Brony Song Tournament

Please listen to both songs before voting

Thought I'd Let You Know

Fly Like You

Susan Alcorn — CANTO (Relative Pitch)

Susan Alcorn's interests range far. She began, as many pedal steel guitar players do, in country bands, playing the instrument like you might expect, but she soon traveled far from Texas, exploring jazz and classical music as well as some world influences. It's a heady approach that's produced a couple decades of compelling and distinct music, but she still might be restless. New album CANTO comes from Chile, where Alcorn assembled her ensemble Septeto del Sur for a new blend of sounds crossing generations, continents and politics. The record's loveliness has an edge to it, producing a memorable new take on still-vibrant traditions.

The initial interaction, that between pedal steel and violin, makes sense, at least in theory. Both instruments (as long as you call one of them a fiddle) have long partnered in country music, but nothing here sounds like a honky tonk. Alcorn and violinist Danka Villanueva blend their sounds as if they've made a career of it. The feeling begins with the somber “Suite Para Todos,” in what feels like a controlled composition breaking into a freer section of invitation before regaining its composure (in both senses).

Much of the rest of the album belongs to the three-part “Canto,” a distinctly political suite that draws on chants from the Pinochet era. Alcorn and the septet oscillate between morning for the lost (the “disappeared”) and finding anger in the situation. These are folk musicians more interested in bending their tradition than in reinscribing it; the nueva canción sound comes in and out of focus but its revolutionary spirit guides the entire section.

“Mercedes Sosa” sounds more folk-based. Alcorn primarily provides the textures for her bandmates to play over, offering a change of tone from her own solo version for 2000's Uma. After the challenges of “Canto,” the shift brightens the album while incorporating elegaic moments into the piece. Claudio "Pajaro" Araya turns loose on the cuatro to release some of the tension in a flurry. Alcorn's own playing as long been subsumed into the larger endeavor, making the experience transporting, far less about the blend of musical cultures than about the straightforward immersion into a time and place.

The record closes with an unplanned rendition of “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” featuring bassist Amanda Irarrazabal on vocals and something approaching rock guitar (the quena does not approach rock flute, and that's not a complaint). The sonics turn surprisingly heavy, and the anti-Vietnam War song reminds us that resistance continues. Alcorn's latest release hits clear political beats, but it does so with an artistry driven more by curiosity and warmth than by polemic, making CANTO a beautiful and personal meeting of musics and cultures.

Justin Cober-Lake

Please reblog so this can reach more people! Feel free to add more info in the tags - your musical exposure, what instrument(s) you play, if you can sing in harmony, whether or not you think you have a good memory, whatever you’d like - or don’t, I don’t make the rules. Have a lovely day!

My ears: ᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱᴱ

Me, who has relative pitch: That's a g4 detuned by 10 cents

Pulverize the Sound - Repatriation from: Pulverize the Sound - Black (Relative Pitch, 2022)

my neighbor's hedge trimmer is buzzing at a D natural

i'm too much of a music nerd for this

I’m making a webcomic adaptation of The Hobbit! It’s an epic cool passion project that incorporates as much of Tolkien’s prose as possible while also being my own take on the story, it features a variety of different art styles to represent the worlds of different characters in Middle Earth, it’s over 100 pages long already, the art/writing keeps gradually improving over time, and you should follow it! Like, comment, and subscribe! *dabs*

Okay I admit I’m awful at ‘marketing.’ But my point stands! Follow for queer Tookish antics over the Edge of the Wild. 

You can keep up by following me here at @retellingthehobbit on Tumblr. This blog posts a new 10ish-page-long chapter once a month (on the 13th), as well as assorted WIP art :3. The first chapter on tumblr is here. (I started out posting on my main @secretmellowblog, so the earlier chapters were posted there instead.) However, I personally recommend keeping up with the comic by bookmarking it on ao3 here or subscribing on Webtoon here. This keeps all the chapters neatly organized in one place, and also sends you an email notification whenever it updates, which is helpful because I don't update weekly :). I currently update monthly, on the thirteenth day of every month.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy!

All the trouble he went through to hide his injuries and black blood, and it leaks out of his face. Figures.

I am running out of ways to tell people to go read A Dark Among the Lights by LuckyLectio on AO3. I'm starting to feel like this is an early 2000s FFN authors note with cheesy dialogue...I might just start saying random nonsense since it feels awkward to just post a link.

