Folkways Mini Mix

I’m spending this summer in Washington, D.C.!

For years as a college radio DJ, I said that my dream job would be to work at Smithsonian Folkways, the institution’s record label that specializes in regional folk music, field recordings and spoken word. The dream is coming true — temporarily and with no pay, but I’ll take it.

To get myself psyched up, I wanted to make a D.C.-themed mix, mostly so I could start it with that Magnetic Fields song. Instead I pulled out the few Folkways records I have in my collection and picked some favorites. If you’re unfamiliar with the label, here’s a tiny primer.

The greatest thing about Folkways is the detailed liner notes that come with each record: descriptions of musicians and instruments, translations of lyrics, and social contexts to what you’re hearing. (Sorry I can’t share those too.)

The other greatest thing is that every single record they’ve ever released is still, in a way, in print. You can order anything from their catalog digitally, on CD, or on tape. If the professionally manufactured copies are gone, they will burn you a CD-R or dub you a tape and Xerox all the liner notes. You can also listen to snippets of everything online (that’s where I got all the spoken word bits.)

This is a pretty measly sampling of all Smithsonian Folkways has to offer. Hopefully through the summer I’ll have much more to share!

Track list:

Answering Machine Answers

What can you tell about a person from the people who call him?

Today I paid $5 for this old Panasonic micro-cassette answering machine at Berda Paradise Thrift Store in Silver Lake to find out.

Paul Gray is a man who tunes pianos, lives in Echo Park with a 666 home phone number, stands up two women on a date, and supports his local credit union over a major international bank. Not a bad aural portrait painted.

Upon further investigation online, I also found out that Paul is a Registered Piano Technician and is USC and LACC’s official piano tuner. Ha!

Sidenote: I had ended up at the thrift store on a mission to find some silly sounds. I considered recording the shopkeeper and a customer who were chatting away, especially after the latter mentioned doing a photo shoot in a hot tub. Turns out it was Anna Maria Horsford from Friday and Friday After Next.

A Mother’s Day Message

When I record people’s voices, it’s usually for the pure novelty and silliness of it. I’ve always enjoyed eavesdropping, and the pocket-sized ability to document little snippets of other people’s lives and replay them for my own amusement opened up a whole new world of audio voyeurism.

It’s more daunting to think about audio recording as a real preservation of voices. When my grandma was recovering from a stroke, my cousin and I decided we better take the opportunity to interview her while we still could. We set up a recorder and asked her about growing up in the Philippines, moving to America, and if she really thought Obama could win the 2008 election just because he’s handsome. She turned out to be fine.

When my mom was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer not long after, I knew I should do an audio interview with her, too. I knew I should ask her about growing up in Okinawa, crying when she first rode a boat across the Pacific Ocean and saw that the Golden Gate Bridge was not actually gold, and raising my brother and me — all stories I know but wish I could hear again and again.

For two years while my mom was fighting sickness, undergoing chemotherapy and altering her diet, I knew I needed to record her, but I couldn’t. It meant it would be my last chance to ask her questions I always wanted to ask. It meant admitting to myself that, soon, she wouldn’t be around to tell me stories.

The last time I talked to my mom, it was a Gmail video chat while I was in Okinawa and she was home in Sacramento. It was a short conversation — the sun had just come out after days of rain, so I showed off my new Japanese haircut and told her I better go to take a walk. I couldn’t have known that was it.

That was three years ago. I’ve searched Google in hopes that they secretly archive video chats (they don’t). I’ve gone through old cassette tapes in case of some long-lost home recordings (none, yet).

Each Mother’s Day, I try to find something to put on this blog in memory of my mom, but the only audio I’ve dug up is this from our home answering machine:

So here’s the real Mother’s Day message: Don’t wait. Don’t wait until your mom is sick or it’s your last chance. Document her voice now, frequently, whenever she wants to tell you tales about her life. Get a voice recorder, download a phone app, or unearth your Walkman, because these are stories worth preserving.

It’s nice to think you can rely on your memory of a person and everything they’ve ever told you, but, even if you can, it would be comforting to have some audio memories backed up.

Anacortes Unknown #2

By a stroke of serendipity, the Cheap Flight I found for a spring break in Seattle coincided with the Anacortes Unknown Music Series #2. AUMS #1 was a lower-key festival than its What’s the Heck? Fest predecessor, and this installment was even mellower still.

The one-day event, titled “OURS” — organizer Geneviève Castrée  claimed the name was not so much about a feeling of inclusion as the importance of a woman’s right to choose — featured a nearly all-female lineup.

I’m not going to post as many tracks as I have in festivals past, partly because none of the recordings turned out that great and partly because I recorded Lois saying something like “I hope all you people with recording devices are going to keep it to yourselves, keep it ours.” Whoops.

Well, I’m only going to share this one, to get you stoked for AUMS #3 in July. Here’s Lloyd & Michael:

During this song, I was thinking, “These are some pretty heavy Mark Knopfler-style riffs.” At the end, Ian leaned over to me and said, “Man, those were some pretty heavy Mark Knopfler-style riffs!”

The music at the festival was good, but really the highlights for me were the ethnomusicology lecture about Hildegard von Bingen by one half of Lloyd & Michael, Marianna Ritchey, and the finale dance party DJ’d by the other half, Katy Davidson (a.k.a. DJ Weird Cactus). She played “Killing in the Name” and Craig initially laughed but then rocked out harder than I’ve ever seen.

Punishment in a Basement

I won’t pretend to be any kind of expert on the DIY music scene in Seattle, but William Statler seems to be a favorite. His usually one-man act Punishment was infamous for letting a constant plague of technical difficulties dissolve into a legitimate comedy routine, cracking self-deprecating jokes while juggling MIDI keyboards and minidiscs.

But he seemed to have it together when I saw him play in the basement of Another Dream. Along with drums and an EWI, it was an almost regrettably error-free set — except when William decided one track should be sped up 8%, and everything the EWI played was, by necessity, out of tune.

Gamelan Pacifica

The Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle hosts a student gamelan class and a seasoned community group, Gamelan Pacifica.

The ensemble includes the standard Javanese instruments made of bronze, but I first learned of them through a recording at KDVS using an aluminum gamelan!

So when my fellow Davis gamelan expat Mike joined Gamelan Pacifica, and my trip to Seattle coincided with his first performance with them, I was quite excited.

The show was Maggie Brown’s senior composition recital, featuring also complex and moving pieces for various Western instrumentations. She composed both the music — alas, on the bronze set — and lyrics for the gamelan song, “Sun Time in Slendro.”

Things I realized after writing and uploading this:
1) The vocalist Jessika Kenney has collaborated with Sun O))), Sun City Girls and the Black Cat Orchestra, among others.
2) Cornish College already uploaded the entire recital on Soundcloud.

Seattle Buskers Are Great

When I’m visiting another city and I see busking musicians in the street, I always get the urge to record it, just for travel documentation purposes. But it’s almost always a guy or two on acoustic guitars, sounding exactly like a guy or two on acoustic guitars sounds on every other sidewalk, so I keep moving.

But this guy from Cuba on The Ave, the heavily foot-trafficked strip of shops and cheap eats parallel to the University of Washington, kept my attention for a full five minutes. He had to rest in between songs to recover from the physical intensity of “marimba salsa!”

(Note: I didn’t make that fade at the end. He’s just a wiz.)