Melanaster Band at Club 828 in Asheville
Posted on 12. Mar, 2010 by mundovibe in News
Mundovibe is based in Asheville, here’s something for the local heads to check out:
Melanaster w/ If You Wannas & Mobley!
Saturday, March 13th, join Mundovibe at Club 828 in Asheville, NC for a very special night of live experimental rock with Melanaster Band. We’ll also be checking out Austin innovators Mobley and local indie favorites If You Wannas.
Lots more details + video on the Melanaster blog.
Essential info : Club 828, 9PM | 18+ $8 Map / Facebook Event
Special note: Mobley features a groundbreaking interactive music video on their website. Check it out!
Dimitri From Paris Philly Sound Mix
Guitarist Jorge Strunz Creates Macondo Sonics
Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by mundovibe in News
Seasonal storms sweep in at sunset. Vines interweave like arpeggios. Rains sigh and pelt the tin roof. Night falls, melancholy and magical, over crumbling colonial facades and humble villages, over the tropical nexus of two continents.
Genre-defying guitarist Jorge Strunz, one half of the acclaimed global guitar duo Strunz & Farah, evokes this luxuriant and haunting world, taking his virtuosity in a new and subtle direction on his solo album, Neotropical Nocturnes (Selva Records; March 16, 2010). A meditation on his Costa Rican roots and transnational travels with his diplomat family, these instrumental pieces reflect the multitude of voices that resonate in the guitar when played by a master, and that speak to the heart of the Americas.
In this recording, the exuberance of tropical nature is a reflection of my earliest inspirations in music,” Strunz reflects. “The lush plant life, the smell of the rains, all that was part of my very early childhood memories in Costa Rica. They form a backdrop to my life experience and music.”
The sounds the young Strunz heard while visiting his relatives’ fincas (farms) seemed to connect directly to the music he encountered growing up in the Costa Rican capital of San José. The rain on the tin roof reminded him of timbales beating out time, and the seasonal cycle of storms had its own lilting time signature. A sonic sense of his tropical home became part of the budding artist’s musical instincts.
This innate Neotropical sensibility, intimate yet intense, was given total focus years later as he began to work with several orphan tracks in his home studio. These sketches didn’t seem to fit his project with Ardeshir Farah, yet he couldn’t seem to leave them alone. They began to take on new musical shape, silently powered by stories and sensations from his tropical childhood and by rhythms from Peru to New York, yet always expressed in Strunz’s unique, technically impeccable improvisational approach to his instrument.
Bollywood Gets Retooled in “My Name is Khan”
Posted on 08. Feb, 2010 by mundovibe in ARCHIVE, FEATURED, News
The Rhythm of the Sufi Saints: “My Name is Khan” Transcends Bollywood’s Musical Borders
A film drama that retools the mindset of Bollywood needs music that gleams like a fine-edged sword. The soundtrack of “My Name is Khan”—the genre-busting Bollywood drama phenomenon that follows an idiosyncratic hero, an Indian Muslim husband and father, on a transcontinental journey through the fog of America, post-9/11—brings the Mumbai sound back to basics. Veteran director Karan Johar and his trusted team of transworld Indian composers Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (SEL) have made this film as much a musical as a cinematic statement.
Six simple songs, custom-made for the movie, recast the role of the Bollywood movie and set aside the typical “item songs,” the fantastic dance numbers that sustain the Indian film industry. Instead, Johar wanted to create a musical counterpoint to the psychosocial drama unfolding on screen. In the film, Rizvan Khan, a Muslim man from India, moves to San Francisco and lives with his brother and sister-in-law. Rizvan, who has Aspergers, falls in love with Mandira. Despite protests from his family, they get married and start a small business together. They are happy until September 11, 2001 when attitudes toward Muslims undergo a sea-change. When tragedy strikes, Mandira is devastated and they split. Rizvan is confused and very upset that the love of his life has left him. To win her back, he embarks on a touching and inspiring journey across America.
Naturally, for the film’s soundtrack Johar turned to SEL, a motley trio from diverse backgrounds who have produced the music for several of his projects. After reading through the script, they started from scratch with a studio jam session. Johar adopted a set of sounds, which appear throughout the film as brushstrokes of watercolor harmony, from the motley array of sonic hybrids that are SEL’s calling card: Loy Mendonsa, a jazz pianist, has been working with Ehsaan Noorani, a rock-and-blues buff, and Shankar Mahadevan, one of India’s top singers and acclaimed collaborator with everyone from Jan Garbarek to Swans, for fourteen peaceful and productive years. Over 250 songs into their collective career, they are masters of blending unexpected genres and ancient traditions.
This blend formed the perfect musical platform for Johar’s tale of cross-cultural communication and passionate longing. In the film, established actor Shah Rukh Khan plays Rizvan Khan, a gentle Islamic man who sees the world in black and white, yet finds himself caught in the confused grey zones of the post-9/11 world. Khan the protagonist sets off on an epic journey to clear his name—and to transform the world’s understanding of his faith and fate.
Any Bollywood film starring the famously handsome Khan, here reunited with his erstwhile sultry screen partner Kajol, has to have a love story, but the romance in “My Name is Khan” is on hold: Khan and his wife are separated, and he begins his journey across America. His theme, a centerpiece of the soundtrack, is the rhythm of the country-western Sufi saints, of the restless whirling cowboy who wandered out of Mumbai with nothing but a prayer for a thread of sky-blue clarity. The music follows Khan as he plucks that thread and follows it along his striking trajectory.
Even before filming began, the soundtrack was in the spinning wheel, bound up in the very cloth of the film. “Every film has a sound that is ingrained in its genes,” opines Karan Johar, the director. “Even when I’m shooting a sequence, I always have background music playing in my head.” Here, he needed to communicate Khan’s journey through disorder to a simple point beyond the horizon along the absolute clarity of a line.
