Bon Iver’s teaser last month, which contained one line of lyrics, “It might be over soon,” was followed up Saturday by two new songs being uploaded to the band’s YouTube channel.
The two songs were uploaded in the form of seven videos, because they have various language hard subtitles.
The two songs are titled “d E A T h b R E a s T” and “(OVER S∞∞N)”
The two songs are part of Bon Iver’s new album, expected to be released in September.
(OVER S∞∞N)
d E A T h b R E a s T
60 year-old Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi performed his composition “Elegy for the Arctic” last Friday in the Svalbard islands in Norway facing sub-zero temperatures.
A grand piano standing majestically in the middle of melting icebergs is surely not a common sight. Yet, it is not only for the pleasure of the eye or the ear that Greenpeace ice breaking vessel Arctic Sunrise brought the musician against the backdrop of the Walhlenbergbreen glacier.
This unique performance on a platform floating on the Arctic Ocean was part of a campaign to protect the Arctic environment and send a conservation message to world leaders.
“Being here has been a great experience. I could see the purity and fragility of this area with my own eyes. It is important that we understand the importance of the Arctic, stop the process of destruction and protect it.” Einaudi said in a statement.
The video was released on Tuesday to mark the start of the four-day meeting of the OSPAR Commission in Tenerife, Spain. OSPAR consists of 15 governments of the EU seeking to protect the marine environment of the North-East Atlantic.
According to Greenpeace, the Arctic is warming faster than any other place in the world with a continuing loss of sea ice volume.
As we watch this haunting performance accompanied by eerie sounds due to icebergs movements slowly melting with ice chunks crumbling and falling in the Ocean, let us not forget that we are witnessing the spectacular yet dramatic effects of rising temperatures.
https://twitter.com/MikeFincken/status/744780382071984128
The Greenpeace petition to protect the Arctic sea is online here.
“Until they change their view, those who would risk the Arctic should not be heard over those calling to protect what we love, not over Ludovico’s music, not over the piano and the glacier, not over eight million voices.”
The Parque del Buen Retiro is home to the imperial statues of a lost Madrid and the heaving throngs of the present day Spanish capital, from the puppeteers to the balladeers, this great oxygen bank has opened its gates in much same way that they city has opened its metaphorical ones – to people from all over world
Band leader Simon Fleury reveals his plans for the future and reflects on what the band has achieved so far.
Nature and nurture in music has now been mapped by McGill neurologists who have recorded the activity and changes in the brains of young adults over the course of a six-week piano training session. Among the results of the research is a greater understanding of how natural disposition factors into skills like music.
“I would venture to say that new skills probably change almost the entire brain in some way or another,” Dr. Robert Zatorre, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill’s Montreal Neurological Institute and lead author of the work, told The Speaker.
“What we try to do in our experiments is to isolate specific components of these changes so that we can characterize them accurately.”
In their recent work, the Neuro team sought to display and map the brain’s response to learning music. They also sought for differences in how individuals learn and respond to musical training.
The team provided six weeks of piano training for 15 young adults who had little or no background in music.
“We measured the entire brain simultaneously using functional MRI,” Zatorre told us, “and then searched the whole brain to find the areas that changed after training, and to distinguish them from those areas which were predictive of learning success.”
The brains of all of the young adults changed as they learned the motor skills involved with playing simple piano pieces, but the team found that the brain activity of some students predicted how quickly they would become skilled.
“The areas that changed most after training were in the premotor cortex and in the parietal cortex, regions concerned with coordinating movements and mapping actions to sounds; the areas that were predictive of subsequent learning were totally different from these and involved the auditory cortex and the hippocampus, the latter of course a structure involved in the formation of memories.”
Zatorre commented on the important role of individual predisposition in learning a skill like music.
“We think that those people who are better at initially encoding sound properties will subsequently have an edge when it comes to learning how to move their fingers to produce that same sound pattern,” Zatorre said.
And the findings do not apply only to music, but are an example of how the brain responds to any skill, according to the neurologists.
“We see it in the context of other research looking at skills such as learning the sounds of a foreign language, or skilled sports activities. In each of these cases there are distinct neural circuits that have to be “trained up” so the specific brain regions involved might differ. But we think the same principle may apply, that is, that some brain circuits are changed by training, but others may be indicative of the predisposition to learn a specific skill.”
