Sometimes, death suits an artist well...Many people in ze show-biz knew about Michael Jackson being in deep physical/psychological/drug troubles and many didn't think he could pull up the gigantic dates he had booked for his return.

All sad that his death is, it's been three years now, there's no hiding his departure opens up alleyways of megagigahyper deals to the two astute managers who control his artistic present and future. For instance, John Branca and John McClain just signed a deal with Pepsi (yes, them, again) so the soda company could exploit the image of Jackson on a billion of cans with the slogan "Live For Now". I know, i find the motto rather disturbing myself...

Furthermore, Sony has signed in 2010 the biggest deal ever as they paid 250 million dollars for retaining the rights on MJ records until 2017 and have the OK for exploiting (i think the term is right) 7 posthume albums.

Wait, the one-arm bandit thing doesn't stop here: le Cirque du Soleil has a Immortal Tour in rehearsals (tickets from 60 $ to 190$), Ubisoft has a videogame in the making, and there shall be an interactive museum in Vegas where the willing consumer will be able to...

Funny to think Berry Gordy, the Tamla boss who send hundreds of songs to the top of the charts, refused to release "What's Going On" when Marvin Gaye approached him with the song...

He tought it was too uncommon and "heavy" for radio but accepted to release it nevertheless...It went on to become Motown's fastest selling single and Benny directly asked for an album to be made. Marvin obliged and came back with a nine songs album. It was first mixed without Gaye but Marvin had it scraped and eventually gave Gordy an album with all the songs intertwining from one to another, something Gordy thought would kill all possible airplays. The album went on to be a massive succes, both commercially and in the press.

At first, Marvin Gaye wanted to stop all musical activities as he was heavily depressed after the death of his musical partner. He contemplated going into baseball but failed...He eventually started to write music with some musicians who had an embryo of what would become the song "What's Going On". Marvin had an epiphany about making soul music with contemporary social comments and roots and the album is in fact the story of a Vietnam soldier coming back to...

Not every music style comes solely from the usual tree that is blues > rythmn blues > rock and krautrock is one of these, typically european, strange outlets of music that don't automatically link themselves to an american born form of music.

While rock music was a direct child from the blues, in Germany an entire generation of musicians start to twiddle around with a music style linked to experimental music, endless grooves and free form: we're encountering then long pieces of music which are combining improvisations on steady beats and noise/electronics. And somehow it does go back to tribal music, from which originated blues...Upwards from Can and krautrock comes post rock and ambient.

Krautrock has two major acts representing it at the beginning with early Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream but Can can be seen as a wilder and grittier form: a solid, psychedelic and somehow groovy exponent of a generation of german musicians who wanted to break away from the american mould by injecting more european roots, classical avant-garde and social/political (silent) comments. One can hear influences from Sly And The Family Stones or Zappa, but mixed with rage, anger...

Totally fascinating endeavour from Dr Bob MacCallum, a bio informatician at the Imperial College of London. He had the wonderful desire to learn how music evolves and believe Darwin dictates music evolution as well: there's a process that select the strongest, even among music loops.

So, Bob has put together a program called Darwin Tunes and started with a few short 8 sec loops that were randomly programmed by code. These little 4 bar loops then reproduce themselves when being add to another loop and together they give birth to a loop programmed from the music "genes" they come with. Sympatoche, isn't it ?

Where it becomes totally uber fascinating is that turns out to be a social happening as anyone can participate and somehow decide of what generations of loops will survive and creates infants. You can add your vote to the ones of other people as you will be asked to choose between loops randomly picked up for you. And you can take the place of Nature itself as you will decide which loops are the strongest and kept in the run for the next baby boom...The loops that have many votes will reproduce themselves more often with other loops, the ones will less votes...

The crowd may only concentrate on the singer or the cutest band member, but one key to commercial (and artistic) success is often a great producer, someone (it can be a team sometimes) who takes a rough gem and tailor it to make it shine and rise. There always were such individuals that could take a song and make it sound crisp and tantalising and thru history we can pinpoint some names: Phil Spector, Benny Gordy, Georges Martin, Holland Dozier, Brian Eno, Butch Vig, Rick Rubin...

One of these producers who really owned his time in pop history was Trevor Horn. He came to the attention of the public early 80's as the Buggles bass player of an embarrassing and huge hit "Video Killed The Radio Stars" (actually, in the video of that song, you can see the ubiquitous movie soundtrack maestro Hans Zimmer and his gigantic Moog) and later on did set up a label that would become iconic of his sound and vision: ZTT.

One of his signing was Frankie Goes To Hollywood and their anthem called "Relax" was going to be the soundtrack of many, many clubs in 1984 despite being banned by the BBC: as a revenge it went to top the charts for five consecutive weeks and their following...

