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321 : Tune-Yards Tune-Yards is Merrill Garbus who we went to see in Paris the other day. Her one-woman sampling-assed, ukulele-owning, Aretha-by-way-of-Sister-Gertrude-Morgan show is amazing. You should try and see her this week and next across the UK. Check out her crazy album BiRd-BrAiNs and look forward to the next which we are told will be "like Mary J Blige, but crazy." After the jump Merrill schools us on DROC, fairy houses and shape notes. Tune-Yards - Sunlight [mp3] 3 FACTS Merrill Garbus: "1. The year I graduated high school was also the year that Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo: 1997. I remember feeling impatient with how many times we had to learn and relearn names of countries just because the governments couldn’t get it together. I since then have felt very American and ignorant about that reaction, since the change of name had to do with a genocide, a war, and the ousting of a dictator. So the need for a name change, uh, makes sense. "2. Every summer of my life, for the first 18 years of it, I went to a camp in Massachusetts, where my mom taught music and played for folk dancing. It wasn’t a camp for kids, mostly, but for adults. We would mostly go to a week called Early Music Week where adults play gorgeous music from the pre-Renaissance and after, on recorders and viola de gambas and harpsichords. My sister and I would walk around the woods making fairy houses and hearing these harmonies which probably had a very big influence on my ears. "3. When I was 21 I lived in Kenya and became friends with some hip-hop musicians who lived in Dandora, one of the bigger slums in Nairobi. We decided to live closer to our friends so I and an American friend rented a small concrete cubicle there. We lived in Dandora for what felt like months but was probably a couple of weeks. I would wake up in the morning and go to get these donuts, fried fresh. They were delicious little golden puffs of dough. A whole bag of about 12 for 2 shillings, so like maybe 30 cents. I don’t eat doughy fried things anymore." 2 SONGS MG: "A shape note tune called Life’s Purpose, by Ron Kelly, who’s a contemporary composer. If you haven’t heard a shape note song, just youtube that stuff and play it really loud through non-computer speakers. A shape note song is like nothing else. It’s akin to other religious music, like choirs in black churches, or Russian Orthodox choirs. It consists of a large group of people singing at the top of their lungs, in the nasal part of their voices where you can make a lot of sound, singing like there’s no tomorrow, with all the breath they have in them. This song references the bible in this line that says, “Dust thou art to dust returneth/ was not spoken of the soul.” The way the music combines with those words creates this amazing feeling of being a champion of life, of overcoming all. I’m not religious but I’m human, what can I say." Ron Kelly - Life's Purpose [mp3] [Buy] "Chris Weisman, Rise! This song will always haunt me. You are in a desolate field outside a village in Hungary in 1956. The song is the story of that village sung by a freaking transformer, like the 1980’s kind. Therefore time is not linear, but instead a bunch-up of knots in a string of twine, making all of these eras that we think of as so far apart as parts of the same, huge knot. This song is The Reason Why Glossy Studio Recording Must Not Be The Standard That All High-Caliber Musicians Aspire To." Chris Weisman - Rise! [Snippet - stream only] [Buy] 1 WISH MG: "I wish that people living in poverty would soon have access to more power, here in this country, and around the world. " Tune-Yards album, BiRd-BrAiNs is out soon on 4AD. See her live in London, Manchester and Dublin this week and next. Posted by: Scott 11/09/09