Anyway, chapter 12 was honestly really fun to read in spite of the fact that Dark was, y'know, actively dying. The character interactions are fantastic, I love all of them so much and their inter-personal relationships are written so well. Here's hoping next chapter goes better for our shady boi :b

Bonus below the cut:

A doodle for this chapter :3

Also it's a crying shame that tumblr seems to hide the wonderful file names I give my pieces, so here's what we have so far :D

I did nuke my artstation and deviantart back when I started seeing The Signs but this latest double down is still insane to watch. what are they expecting out of this

Hi Yeri!!! Does the ros and the mc have any special talent?? It doesn't have to be anything special, like maybe one of them could spin themselves around without getting dizzy at all or can see in the dark better than others lololol

jinwol has a talent for spotting nicks and scratches or unpolished streaks on metal. he takes such good care of his weapons that he's trained his eye to be able to spot even the most minuscule defects. (conversely it drives him crazy when he can't do anything about it HAHAHA)

yul has really sharp visual acuity, which helps them mimic people and gives them an edge on picking up and copying most mannerisms. this makes them a really good actor when they want to be, but since it requires careful study, they don't really see a point in examining (most) people that closely.

iseul has perfect pitch! she picks up tonal languages a lot faster than the average person for this reason hehe but what she's really good at with it is being able to recreate most songs on the spot. she's not the best singer, but she can play both the zither (her namesake!) and the dombyra.

??? has an uncanny sense of smell, and they come up with really odd comparisons to describe what they're sensing. it's bewildered quite a few people, so they've stopped saying it out loud because of all the weird stares they got, but they're very good at it. for example: "this broth smells like a burning rhododendron"

I don't know a lot about the technicalities behind music but I've also thought Vessel is a musical genius, once I actively started listening to Sleep Token. So I thought the answer to the ask about his musical training was really interesting.

Do you think or do you know if he has an absolute pitch?

Hi! 🖤 ty for the ask! So... I did some deep diving to try and see if I could find anything on this. I couldn't find much, so I can't give a definitive answer, but I'm going to say it's very likely he has absolute pitch (or a very accurate relative pitch).

I did, however, find a bit more information about the previous ask about Vessel's musical training. One of my online friends found a self-written short bio from back when Vessel was offering piano lessons. The degree he completed was in commercial songwriting. He also admits to possessing a "relatively deep understanding of music from a theoretical perspective."

Unfortunately, he did not state anything about absolute/relative pitch in the bio he wrote, but he also strikes me as the type of guy not to brag about those skills. He seems very humble, and if anything he would most likely "show" rather than "tell," if you get my meaning.

Brony Song Tournament

Please listen to both songs before voting

Emerald Eyes

Shining Armor

Evan Parker — NYC 1978 (Relative Pitch)

NYC 1978 by Evan Parker

On April 30, 1978, Evan Parker recorded Monoceros, his first album of long-form, solo soprano saxophone music. With unbroken streams of intertwined tone and complex simultaneous explosions of sound, it upended assumptions of what was deemed possible on the instrument, and opened up for Parker a field of possibilities that he’s still harvesting 40-something years later. About five months later, Parker undertook his first solo tour of North America, where it’s unlikely that many of the people who went to hear him had heard Monoceros yet. If the concerts were all like NYC 1978, they must have blown a lot of minds. At the time, no one was playing saxophones like Evan Parker, nor were they making music like he made.

NYC 1978 is taken from a cassette tape of a concert that took place on October 13 of that year at the loft venue, Environ. Aside from shaving off a bit of high end, the recording method in no way interferes with appreciating the performance. “Environ 1” begins with a swirl of discrete notes spinning away from an unbroken column of air; at the time, the only comparison would have been Terry Riley’s Poppy Nogood, only he needed a tape machine to make it happen, and Parker just had his fingers, lungs, and unyielding concentration. The echoes on the tenor showcase, “Environ 4,” smacks you in the face like a newspaper tossed by a delivery person with major league pitching aspirations, and the intricate dance of piercing, high pitches and raw, punctuating barks on “Environ 5” loses none of the complexity experienced by people who were in the room when the music first went down. 

Parker would go on to sustain his circular breathing for longer, and to finger his patterns more quickly and with more complexity. But there’s an unrepentant aggression in his attack throughout NYC 1978 captures the just how ornery this music was at the time. It’s no longer sui generis, but it still stands as a formidable statement of how one person with sufficient command of extraordinary gifts can change what is possible. 

Bill Meyer

my best and most dearly missed skillset is my now defunct ability to transpose music on the fly. i was so good at that i miss that. blew people's minds

venting in tags about gender n shit (long as hell) (u can comment and talk 2 me as always :3)

Just watched the new trailer in german to prepare myself for the episodes airing early and noticed two things

visually the trailer is exactly the same, but the dialogue has a few differences

The forbidden five are referred to as the banished five (die verbannten fünf) not that different, but interesting nontheless

Ras specifically calls Shatterspin a „highly evolved version lf your beloved fighting technique“(eine hochentwickelte Form eurer geliebten Kampftechnik). So there is definitely a connection between shatterspin and Spinjitzu, other than the similar names and looks

Nothing really new here, just some interesting differences