There are out there musicians and weird artists, and then there's Sun Ra.

Herman Poole Blount was a strange man, no doubt about that and his music legacy is immense: eclectic jazz musician and very good keyboard player, innovative (he was one of the first musician to experiment with electronic music instruments and Robert Moog actually gave him a prototype of the Minimoog) and proud, he was also claiming he came from Saturn and initiated a complete philosophy around space and the galaxies...
He was also a tough if not cold blooded band leader as it wasn't uncommon he would leave the musicians he didn't want in his band no more stranded abroad. It had become so usual for him that the US State department had to forbid him to do so.

There's a very good article in FactMag about Sun Ra and his work/philosophy/heritage/ways of being.
We also leave you also with a 1974 movie he was in at the peak of Blackploitation) and several sources of informations about this amazing person.

Factmag article: http://www.factmag.com/2012/05/25/the-essential-sun-ra/
Don Lett's documentary:...

It starts out like yet another rock music documentary where the band obviously believes he's the greatest thing since The Beatles but you soon cannot help to feel something is about to burst open...

And it does. Rebel Scum is an extraordinary documentary that begins with a Bible Belt punk band called "The Dirty Works" performing and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, his singer Christopher Scum starts to violently hit himself on the forefront with the microphone and obviously starts to bleed intensively while continuing to sing...You know this is not going to be an average movie...

And from then on, it's a deep dive into an abyss of addiction, delusion, bad times and even worst times again and again. But you cannot stop watching it cos it's one side of reality few music documentaries show: there's the glitter and the strass with Pop Idol where everything is just about how well the singer re-sang that Wilson Pickett song and how it looked good with that Armani suit on and then you have the sad reality of people stuck in a system where drugs, alcohol, family disfunctions, religion and hopeless hope just drive people in the gutter...

I watched Rebel Scum with...

In a market which is schrinking everyday, one needs to find new ways to get exposure and revenues and we've been long advocate of bands trying to break thru with the licencing of tneir songs for commercials, videogames and movies.

Of course, it's easy to say but harder to do but this should be on the to-do list of every band who wants to make a revenue these days: send your works to supervisors who deal with commercials, movies and videogames.

An example ? The sweet-sounding Jezabels: without a label but their own, this aussie band has succeed in opening many doors thru intensive touring to build up an audience and airplays on a specifically indie-oriented state-funded Triple J radio. That landed them support which eventaully climaxed with a few pretigious australian awards.

But what was really the push to more exposure, and paving the road to international tours and festival bookings was the inclusion of one of their song as the soundtrack for the Red Bull backed BMX rider Danny MacAskill video: it started at 20.000 views the first day and topping more than 20 millions in 18 months...

So, bands and artists: when you have new material ready and if...

Diego Pascal Panarello has a dream and this dream is going to Yakutia, a very eastern Republic in Russia, to complete a very emotionnal and interesting documentary on one of the oldest instruments there is: the jew's harp.

What seems to be a simple toy is in fact a very ancient music instrument and roots itself very deep in human history. It's been played in all continents in differents forms and shapes but all based on that unique flexible metal (or bamboo) reed attached to its frame.

But Diego found out in his research that the jew's harp is also a national music instrument in the desolated republic of Yakutia: there it has been linked to chamanism and nature for thousand of years. With hours of rushes consisting of interviews of players and lovers of that instrument, Diego wants now to embark on a voyage to this rather unknown part of Russia and discover why and how such a tiny instrument is linked to the history of an entire country.

Furthermore, Diego seems to be a fantastic story-teller as this trailer suggests..We're not only for a music history documentary, we're also in for a hypnotic and tantalising adventure as Diego travels from Sicilia to...

Sabina England, multimedia artist, poet, filmmaker (see her excellent short movie on the left hand side) and playwrighter is going to hate me for this, but under her punk stance and fierce eyes that say fuck-you-world she's in fact a deeply romantic artist and her work embodies all the hopes, sorrows, violence, prejudice, desires, lust and envies, macaber angles and sunny moments that we all have inside ourselves when we haven't been eaten out alive and spit out on the pavement by The System.

At the same time, she doesn't play the game right: as a Desi (in Wiki, Desi refers to the people, cultures, and products of the Indian subcontinent and, increasingly, to the people, cultures, and products of their diaspora), some might expect a docile woman, waiting to fill in the shoes that have been carved for her by traditions, centuries of ways of doing/being. No way, no way, she's a strong opiniated woman with ideas, dreams and behaviors that will set your world and hers in fire if you don't look twice and see all the superb humanity, the warm Understanding and the Love behind it all.

As a brown skinned woman living in the West, she has to suffer being an outcast even...