Award shows on TV keep the best for last in order to keep their audience hostage and their advertisers happy, but the web apparently doesn’t work like that. So,lets get this show on the road!

Album of the Year 2009

The Crimson Wing OST, by TCO

This has got to be the album I’ve listened to most this year -and it is in fact the album I’m listening to as I write this post. It is the truly epic soundtrack to The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos film, a Disney Nature documentary. The music is by the ever awesome The Cinematic Orchestra. Take a look at the trailer to get an idea of what the movie is about.

[youtube width="560" height="340"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23j5r7cJQ5w[/youtube]

If you know of The Cinematic Orchestra, you’ll note that the trailer uses a song from their album Breathe. The song does not feature on the Soundtrack, but it does feature Louise Rhodes, a guest star on the Breathe album and of Lamb fame.

The Crimson Wing soundtrack is written by J. Swincoe, lead man of TCO, who has the full use of the London Metropolitan Orchestra to create a melodramatic, subtle and at times epic soundtrack. The album starts small and fragile with harp, piano and guitar, but with the LMO’s strings and brass sections accompanying them, the tracks get a full body and character.

My favorite track is ‘Transformation‘. I haven’t seen the movie (is hasn’t been released here in the NL), but you can clearly imagine the sun rising, the world waking, and hope flooding the world. The central theme just breathes that ‘everything will be alright now’, culminating into a grand finale worthy of the biggest concert halls.

Tracklist:

1. Opening Titles (2:53)
2. Arrival of the Birds (2:38)
3. The Dance (3:21)
4. Soda (3:11)
5. Hatching (5:12)
6. Marabou (3:56)
7. Exodus (7:17)
8. Transformation (5:16)
9. Hyena (1:49)
10. Life of the Bird (3:33)
11. First Light (4:06)
12. Crimson Skies (Featuring Lou Rhodes) (3:24)

New Discovery of 2009

Please note that this category -this whole post for that matter- is extremely subjective and relative. There’s so much great music out there, this is just what I found and enjoyed. My discovery for 2009 is DJ/producer/singer Ben Westbeech. Mr. Westbeech is from Bristol, UK, a hotbed of creativity, or so I’m told. He’s trained as a cellist and vocalist, and he uses his soulful singing talents during his DJ sets.

Ben Westbeech

I first saw him perform live at the RAW Rhythm festival in Amsterdam, where he was truly giving the festival some needed flavor and spicing things up a bit. His DJ set -sometimes combined with the Jazzanova crew who were scheduled to perform next- was awesome. He played some of his own tracks too, from his album ‘Welcome to the best years of your life’. Ben gave a CD containing his first single “So good today” to a friend in London. Two months later she played it to Gilles Peterson who snapped it up. This led to Ben being signed to Gilles Peterson’s new label, Brownswood Recordings. His debut albumWelcome to the Best Years of Your Life was released in March 2007.

Later this year, he did a set at the Amsterdam Dance Event Strictly Defected (in da house) night over at Club Panama*. His talent is in both truly enjoying himself when spinning the decks, showing a passion for good music and different styles -funk, house, jazz, soul, and using his smooth voice to create an extra dimension to his sets.

For those of you who are into that sort of thing, you can follow him on Twitter as well: @benwestbeech. Keep an eye out for him, as he’s going to get bigger and bigger!

Best Podcast of 2009

Yes, I have an iPod, and an iPhone, and a Mac, so I do listen to podcasts. But choosing the one I liked best in 2009 is going to be difficult, as it’s a close call between 2 excellent podcasts, really. The first is @dennisruyer’s Radio 538 Dance Department podcast.

This is the online version of the leading Dutch radio station Radio 538′s dance music show. It’s been in the iTunes top 10 most downloaded podcasts for quite a while now, which should tell you something of the quality of the music featured on the show. Basically, it showcases some of the best new dance tracks and artists, and is a great show to listen to in just about any circumstance. Dennis has many friends among the world’s top DJ’s and producers, giving him access to many not-yet-released tunes and some of the hottest gossip. But it’s more then that, Dennis is also a gifted DJ and aspiring producer (with his mate Prinsjan), giving the show a great tension buildup and rhythm of its own. This makes almost every show a great show to listen to, with never a dull moment.

The other podcast is the Solid Steel podcast, which is a collaboration between Ninja Tunes‘ DK and Serato, producter of sofware for DJ gear (for anyone who feels the urge to buy me something expensive, please look for their Numark S7 solution -not that I’m any good at DJing, but you’ve got to start somewhere! ). The Solid Steel podcast has some true gems, and some where I go ‘meh’. But the gems make up for all the ‘meh’s. DK is an excellent DJ, who is able to combine hip-hop with drum-and-bass and warm soul and classic jazz. It’s this that makes the Solid Steel shows legendary. Plus, some of Ninja Tunes’ finest have featured on Solid Steel radio making it a great archive for progressive nu-jazz and whatnot.

