Mike Seeger is wrapping up a residency at UCLA this weekend with the famous Ashgrove Festival. This week he gave talks on the journey of the guitar through America, as well as history on other instruments found in old timey America. Including the Jew's harp, which he is holding above, the banjo, and more obscure instruments such as the banjo ukulele and the quills (a southern pan pipe). Some highlights were Seeger and his wife playing a Carter Family song and the Elizabeth Cotton song, "Freight Train."

http://www.mikeseeger.com

Mia Doi Todd

A late report of Mia Doi Todd at the Echo! About a decade ago folk music was in a place that could be characterized as making country folk cool. Whether it was a slide guitar or a tex-mex backbeat. Now folk music seems to be in a romantic period, with themes shifting from drugs, drinking, and relationships to nature and transcendental thought. Yes, yes, all these themes and instrumentalization are a constant somewhere in folk, but right now folk music is quite romantic, bringing to mind Nick Drake, John Fahey, or any folk musician of the psycho-60's. Mia Doi Todd is a contemporary of Jose Gonzalez and Devendra Banhart, who both focus on themes found in the art songs of traditional romanticism. With a droning harmonium at her feet, the keys being held in place by coins, she played her guitar and sang simple poems about love and nature. Now Mia Doi Todd is an example of this type of transcendental music being awesome. Her opening act, The Dead Flowers, can suck dick, because that is all they were doing last Thursday.

http://www.miadoitodd.com

4/10/08 - Karin Tatoyan at the Echo

karin tatoyan_0096
Originally uploaded by arbouler jameson, i love you!

Easily this was the most incredible display of musical intensity I've ever seen during my career as a show-goer. Karin Tatoyan and her band were great!A drum+drummachiner, cellist, and a french horner, all did backup to Karin's keyboard, theremin and vocal shenanigans. I showed up a little into their set but my attention was immediately grasped. All of the songs were excellent. There was a little bit of hip-hop beats with the drum machine and a lot of tastefull vocal and instrumental looping. The highlight of the show was about half way through the set. To paraphrase:

"This is so important to me right now. I feel like.... a nebula... out there...."

And she goes into this glorious song all wild eyed and crazy. She starts screaming and playing her theremin, eventually slamming it into the stage where it shatters and pieces of it fly off into the audience. The audience loved it, but it was sort of strange having such a small crowd applauding with such approval.

Vampire Weekend

So I found about these guys in the wee hours of this morning. Something like the Wailers, Police and some classical biznass mixed in.

Check them out:
http://www.vampireweekend.com/
http://www.myspace.com/vampireweekend

Nate Weiner

Credit: Eugene Goryachev

Wednesday night our very own Nate Weiner graced California Lutheran University sans the remaining members of his trio. We had a pretty solid attendance for CLU and Nate got down and was hanging out with the crowd before the show. Nate mostly played his own songs but mixed in a few covers and even a Gnarles Barkley reference. Even a few people in the crowd got in and back up vocals too. This was one of the more fun shows I've been to in a while.

Definitely hit him up:
http://www.nateweiner.com
http://www.myspace.com/nathanweiner

José González at the Wiltern

José González played an excellent show at the Wiltern last Tuesday night. The show was a lot more lo-fi than I had expected, with José starting it off solo. About a third of the way through the show two percussionists/backups joined and they went on to play until the pre-encore finale where the opening artists joined. Simple but wonderful.

http://www.myspace.com/josegonzalez

Justice - DVNO

This is by far one of the coolest music videos I've seen in a very long time. So Me does it again.