Throwback Thursday: Doris

Swedish singer Doris Svensson, now 68 years old, released one hell of a Jazz (but not really) record in 1970. Did You give the World Some Love Today Baby was her second album and was a collaboration with Berndt Egerbladh (Jazz pianist, composer, television producer, and record label owner) at the EMI studios in Stockholm.

I discovered this record when record label Mr. Bongo re-released this album in the late '90s and in looking up the album this morning, I see the New York Times reviewed a track from this album by describing it as Hendrix backing Björk (the internet also tells me that Bjork is a fan of Doris)!

Such a powerhouse of a voice!

Check out Doris fronting Plums.

New Album Alert : Deradoorian

Los Angeles musician Angel Deradoorian has an impressive pedigree. She was the bass player and vocalist in Dirty Projectors. She has lent her talents to Slasher Flicks, an Avey Tare side band. She has offered vocals to the likes of Flying Lotus, the Roots, and Matmos to name a few. Her new solo album The Expanding Flower Planet on Anticon does not stray far from the creative company she has kept in the past. It is a hypnotic tapestry threaded by her complex vocal layers. Her voice charters a hypnotic Middle Eastern magic carpet ride that brings a listener to the exotic places that albums like Medulla by Bjork and Can's Tago Mago have explored in years past.

Fighting the Good Fight

Did you know that fewer than 5% of record producers and sound engineers are women? How about that when you review a huge festival line up, the number of women headliners of the bill make up for maybe one tenth of the line up? The numbers are discouraging when it comes to women verse men in the music industry however more and more women are working hard to change that number.

Antye Greie-Ripatti inspired by a 2015 interview with Björk who openly described women's role in music as "unacknowledged" and "uncredited" from personal experience, launched a Tumblr page called female:pressure  that gives visibility to female producers, DJ's, media artists, and electronic music performers at work. The idea is that the more of us there are documenting our work and celebrating the work of our female peers is to remind people that women making music is normal and happening daily all over the world.

For more statistics of women in the music industry, go here. If you are making music behind the scenes and feel comfortable sharing images of it, you should post them on your social media pages and or pass them along to sites like female:pressure to share with their readers. As I write this I am reminded that I need to do this more too as I often record at home and never think to document this part of my writing process. I intend to practice what I preach.

I am far from technical when it comes to getting down my ideas for a new song. I have a PC and use a program called Mixcraft 5 to record my vocal rough drafts for Positive No and have also used this program to write whole songs electronically for my solo project Ringfinger.

New Album Alert : Joanna Newsom - Divers

SQUEEEE! You can stream her whole new album Divers right now via NPR. I liken this to reading a choose your own adventure book that has no definitive plot (no two listener take aways will be the same!) and may require a dictionary to understand all the words she uses to spin her delicately orchestrated webs. It is as if Kate Bush and Björk  (who apparently has been a singing coach of sorts to her) has created a chamber Pop opera and given birth to a star whose voice flits like a sprite through a maze of tall grass and mushroom caps houses. If you hate reading but love a good story, this is the gift you have been waiting for. Her vocabulary and use of language is a thing to behold. I am not sure I am smart enough to grasp and unravel all of the thematic layers found on this new record but I feel like a better person for at least trying. Prepare to be awed and English majors, there are a good 100 thesis papers to be found in her body of work.

Not recommended - playing Scrabble against her. I am 100% certain Newsom would win. Apparently Slate agrees.