So, subscribe to both podcasts, now!

I attended two or three editions of Drum Rhythm, and saw some of the most memorable performances I have ever experienced there. I saw Lamb perform a truly magical and energetic set, I saw Leftfield give one of their last performances, I saw Austrian lounge-duo Kruder & Dorfmeister getting a crowd jumping, and many many more.

So I was very happy to discover that there will be a new edition of this festival, and even happier when I found out that my favorite band Lamb had actually reformed itself (after splitting up for solo projects a few years ago) and were going to perform there again! I created a Last.fm event for the festival, as there wasn’t one yet, added all the acts to the bandlist, and saw it grow and grow.

My brother, who is a professional concert and event photographer (he’s 3voor12 Amsterdam‘s phtography coördinator), has now arranged for two photographers wristbands for the whole festival! This means that we’ll be able to go backstage and go everywhere! So this is going to be a very memorable festival for me.

I’ll post a review and photo’s after the weekend!

In fact, it was back in 1983 that Stein and DiFranco, at the time working as an ad writer and a studio engineer respectively, learned about a nationwide remix contest called “Hey Mr. DJ Play That Beat Down by Law Switch the Licks Mastermix Contest” sponsored by Tommy Boy Records. Goal was to remix G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid‘s “Play That Beat Mr. DJ”. A panel including Afrika Bambaataa, Arthur Baker, and Shep Pettibone awarded it first prize after one listen, and the remix gained even more airplay than the original. Their mix was called “Lesson One: The Payoff Mix,” a track that sprinkled the usual funk breakbeats with a parade of samples from feature films and cartoons, including all manner of pop-culture references.

Steinski & Double Dee created more Lesson tracks, with the fourth Lesson track only preformed live once. I learned about the duo from the  Solid Steel podcast, the Coldcut and Ninja Tunes recordlabel affiliated radio station slash podcast station. In podcast ep 81 SolidSteel features an interview from 2002 with the duo, in which they talk to us about their experiences in the Way Back Days, at the start of modern hip-hop.

They later became great inspirators for artists like DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, the DJ Food collective, some of the worlds very best turntablists. A few months ago my brother and I went to the The Hard Sell show by DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist. There they performed a whole show remixing 45rpm records live on 4 decks, using only guitar pedals to create loops. The result was both very impressive and creative. It’s a mix of skill and creativity you don’t see all that often in hip-hop music nowadays. Take a look at this video of them performing here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcNmyhAeQ4k[/youtube]

The intersting thing about this (original?) subculture of hip-hop is the basic premisi that you can deconstruct and creatively recombine any creative expression into something new. Originality doesn’t necessarily stem from creating something new from scratch (no pun intended). And this basic premisis is at the core of the hip-hop culture, which makes it one of the biggest influences on modern day media and creativity inductry.

I’m definately not a big hip-hop fan -I lean more towards the turnablism part then towards the slap-yo-bitch-an-look-at-my-bling-bling style R&B that is branded as hip-hop nowadays. But remixing creative expressions is what the modern internet is mostly about. Not just musical samples, but your personal thoughts and ideas (using twitter, for example), text, film, just about anything and everything can be recombined into something fundamentally new. The whole copyright movement doesn’t realise this -yet, but the Creative Commons does, and supports and promotes use of existing creative work for other uses.

So, Steinski and Double Dee show me that remixing is what is is all about.

Róisín Murphy (by Dennis Stempher)

Yesterday we went to a concert of Róisín Murphy in Amsterdam’s Heineken Music Hall. Róisín is the former Moloko singer. We saw her before twice: once as part of Moloko, and once as part of a Groove Armada concert. Both times she brought great energy and a tight performance to the stage, so our expectations and hopes were high.

The show started a bit slow and tame, like she didn’t really feel like performing but was doing so anyway. Still, her voice is flawless, her band is incredible, and her background singers are awesome, so even then it was still a good concert. Not great tho.

Intermission

Then there was an awkward intermission, about a half hour into the show. This took over 5 minutes, during which some bits and pieces of music were played, and the band gathered to discuss -apparently. Because after the interlude she came back with a vengeance.

She left the commercial easy listening tunes for what they were, and played some of her new tracks. With a new energy, a new vibe, and an apparent love to perform them, she found the way into the hearts and ears of the crowd. Everybody on stage seemed to like this response to an experimental set, and they showed their appreciation by adding more and more energy and drama to the sounds and performance.

Dress up Diva

At one stage Róisín even dressed up in two intertwined inflatable dummies. Her stage dresses are stuff of legend already, as she changes clothes about 10 times during a show, one outfit even more extravagant then the other.

I was thinking that Stephen Fry should write a musical starring ms. Murphy. That would be cool

All in all an entertaining and a wee bit experimental show. We thoroughly enjoyed it