We'll do it LIVE!

A follow up in my quest for new music experiences and to broaden my musical tastes. These are two Radio Stations I have found that have great Live Sessions and a large archived library of previous sessions. One on the east coast in Philly the other on the west coast in Seattle. 


In Philly, Radio 104.5  host's local bands as well as select national acts to play LIVE in the XFINITY Performance Theater.  Some of my favorite Archived Sessions include: Cage The Elephant, Philly locals Circa Survive, Terrible Things, Punk rock royalty, Social Distortion, Local Natives and many more.





Seattle's KEXP 90.3 a tiny 10-watt station back in 1972, KEXP has grown over the years into an innovative, influential cultural force in the Seattle community and beyond, offers a large archived library of live session's. Here I found some favorites: The Black Angels, Arcade Fire, Beach House, Band of Horses, Old 97's, Revolver, Best Coast and many more.


So get your eyeballs and earholes on over and and indulge in the sights and sounds.

In Search of Indie

In my quest for new music experiences to broaden my musical tastes, there are a few web sites that I repeatedly return to. My top pick which I visit everyday is Daytrotter. They have a new downloadable session everyday and it is a great way to start the day. My favorite finds at daytotter so far are April Smith and the Big Picture Show, Catfish Haven, 22-20's, J.Roddy Walston and the Business, Dawes, Backyard Tire Fire and to many more to mention. Also Bands I knew and liked already doing some raw sessions. The Black Angels, Cage the Elephant, Circa Survive, Death Cab for Cutie, Local Natives, and Social Distortion. Any hoo to get a sampling check out Best of Daytrotter 2010, and Readers Choice 2010 Once you start trotting you'll never surf again.



About Daytrotter: 

Daytrotter -- One band a day, every day, 28 Daytrotter Session songs each week.

As Bands are they’re traveling through America’s heartland – take two hours out of their travels between shows to stop in for a Daytrotter Session at The Horseshack in downtown Rock Island, Ill. The name of the city is not ironic. They use borrowed instruments, play with their touring mates, utilize an often unkempt toilet, eat some food and then cram back into their vans for the last half of the drive. What they leave behind is a pile of ashes, sometimes a forgotten stocking hat and four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour – dirty and alive. We want you to make this your new home as it is ours. We promise that you will love it here.

The Horseshack, Rock Island, Illinois. 
Daytrotter Sessions are engineered by Mike Gentry, Patrick Stolley, Brad Kopplin, Brett Allen or Nick Krill.

The Daytrotter recordings are made with minimal mic’ing, through discrete preamps and with some limiting to the mixing console, where they are printed to 1/4” analog tape running at 15 inches per second (usually BASF 468). The analog master is later transferred to a computer and converted to MP3.

There is no set formula or pattern to the recordings, no specific mic setup, etc. They are all live, no overdubs, straight to tape. What you hear is what happened in the room that day.

Things Down Under

I discovered Amanda Fucking Palmer one late night on twitter, when she found this young kid on the streets of San Fran and bought him into her house where she did a impromptu web cast of the kid playing some amazing piano. It was intimate and spontaneous, and I was hooked on this eccentric character I knew nothing about named Amanda Palmer: 

Her new single Map of Tasmania from her forthcoming album "Amanda Palmer goes down Under" is a wild ride to regions few have traveled. (For those of you outside Australia “map of Tasmania” is Australian slang for a woman’s pubic region.) 

Amanda MacKinnon Gaiman Palmer^[2] (born April 30, 1976), known professionally as Amanda Fucking Palmer,^[3] is an American performer who first rose to prominence as the lead singer, pianist, and lyricist/composer of the duo The Dresden Dolls.^[4] She has since started a successful solo career, and is also one half of the Evelyn Evelyn duo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Palmer