Human Voices: Muruch's "Words" Video Premiere

Today, one of the world's original and most passionate music blogs, Muruch, drawing from a deeply personal well, premieres its video for "Words", a song recording from Allison Crowe, with images from photographer George Hodan.

Money for Nothing: 350 Degrees of Stupid from Canada’s Corporate Music Mindset

A relatively small, but prominent, group of Canadian recording artists have been conscripted to lend their names to a petition asserting that they, and/or their corporate masters, along with administrators of certain copyright collectives, are entitled to divvy up a tax/levy they want the government of Canada to impose on mp3 players and other such devices.

The idea is so wrong-headed that it’s hard to imagine it can gain any traction. Only 350 out of the many, many, thousands of recording artists in Canada have put their names to this nonsense. Still, the same sort of lobby forces previously managed to get a taxy/levy imposed on blank recording media – and for years, people have been ripped off each time they purchase a blank cassette tape, CD etc. – so, who knows, there are strange things done in this land of the ice and snow…

P.S. In mid-December, 2010, Canada's ruling minority party announced it was not pursuing enactment of an "iPod levy". Now, if someone can eliminate the crazy levy people must pay on blank cassette tapes and CDs it will be possible to believe there really is a sanity clause.

“An’ for every hung up person in the whole wide universe”

It's a mighty long time since another side of Bob Dylan had us gaze upon the chimes of freedom flashing. Decades, too, since there was blood on the tracks. The “idiot wind”, though, is still blowing like a circle around our skulls.

Allison Crowe is a new truth-seeker. She’s a writer of social conscience. One who believes in the power of music.

“To sing is to love and affirm, to fly and soar, to coast into the hearts of the people who listen, to tell them that life is to live, that love is there, that nothing is a promise, but that beauty exists, and must be hunted for and found,” wrote Joan Baez, musician and plenty more, when she was near the same age Allison Crowe is now.

’t’is high purpose, evermore today, “as we replace marble with plastic”.

The body of work this young Canadian artist is creating is remarkable and varied. Through a repertoire numbering dozens of original songs, she’s fulfilling her stated raison d’etre, making music that is "Soulful. Alive. Joyous. Grievous. Real. True.”

In a concert review this month, Jan DeGrass of the Coast Reporter notes: “In another piece, Crowe savaged the piano with a fierceness that turned our spines to noodles. The song was dedicated to a woman who gave a classical piano performance seen on YouTube only to find that her web audience offered tasteless and ignorant jokes in return. Don’t sugar coat it, Allison.”

No Mother Hubbard soft soap here. The song, Disease, is always riveting social commentary. (Even serving as inspiration to an online discussion of ‘great art’ and the elements of creation.) While unchanged lyrically, the song has grown more steeled musically through its life and release: “Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind.”

Captured in its raging glory, serendipitously on International Women's Day, March 8, 2008, also a fun date of Turtle Recording Studios 20th Anniversary Party in White Rock, B.C., Canada - by Engineer and Producer, Turtle's Larry Anschell - and Co-engineered by Brad Graham:

Disease

rocktopi

Travelling from my home island of Salt Spring to Victoria, B.C. (Canada) this week - I discovered that the trip is just the right distance to enjoy the first disc of Allison's Live at Wood Hall double-album one-way, and to sing along through the second disc on the return to the ferry.

I have just recently found myself with a car that contains a CD player. Modern, I know. Highway cruising, singing out loud, with no one cautioning me to "leave it to the professionals", (as our loved driver Axel likes to say when we're on tour), is plenty of fun!

And this experience answered a question rolling in mind: what can you find on this particular blog that you can't find on Allison Crowe's website or her other online venues?

Well, for a start, a walking octopus.



Octopi, even.



It was in the Spring of 2005 that Allison performed a two-night stand at Victoria's Conservatory of Music - in the converted church sanctuary that now serves as the Robin & Winifred Wood Recital Hall. (It's recordings of these shows that form the 'Wood Hall' CD set.) Between the first night's encore and soundcheck the next afternoon, Christine L. Huffard, Farnis Boneka, and Robert J. Full, scientists in the U.S. and Indonesia, made public their studies on Underwater Bipedal Locomotion by Octopuses in Disguise, revealing:

"Two species of octopus walk on two alternating arms using a rolling gait and appear to use the remaining six arms for camouflage. Octopus marginatus resembles a coconut, and Octopus (Abdopus) aculeatus, a clump of floating algae. Using underwater video, we analyzed the kinematics of their strides. Each arm was on the sand for more than half of the stride, qualifying this behavior as a form of walking."

Naturally, Allison helped spread word of this amazing find that same evening in the song introduction to Secrets.

The 25 March 2005 issue of Science magazine contained full details. Fine folks at the non-profit Sea Studios Foundation, based in Monterey, California's legendary Cannery Row, made the delightful vids.

Allison Crowe's music

Allison has a concert performance this weekend, which keeps me, her personable manager, busy! So, until I'm back online, to post some words, here's what matters most - music.