The report, “Dissociation of Neural Networks for Predisposition and for Training-Related Plasticity in Auditory-Motor Learning,” was completed by Sibylle C. Herholz, Emily B.J. Coffey, Christo Pantev, and Robert J. Zatorre, and was published in Cerebral Cortex.
By Sid Douglas
Images 3 and 4 from the report of the Neuro team
Buy cassette tapes. According to m u s i c i a n / p r o d u c e r s, these are the best spots.
Keeping in mind you’re looking for DIY prices, the cheapest places are:
How much should you pay? It shouldn’t be up there around $1,000, which is what some companies are charging. The ones listed above charge much less.
For example, Duplication.ca reportedly can do around 150 cassettes with inserts and cases for not much over $500 USD.
BELGRADE, Serbia — Happy are the ones who retain childhood for their entire life time, enough to believe in fairy tales. Emir Kusturica decided to share his fairy tale, and he struggled hard throughout his life to bring it closer to his audience. A famous director, author of “Sećaš li se Doli Bel,” “Arizona dream,” “Underground,” and other movies, he is one of seven directors 
with two films that have won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Once he said, “Every time I’m shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don’t see the light in the end of the tunnel.”
The eighth Kustendorf film and music festival took place Jan. 21-26, 2015, and the festival might be the light waiting at the end of Kusturica’s tunnel.
Kusturica has had a great influence on the seventh art with his movies. Many younger authors followed his approach and copied the surreal in their effort to allure the audience to dream and step into the movie scene.
Kusturica continues with his wonders, so he built Drvengrad (Wooden City) in Mećavnik, Serbia. Drvengrad is a whole village made of natural materials, mainly wood and stone, creating a magical structure of traditional architecture and new artistic trends.
Drvengrad hovers between museum, large art exhibition and gastronomic venue. Along with the cinema, musical events are organized all over the place. On top of everything, a small and cute wooden church reminds us of the Russian way of building.
Starting in 2008, this place has hosted the Kustendorf movie and music festival, creating a chance for young directors and actors to meet their older and globally famous colleagues. Over the years, many eminent actors and directors have visited the festival; we will mention only few of them: Nikita Mikhalkov, Jim Jarmusch, Johnny Depp, Isabelle Huppert, Monica Belucci, Andrei Konchalowski, Alfonso Cuarón, Bertrand Tavernier…
The Kustendorf movie and music festival awards young authors with three eggs: Golden, Silver and a Bronze one. For 2015, the winners were:
The Golden Egg – Giacomo Abbruzzese for the film “Stella Maris;”
The Silver Egg – Marko Sopić for the film “The Bag;”
The Bronze Egg – Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson for the film “Whale Valley.”
There is also an award handed out for films yet to be made…
The festival is unique for its surroundings. Amid hundred year old pine forests and clean rivers, a narrow-gauge railway passes through the 
village of Mokra Gora (549 residents), just under Drvengrad. The railway was active from 1925 to 1974, connecting Belgrade with Adriatic Sea. Rebuilt in recent years, it is a tourist attraction now. Many visitors are here to experience the joy of the steam engine whistle and a cowboy-style coach. Unlike other parts of Serbian Railways, everything is in order here. The train starts when scheduled and arrives on time.The coach is clean, personnel dressed properly. Old train, old engine, new rails. A long time ago, this was a very convenient way to travel from Sarajevo to Belgrade. Now, another section of old railway has been reconstructed and will connect Višegrad with Kremna. The total length of the planned railway is around 50 kilometers. The entire area is 245 km away from Belgrade and another 136 from Sarajevo. Only half an hour away from Mecavnik, there are another two mountains, Tara and Zlatibor, both offering attractive tours and decent hotels.
And, in this picturesque and exciting area, Emir Kusturica created a unique hive, attracting others to come and contribute to this spring of creativity. Inactive in terms of politics, he is always ready to emphasize his anti-globalism and injustice towards small nations. We wish him many more festivals and bright light at the end of the tunnel.
By Miroslav Velimirovic