Mike Mewborne
Art, faith, education, social commentary, and daily happenings.
It’s difficult for me to not feel like I have multiple personalities. Perhaps people have infinite personalities, but one default. Or perhaps their personalities all get sifted through the same spout or lens, and so it appears to be one though they are many.
I especially notice this tension within my own music. There are times when I want to be a singer songwriter, captivating a room with nothing but my humble words and guitar picking. Other times, I want to stand out, to be more aggressive, to catch people off guard with glitchy beats and strange synth sounds.
While The Lovely Few continue to venture further into outer space, this week I will have a chance to come back down to earth, at least a bit. I’ll be playing two solo performances with my friend Steven Fiore. Steven is releasing a new record and playing a few shows between Charleston, SC, and Nashville, TN. I’ll be opening for him this Tuesday at Red Door in West Columbia, SC, and Wednesday night at Coffee Underground in Greenville, SC.
Please come hang out with us! I’ll be playing guitar with some minimal beats I’ve made using Figure on my phone. I’m excited about doing something new. Steven is always amazing. He really is. If you live in South Carolina and haven’t seen him, you really need to. If you have seen him, you know you need to see him again.
Join us. This Tuesday and Wednesday. Stay tuned to The Lovely Few’s Twitter handle for more, and be sure to check in with Steven on Twitter and Bandcamp (where you can get his music) as well.
Top photo by Alan Davis at the Johnson City, TN, Cracker Barrel.
You can sell an old CD to a record store, but what about songs from your iTunes library? Our friends at Planet Money tell story of a company that tried to set up an online marketplace where people can buy and sell old mp3s, and what happened to them.
this is great. record stores, star trek, debating existence…
lots of cool things to think about, as a consumer, an artist, a citizen of the digital world.
Vyie! Tonight, Raleigh NC, Deep South the Bar @ 9pm.
PLUS…they’ll be hosting an awesome lil’ party afterwards!
WHAT!?!?!? afterparty with Vyie!?!?!?
Raleigh, you need to get out to this.
oh. ooh. oh.
Packing for the first Beams performance. Flying to Seattle in the morning. See you soon Decibel Festival. (Taken with Instagram)
very interesting analysis on how music’s growth as an art is complicated by it’s entanglement with pop culture, idol worship (pun intended), and reaching backwards to go forward. favorite line, however shallow, might be “caught in the pop ages.”
Grizzly Bear stopped by the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., last night. Hear our recording of the show.
Photos by Christopher Parks/NPR.
(via npr)
In this excerpt from his new book, How Music Works, musician David Byrne explores some of the latest neuroscience regarding how it is, exactly, certain patterns of sound that fall within particular ranges of frequencies can affect our brains so greatly:
“…the sonic range that matters and interests us the most is identical to the range of sounds we ourselves produce. Our ears and our brains have evolved to catch subtle nuances mainly within that range, and we hear less, or often nothing at all, outside of it. We can’t hear what bats hear, or the subharmonic sound that whales use. For the most part, music also falls into the range of what we can hear. Though some of the harmonics that give voices and instruments their characteristic sounds are beyond our hearing range, the effects they produce are not. The part of our brain that analyzes sounds in those musical frequencies that overlap with the sounds we ourselves make is larger and more developed—just as the visual analysis of faces is a specialty of another highly developed part of the brain.”
Do yourself a favor and go read the whole fascinating piece over at Smithsonian. Some recommended listening to accompany it.
