“In the early ’70s, myself and a few friends were exchanging cassettes with each other. We’d all started to realize that what we liked best was long cassettes without much variety in them. You used to have allegro followed by andante and then largo and blah blah blah. None of us really wanted that. We weren’t after drama and surprise. We wanted a single continuous atmosphere. Then, when my friend Judy Nylon left my flat that day and left the record at too low a volume, and it was raining outside, I could only hear the music as part of the landscape. I wasn’t sure what was music and what was just the sound of rain on the window. That’s when I thought, “O.K., this is where I want to be” — sort of on the edge of music, not firmly in the center of it.”

– http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/q-a-brian-eno-on-the-best-use-of-a-television-why-art-students-make-good-pop-stars-and-the-meaning-of-visual-music/?ref=todayspaper

King Krule – Easy Easy (David Letterman 10-28-13)

“

The famous quotation, widely attributed to Brian Eno, that “only a thousand people bought the Velvet Underground’s début, but they all started bands” is not wrong; if anything, it is conservative, though we have to range over many albums to size up Reed’s impact. “What Goes On” gave us the Feelies; “Sister Ray” gave us Spacemen 3; the third, self-titled Velvet Underground album gave us Galaxie 500, and maybe a chunk of the independent rock music made in New Zealand during the late nineteen-eighties. Reed’s tendency toward structural simplicity married to noise, and a faith that no word was above his listener’s head, is at the root of so much music that I am scared to make a list, in fear of the counterlists that will point out everyone who is missing.

On the Pixies’ 1987 début, “Come On Pilgrim,” Frank Black sang, “I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed.” That’s a fairly solid citation, so we’ve got one, for sure. We could venture further and say that David Byrne, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, and Ian Curtis would have thought very differently about music if not for Reed’s existence. The real list of who loved Lou Reed songs is probably something like “everyone,” though that doesn’t do much for anyone looking to find something to listen to right now. His work spans my life and is woven into it, and it is impossible to imagine my own imagination without thinking of the direction in which Reed told me to look. Some people have Dylan, some have Tori, others have Kanye. I started with Lou, and he rarely failed me, even when he failed me. (Hell, I liked “Lulu,” give or take twenty minutes.) Dylan, in the director Todd Haynes’s formulation “wasn’t there,” which is a brilliant plan. Reed, for better or worse, was always right in front of us, no different from anyone, except that he had some pretty nice guitars. But he barely pretended to be a singer, and the simplicity of those songs lulled so many of us into thinking we could do that, because, hey, there wasn’t even a third chord on “Heroin,” just two! That isn’t so hard.

”

– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2013/10/postscript-lou-reed-obit.html

“In this era where cultural products seem to live forever digitally, the fear of music becoming lost to time may seem distinctly outdated. But efforts to preserve America’s audio history have never been more active than they are right now. Jack White has become the public face of these efforts, recently donating $200,000 to the National Recording Preservation Foundation, affiliated with the Library of Congress. He sits on the board with producer T. Bone Burnett, Sub Pop label founder Jonathan Poneman, legendary engineer George Massenburg and other music luminaries. What, exactly, are they trying to save? Turns out, a lot: Their ambitions are nothing smaller than protecting the entirety of America’s sonic history.”

– http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/just-how-much-of-musical-history-has-been-lost-to-history/279948/

Arcade Fire – Here Comes the Night Time

Directed by Roman Coppola. Featuring ‘Here Comes The Night Time,’ ‘We Exist,’ and ‘Normal Person’ from the new album REFLEKTOR out Oct 29th.

Jimmy, the Roots & the cast of Sesame Street play the “Sesame Street” theme on classroom instruments in the Late Night Music Room.

Madonna Sings Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars”

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So, for instance, when Kanye sampled Otis Redding on Watch the Throne, music critic Chris Richards probably got it right when he said, “although West’s creation sounded cool, the overriding message was, ‘This cost me a lot of money.’”

Thanks to a corporate and legal system that rappers don’t control, that’s one of the underlying messages of just about any sample today. This is a significant break from the early days of hip hop. As Shocklee explains it, “The reason why we sampled in the beginning was that we couldn’t afford to have a guitar player come in and play on our record. We couldn’t afford to have that horn section…or the string sections. We were like scavengers, going through the garbage bin and finding whatever we could from our old dusty records.” In a complete paradigm shift, today it’s probably less expensive to hire those string sections than to sample them.

”

– http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/did-the-decline-of-sampling-cause-the-decline-of-political-hip-hop/279791/