Howling Kettles' rabid hoe-down

I've got my first Dusted review of the year up now, a consideration of Howling Kettles' home-brewed string band rambles. Howling Kettles is another project from Sam Moss, who lives down the road in Brattleboro and has appeared on a couple of Imaginational Anthem comps. I still haven't met him or seen him play, but maybe some day...

The Howling Kettles
The Parlor is Pleasant on Sunday Night


When I reviewed Sam Moss’s Neighbors last year, I was struck by how solitary it was, how it explored the lonely, desolate side of the Americana experience in stark, slow-tempo combinations of voice and banjo (and a little guitar). The Howling Kettles, Moss’ string band collaboration with Jackson Emmer, is completely different: giddily communicative, celebratory, and wildly, rhythmically physical.

More here

You can hear the whole thing at the Howling Kettles' website.

In other news, a big shout-out to the cloud, which has somehow preserved a long-lost copy of Art Brut's Bang Bang Rock and Roll and, a couple of days ago, reinstalled it on my iTunes. I'm listening to it right now. What a fun record. Looks like there's also a Stereolab album with my name on it, good times.



Also, I have given up on Pictures in Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Music from Dust-to-Digital. Turns out that the music of past centuries, laboriously transcribed into pictograms and ressurrected just-add-water style sounds a lot like the static between radio stations (and also some of it sounds like calliope). Anyway, I'm willing to grant it's an interesting idea, but listen to its 28 tracks three more times in a row and then have them pop up sporadically on random shuffle? No thanks.

Drop Down Florida's one-string wizard

I'm repeating myself, I know, but still working through this truckload dump from Dust-to-Digital, and enjoying very much the archival Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African American Music 1977-1980. It's about a third blues, a third gospel and a third sacred harp singing, and all of it quite good, but I am especially loving the tracks from one-string virtuoso Moses Williams, from Inna, Bena Mississippi (he says), who constructed an instrument out of one length of wire. Williams has a fine, gravelly voice, but the fascinating thing is the way the wire reverberates, a very metallish sort of sound, almost industrial, quite at odds with the traditional melodies.



Pretty cool, isn't it?

Lonnie Holley

Okay for one thing, I have put far, far, far too much new music onto my iTunes lately...neither my iPod touch nor my shuffle will update anymore because new stuff automatically goes onto them and there's more of it than will fit, even after taking a shitload of other stuff off the touch. I don't usually care about capacity because 2 GB is plenty in terms of what you can actually listen to, but this is a special case.

It happened mostly because I got a DL of three new releases from Dust to Digital, which I was, of course, pretty excited about and didn't even notice that, in total, I was adding about half a MG to the library in the process. So now I'm swimming through archival, oddball, field recorded music -- in particular a 53 track compilation of blues, gospel and sacred harp music from Florida -- and if I can catch up in two weeks, that'll be a good thing. There is also a lengthy Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Music recording, which I haven't even cracked yet. (Educed, apparently, means that the music has been represented in pictoral terms sometime in the past, and that the artists have turned it back into the sound...interesting idea, haven't really had time to listen yet.]

But meanwhile, I am fascinated by a shorter, more digestible album by the outsider artist Lonnie Holley, mostly famous for his sculptures, but also, on his own terms, a singer/composer, who improvises lyrics over weirdly apocalyptic, minimalist keyboard arrangements. His voice is, I think, untrained, but extremely soulful -- it's like freeform, hallucinogenic Marvin Gaye -- unbelievable stuff.

Here's a video with music and also some of his art.