The streets of Cairo are mad with cabs and cars and trucks packed to the gills with livestock. They jockey for position along wide avenues, sans lanes. Old Fiats belch diesel. Pedestrians dart between vehicles. Policemen direct traffic at intersections. And a constant chorus of honking runs through it all. But directly off main thoroughfares are coffeehouses or ahwas where patrons drink Turkish coffee, play backgammon, and smoke shisha, escaping the din. Ahwas are everywhere, if sometimes hidden, an integral part of the city’s life.
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New York-based singer Joe Hurley collaborated with National Book Award winner Colum McCann to write “The House that Horse Built” (Let the Great World Spin), a 12-minute track inspired by a chapter in McCann’s novel about 1970s New York, Let the Great World Spin. The limited edition EP was produced by Don Fleming (Sonic Youth, Pete Yorn, Nancy Sinatra, Hunter S. Thompson) and is currently available for download here.
While this song is told from the point of view of Tilly, a black prostitute who loses her daughter, rumor is that the pair is working on nine additional tracks inspired by other characters from the book for a full-length album that would coincide with the release of the paperback version in the UK.
If you live in New York, check out the album release party on December 8th at Joe’s Pub. Hurley will perform “The House that Horse Built” live for the first time with the full band, and McCann is scheduled to appear as well.
Download an excerpt from the book here.
Asobi Seksu‘s woozy, sugar-sweet pop songs sound as if they were built with a microscope, their lushness a product of singer/keyboardist Yuki Chikudate and guitarist James Hanna’s extreme attention to detail. When their UK label asked them to record acoustic versions of some of their best songs at the legendary Olympic Studios, the offer was equally frightening and fun. “Because it was such a short time frame, there wasn’t enough time for fear or doubt to kick in. We knew we had to move in order to get it done, and that turned out in our favor, really,” explains Chikudate. “If we’re given more time, it can easily become a perfectionist nightmare.”
Yet the result, Rewolf, sounds just as lush, with a quiet intimacy and effortlessness that brings Chikudate’s voice and the band’s melodies into greater focus. Chikudate talks to Flavorpill about Rewolf, performing “naked,” and the artists that inspired the album’s arrangements.
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Two twenty-something, upper class, educated, Jewish girls traipse around the United States looking for the feminism of a new generation, and once they find it, one of them kills herself. That’s not exactly what the back cover of Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism reads, but that’s one version of what happened. Best friends since 1997, Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein decided to take a road trip and talk to a cross section of young women about the F-word. They met 127 women — including a sex shop clerk, a Bible college student, a witch, a future nun, a former Air Force worker, a 28-year-old mother of six, and an anarchist — to find out why some woman love feminism with a fierceness and why others don’t relate to it at all.
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Joe Swanberg may be best known as the lo-fi filmmaker responsible for such features as Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends and, most recently, Alexander the Last. But, since 2006, he’s also been directing and c0-starring in IFC.com’s addictive web series, Young American Bodies, which chronicles the romantic lives of a group of 20-something friends in Chicago.
While the show’s subject matter — marriage, infidelity, long-distance relationships — doesn’t differ greatly from what we’re used to seeing in more mainstream sex comedies, its style is pure Swanberg: spontaneous, vérité and, above all, authentic. In fact, those of us who happen to be in our 20s may find the resemblance between YAB and our own lives uncanny. And that’s no accident. As Swanberg says, “If we don’t represent ourselves in the media, no one else is going to.” Oh, and did we mention there’s full-frontal nudity, too?
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SucceedBlog is an overnight SUCCEED. “It’s totally picking up steam,” says co-creator David Littlejohn, who launched the website yesterday afternoon. This morning, he and co-creator Jim Haas with “web ninja” Mark Neigh woke up to a staggering 20,000 hits. SucceedBlog is the counter-site to FailBlog.
As you can guess, instead of highlighting life’s failures by matching tragically embarrassing photographs with the word “Fail,” the site uses the word “SUCCEED” to celebrate moments of unparalleled human achievement. Like this one dude who is particularly talented at stacking Legos.
“Everybody wants to see ‘succeeds,’ everybody wants to see people succeed, our country succeed. It’s just a lot more positive,” Littlejohn explains. “It’s always funny — since the beginning of time, I imagine — to see someone kicked in the nuts, or fall down, or trip. You’re just going to laugh at that. There’s something a lot more inspiring in succeeding.”
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Ever since opening for Bjork at Housing Works in May, Icelandic singer Ólöf Arnalds has been the talk of the blogosphere. And with good reason: her debut album, Vid og Vid, is an indie-folk gem consisting of ten perfectly crafted songs. Her voice evokes her classical training while hinting at a more modern sound. We sat with Ólöf — who plays at the Whitney Museum tonight and Rockwood Music Hall on Monday — to chat about her work with Sigur Ros’ Kjartan Sveinsson, crazy cars, and her second album. Read all about it after the jump.
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Our friends at David Lynch Foundation Television paid a studio visit to Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, and we’ve got first dibs on the interview. In it, Corgan discusses his creative process and there’s footage of him working on new Smashing Pumpkins material/holding auditions for their new drummer. He also gives the back story on how “Eye” ended up on the Lost Highway soundtrack. Here’s what Lynch has to say about Corgan: “Billy Corgan is a magical musician — a singer/songwriter with his own unique voice and way… a deep honest coolness emerges every time and his music has a big lasting power.”
Watch the video after the jump.
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Suggestion: it’s going to be a good autumn for David Wingo, a musician perhaps best known for his work with filmmaker David Gordon Green. The end of October brings with it the opening of Gentlemen Broncos, a Jared Hess-directed comedy about science-fiction writers, for which Wingo composed the score. Come November, Belly of the Lion, his second album recorded under the name Ola Podrida, will be released on Western Vinyl. It’s a rich, textured work, edging Wingo’s Americana-focused concerns into a territory that sounds — dare I say it — pretty close to cinematic.
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Brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner take a break from recording the latest National album this week to perform a new multimedia work at BAM in collaboration with visual artist Matthew Ritchie. In just over an hour, The Long Count tackles such heady ideas as the beginning of time through myth, songs, and raw orchestral power. We caught up with Bryce Dessner to talk about the origins of this ambitious project, how Kim and Kelley Deal got involved, and what to expect from the new National album.
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