiencequest: A military psi experiment goes wrong when a young man's accelerating telekinesis abilities lead to an eventual thermo-nuclear style 'singularity' in which he transcends the physical plane and a new universe is created. Quite deep stuff for what is essentially a young person's movie. There's lots of action, too, of course.

Oh, they don't make 'em like they used to.

Three choice selections from the soundtrack.

James Blood Ulmer claims to have gotten his guitar tunings in a dream. Also, his music has been known to precipitate spontaneous OBEs. So, if you start feeling an inner body vibration, hit pause. Here be dragons.

Barclay James Harvest - Berlin; A Concert For The People.

[Laird]

One of my favourites from my cousin, off his 2021 album Japanese Eggs:

Green Vagabond