You’re never a few clicks away from discovering something new in the world of music these days. Do you feel like hearing what your recently-settled cousins and friends in Australia are listening to? Tune in the online radio stream of Triple J. Need some warm tones on a wintry day? Listen to a Trinidadian calypso band covering Michael Jackson on Spotify. Want to know what’s blaring from speakers in Ohio? Click to a local Cleveland music blog to find out.
Doing that kind of work in the past required dedication, travel and a lot of recording tape. Which is exactly why field-recordist Alan Lomax is so revered and important to the history of music. For most of his lifetime, Lomax travelled around the US to the UK, Ireland, the Caribbean and mainland Europe archiving and recording folk music of the world. He was the first man to capture Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie to tape. When he died in 2002, he left 5000 hours of audio recordings behind (along with 3000 videotape and 5000 photographs) and a trail of invaluable ethnomusicology.
In February, 17,400 songs from the Alan Lomax archive were published online for all to hear at research.culturalequity.org. Every false start, every interview, ambient recording, mic checks and abandoned performance is available. Dating from 1946 up to the ’90s, there’s a lifetime of exploration. Chicago blues man Big Bill Bronzy performing in Paris, calypso concerts captured in New York, West Indies folk, English children’s lullabies, chain gang songs recorded in Mississippi State Penitentiary, New Orleans jazz, Soviet wedding songs, Transylvanian funeral laments and Moroccan courtship music.
Of particular interest to Irish listeners is the collection of music recorded here in 1951 and 1953. Made in co-operation with the BBC, Radió Éireann and the Irish Folklore Commission, it includes performances captured in Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Dublin as well as renditions of songs from Seamus Ennis, singer Margaret Barry and Brendan Behan in London. The world is now an instant global jukebox but Lomax was the originator.
It was a temporary victory for the power of the internet. On January 18th, in opposition to the proposed US anti-piracy legislation of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), huge websites such as Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, Flickr and an estimated 115,000 other sites either blocked access to their services or publicly opposed both acts. Wikipedia’s 24 hour blackout page was accessed by 162 million people worldwide, 2.2 million tweets with the hashtag #SOPA were sent and 3 million emails were sent via the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other digital groups. The result of the blackout was a huge shift in opinion against SOPA/PIPA in the US Congress.
It’s worth reading up on why SOPA and PIPA are not ideal (If you’re stuck for time, The Oatmeal’s animated gif at theoatmeal.com/sopa explains it pretty succinctly). Their heavy handed answer to online piracy gives a lot of power to large entertainment companies to shut down and block access to sites it suspects of listing copyright infringement whether the sites exist in the USA or outside it. This means that sites such as Youtube, Facebook, Tumblr, Soundcloud and thousands upon thousands of blogs and sites could not operate as they now do. In an extreme case, Twitter could be shut down because of a single infringing tweet. Continue Reading..»
The next time you see a stranger lying down on the ground motionless in public, there may be a relatively harmless reason. In fact, they’re probably participating in the latest internet craze, “facedown”.
The idea is simple. Pick a public place, the more random the better, lie down horizontally with your hands by your side, straight as you can and get someone to snap a photo. Upload to Facebook or Twitter, and it becomes a part of the hottest social networking phenomenon since sleeveface (augmenting a vinyl record cover with your own body – see sleeveface.com).
Facedown seems to have captivated the Irish internet-using public in the past week but it has been happening for a few years. Memorable facedowns include a young man lying in the cheese counter in Tesco, an ambitious Limerick resident balanced precariously on a large road sign and others on top of goalposts, the pavement outside a fast food restaurant, a Gardaí car, atop a garage roof, an airport runway and a bridge.
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We all know what a pain it is to damage an electronic device. Whether you stupidly drop your phone down the toilet, put your iPod through the wash or lose all your data on your laptop (Disclosure: Only one of these did not happen to me), you are sure to be kicking yourself. Either you have to restore your phone numbers into a banjaxed brick of a phone with a broken screen, or you have to convince Apple customer care that the iPod just inexplicably ceased functioning (Tip: Sunlight and hairdrying it for a week might help, but I didn’t tell you…), or you have to transfer all your files from that external hard-drive you cleverly bought. But here’s a very 21stcentury dilemma. What happens when both your external hard-drives containing all your music, videos, photos and important work files stop working at the same time??
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