David Byrne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Topic: Music
7:10 am EDT, Aug 18, 2008
Today's the day for Byrne's new album.
Brian Eno and I recently finished our first collaboration in about 30 years. The name of the new record is Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang. It's familiar but completely new as well. We're pretty excited.
The album is available exclusively from this Web site. You can stream all of the songs for free and purchase it in a variety of digital and physical formats, including a limited edition Deluxe Package designed by Stefan Sagmeister. All formats can be downloaded immediately and physical CDs will be shipped in the Fall.
David Byrne Midtown
They'll be at the Chastain Park Amphitheater on September 20.
From the archive:
The symphony of Manhattan Island, composed and performed fortissimo daily by garbage trucks, car speakers, I-beam bolters, bus brakes, warped manhole covers, knocking radiators, people yelling from high windows and the blaring television that now greets you in the back of a taxi, is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.
The other day, in a paint-peeling hangar of a room at the foot of the island, David Byrne, the artist and musician, placed his finger on a switch that did exactly the opposite: it made such music on purpose.
"So many of the decisions at these companies are not about the music. They are shortsighted and desperate. For so long, the record industry had control. But now that monopoly has ended, they don't know what to do."
Rick Rubin says that the future of the industry is a subscription model.
A few years ago, the man behind the Buena Vista Social Club, Nick Gold, approached a group of Senegalese musicians he was crazy about — the Orchestra Baobab. In the 1970s and '80s, they were masters of blending African and Cuban dance rhythms. Gold convinced them to get back on the road, and now they're more successful than ever, melding salsa rhythms with African beats on stage at Carnegie Hall.
These guys are awesome. (The link at "crazy" above is an entire concert!)
The Guardian reviewed their latest album:
Whoever coined the term "intelligent dance music" was probably thinking of digital basslines and tricky breaks, but the phrase will also do nicely for this set of newly recorded songs by the legendary Senegalese band. Orchestra Baobab, who reformed in 2001 after a 16-year break, are masters of an urban style that pairs rippling, fast-flowing guitar lines with impassioned vocals and sophisticated dance rhythms. These move effortlessly from rumba, reggae and highlife to more indigenous grooves such as mbalax and their own "mbalsa", an infectious salsa hybrid heard on the track Ami Kita Bay. The four vocalists - augmented by Youssou N'Dour for a new version of their 1970s hit Nijaay - are superb. Nick Gold's production and sequencing ensures we are never bored: there is always a new voice or groove around the corner. Star of the show, as always, is musical director and guitarist Barthélemy Attisso, whom I once compared to Hank Marvin and Mark Knopfler; that wasn't hyperbole.
Here's the back-story:
Orchestra Baobab are one of Africa’s great iconic bands, creators of one of the world’s most sublime and truly distinctive pop sounds. Founded in 1970, Orchestra Baobab fused Afro-Cuban rhythm and Portuguese Creole melody with Congolese rumba, high life and a whole gamut of local styles – kickstarting a musical renaissance in their native Senegal, which turned the capital Dakar into one of the world’s most vibrant musical cities. They produced more hits in less than a decade than other bands in a lifetime. While Baobab found themselves sidelined by the revolution they helped create and disbanded in 1985, a huge groundswell of international interest led to their triumphant reformation in 2001. Orchestra Baobab are still very much in business today.
You can listen to A Night at Club Baobab for free on Rhapsody. Try the first track, "Jin ma jin ma". (This is also the second song at the Zankel Hall performance, above.) Also try "Liti liti".
Watch a live performance:
Orchestra Baobab performing live at the Roll Back Malaria Concert
About their recent show in London, a reviewer wrote in The Independent:
It seems as if every commercial these days has a rock band in it. What was once the mark of utter uncoolness, a veritable byword of selling out, has become the norm. More than a decade ago we became inured to the most unlikely parings. Led Zeppelin in a Cadillac ad. The Clash shilling for Jaguar. Bob Dylan warbling for an accounting firm, or Victoria's Secret. An Iggy Pop song about a heroin-soaked demimonde accompanying scenes of blissful vacationers on a Caribbean cruise ship.
There is no longer even a debate, let alone a stigma.
Can you imagine ... the horror, the horror of being denied floor seats for Kathy Griffin?
In its lawsuit against RMG, Ticketmaster essentially argues that the free market isn't all that free. In court filings last summer, Ticketmaster says that RMG's clients used bots to purchase, for example, 5 percent of the tickets to a Beastie Boys concert, and as much as 40 percent of the best floor seats to a show by comedian Kathy Griffin, denying the public a chance at these seats. Ticketmaster accused one broker of using the software to buy 45,000 tickets since 2003. Ticketmaster has since taken countermeasures to prevent such "assaults," but executives say automated buying still occurs.
American Music: OFF THE RECORD features theorists Noam Chomsky and Douglas Rushkoff in an interrogation of the American music industry. The film covers a great deal of ground from the authenticity of live music to the circumvention of the corporate machine by indie distribution, to the demise of the privately owned music store.
Many musicians and musical acts are featured including Richard Thompson, James McMurtry, Rodney Crowell, Lizzie West, Sonic Youth, David Lindley, Mission of Burma, Watermelon Slim, David Allen Coe, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Darden Smith, Carolyn Wonderland, The Mavericks, Bob Walkenhorst, The Alloy Orchestra, The Morells, Little Feat, Candy Coburn, Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, Billy Joe Shaver, Pavlov's Dog, Chubby Carrier, Buckethead, Lee Roy Parnell, The Blasters, Country Joe McDonald, Eddie “DEVILBOY” Turner, Big Bill Morganfield (son of Muddy Waters), Chris Duarte, Eric Lindell, Bugs Henderson, Les Dudek, Rick Derringer, Commander Cody, The Elders, Hothouse Flowers, Room Full of Blues, Webb Wilder, Chris Scruggs, Hank Williams III, John Mooney, The Belairs, Wanda Jackson, Paul Thorn, Rev. Billy Wirtz, Kerry Livgren, Iron Butterfly, It’s a Beautiful Day, Canned Heat, Les Paul, Tommy Castro and The Bottle Rockets, Diunna Greenleaf, WAR, Roger Miller, and Lee Oskar.
Here's what the Arkansas Times had to say:
Come for the discussion on the corporatized world of music production and distribution, stay for the celebrities! Led by Noam Chomsky and Douglas Rushkoff, “American Music: Off the Record” takes viewers on a tour through the paradox of the “music industry” — the industrial production of an art form — and finds some disquieting facts. Along the way, we meet Mission of Burma, David Allan Coe, Sonic Youth and other musicians who have found their own, idiosyncratic ways through the sweatshop stage of the capitalistic arts.
