Fiddles on Friday XX

Today we have no fiddler but a beautiful cellist avant cellist named Zoë Keating

photo by Jeffrey Rusch

Zoë Keating is a Canadian-born cellist and composer based in San Francisco, California. Zoë is a one-woman orchestra. She uses a cello and a foot-controlled laptop to record layer upon layer of cello, creating intricate, haunting and compelling music. She's the Andrew Bird or Kishi Bashi on cello. First let's take a look at a stunning performance she did for Wired, this song is called "The Escape Artist". It's a perfect performance. In her shoes I would be affraid technology would fail or let me down... like computers sometimes do, but probably the loopstation is not Windows based ;-) I think she writes great compositions and never a dull moment no endles repeating but nice variations of rhythm, sounds, sphere, richness. It's not a surprise that her songs are often used as soundtracks (Breaking Bad, Elementary, The secret life of bees etc.). Here she's playing her song Lost from the album Into the Trees The next song she felt almost too embarrassed to play because she found it too simple, extremely simple even.....sigh Here's a more dark and rough-edged song she made in collaboration with the also møpkemuziek worthy artist Jane Woodman here's Tango. And here's a soundcloud link to a selection of her own favorites. 45 minutes of joy. Have a nice weekend!!!        

Fiddles of Friday XIII

No ordinary Fiddles on Friday today but a preview of a heartwarming film. This film shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings Landfill Harmonic is an upcoming feature-length documentary about a remarkable musical orchestra in Paraguay, where the musicians play instruments made from trash Cateura, Paraguay is a town essentially built on top of a landfill. Garbage collectors browse the trash for sellable goods, and children are often at risk of getting involved with drugs and gangs. When orchestra director Szaran and music teacher Fabio set up a music program for the kids of Cateura, they soon have more students than they have instruments. That changed when Szaran and Fabio were brought something they had never seen before: a violin made out of garbage. Today, there's an entire orchestra of assembled instruments, now called The Recycled Orchestra. Check and follow this great initiative on http://landfillharmonicmovie.wordpress.com/

Landfill Harmonic movie teaser from Landfill Harmonic on Vimeo.