Weekly Music Roundup: My Brightest Diamond and Rhiannon Giddens
Week of May 6: This week, a new song by My Brightest Diamond, a magnificent musical journey from Rhiannon Giddens, and the unexpected beauty of broken instruments.
PREMIERE: New Song/Video From My Brightest Diamond
Since releasing her first album under the name My Brightest Diamond in 2006, Shara Nova (formerly Shara Worden) has been a triple threat: an art-rock songwriter, a classical music composer, and a singer for whom a number of other contemporary composers have written music. My Brightest Diamond is where she gets to sing her own music, which is thoughtful without being mopey, and which demonstrates that songs sung from a woman’s point of view are also capable of balls-to-the-wall attitude. Today we premiere the new video for her song “Dorian,” which is the second single she’s released this year, after the Valentine’s Day’s song “Another Chance.” The occasion this time is the start of a new stretch of shows beginning on May 8 in Minneapolis and rolling into her old stomping grounds of New York on May 14. (Shara has lived in Detroit since 2009 but has continued to maintain a presence on the New York new music scene.) The song, which contains everything from birds to buzzing electric guitar, seems to occupy that tenuous place between love and obsession, between desire and the desire to control. The video is a similarly elusive blend of the abstract and the concrete, with hypnotic lines that resolve to form silhouetted people and birds.
My Brightest Diamond plays Rough Trade in Brooklyn on May 14.
“Black Swan” Is A Highlight From Rhiannon Giddens’ Stunning New Album
Rhiannon Giddens is a Grammy winner, a MacArthur Fellow (that’s the so-called “genius award”) and a superb singer, songwriter, and musical explorer. We first met her as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who resurrected the overlooked black string band music of the early 20th century. She has since moved on to a series of projects that have explored the music of the African diaspora, as well as Appalachian/Anglo-Irish folk music. The two are actually quite closely related, most clearly in the banjo, which originated in West Africa before being adapted and adopted by white Americans in the 19th century.
Now, Giddens has released a new album called there is no Other. Notice the capitalization of “Other” only – the album is a response to “othering”: the process of dividing people by race, nationality, political party, sexuality, or any of the other ways that we band together and then view outsiders as something “other.” Music is a great connector, and on the album Giddens works with the Italian-born, Irish-based multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi on songs, both traditional and original, that blend the sounds of the Near East, the Mediterranean, medieval music, jazz, and the African-American and British Isles-based folk traditions that we’ve come to expect from her.
There are too many tracks to highlight – but you can hear Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi perform some of them live in our studio on the Soundcheck podcast edition that comes out on May 16. I do want to mention, though, her version of “Black Swan.” Originally, this was an aria from the opera The Medium by Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti (best known for his Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors and for founding the Spoleto Festival). But Nina Simone created a version of the piece that stripped away the original neo-Romantic accompaniment and replaced it with a hypnotic, perhaps even obsessive, repeating piano figure.
Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi build on that – the song is still beautiful, still hypnotic, but as it goes along, listen to how Turrisi adds some almost electronic-sounding accordion and a rumble of thunder in the piano’s low register. It’s a canny choice: Giddens studied opera in college so “Black Swan” offers a chance to connect that world to the African-American experience (through Nina Simone) and to the contemporary sonic world that she and Turrisi create on this new album.
Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi play at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 4.
800 Broken Instruments Still Have Something To Say – And So Can You
Suites for a Broken Orchestra is a new recording with a surprising source: over 800 broken instruments from the Philadelphia school system. Apparently, Temple University’s contemporary art gallery somehow came into possession of all of the school district’s broken, bruised, and battered instruments, and instead of tossing them in the trash, they invited the artist-run record label Found Sound Records to record each instrument’s sounds – whatever sounds they could still make. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang then wrote a Symphony For Broken Instruments in which 400 musicians from the Philly area had to learn what their instruments could and could not do, and then figure out how to solve the musical problems posed by Lang’s written score. One by-product of this was the creation of a library of sampled sounds from all of these fractured, splintered, ruined instruments. So Found Sound Nation invited a long list of musicians to take those sounds and produce something from them. The results are widely varied, but in their own way, kind of wonderful and poignant. Here are instruments that are no longer considered musical, becoming musical again. Some fairly well known folks took part: the producer Daedalus and Son Lux’s Ian Chang both contributed works that put the squeaks and squawks of these instruments into a rhythmic pattern that helps get your ear used to the odd timbres. Composer Angelica Negron and singer/composer Julia Holter chose to use long, sustained tones that create unusual soundscapes. But the opening track of the album is by an entity I can find absolutely no information about: the track “A Broken Orchestra” is by Sinego B Side. Whoever he/she/they are, they’ve created a fun piece that seems to strut along while saying,”tuning? Who needs tuning – listen to this!”
Now, if you’re thinking, this sounds like fun, wish I could get in on it… you can! Found Sound Nation has posted an online typewriter of sorts: you type, and it triggers sounds from this vast array of samples. Find it here.
Calexico and Iron & Wine Collaborate On “Midnight Sun”
The ghosts of the Southwest seem to haunt the songs of Calexico, Joey Burns and John Convertino’s desert rock band. Back in 2005, they did an EP with folk-rocker Sam Beam, who records as Iron & Wine, and things went well enough that now they’re about to release an LP together. Their new single, “Midnight Sun,” is a cryptic fable full of poetic imagery and strangely alluring harmonies; Burns and Beam both have somewhat spectral voices, and they trade verses over a simmering, shimmering backdrop that only comes to a boil when Burns takes an edgy guitar solo. That solo doesn’t really end – it just stops, and then the voices reappear to provide a gentle, consoling conclusion. The video uses over 100 paintings that Sam Beam did for the forthcoming album’s cover – his own grizzly visage is easy to pick out, but Joey and John are equally, um, animated here.
The Calexico and Iron & Wine LP, Years To Burn, comes out on June 14.
A Miley Cyrus/Mark Ronson Song From An Irish Pub, Courtesy of Beoga
The Irish band Beoga came to wide attention when they collaborated with pop star Ed Sheeran on two tracks from his bestselling album “÷” and played on his headlining set at last year’s Glastonbury Festival. They look like a band you might see in any pub in Dublin – acoustic guitars, fiddle, accordion, and bodhran (the Irish frame drum, pronounced bow-ron); but they are tilling the surprisingly fertile ground between trad music and modern pop. This week they released a video of their performance of the Miley Cyrus/Mark Ronson song “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart.” On the one hand, nothing could be further from the original’s over-the-top, Hollywood-style video than this intimate look at the band in a corner of the local pub. On the other, the song has a plaintive quality that wouldn’t sound out of place in a folk song, or an old country tune – or in an Irish band’s set.
Beoga is opening for Johnnyswim at Brooklyn Steel on May 22.
