It's no secret that music is incredibly powerful—but why is that? And in what ways?
These are questions that scientists of many stripes have asked, and what their research tells us is astounding.
Can music really give your genes a boost? What should you listen to if you want to feel more powerful? How do all those sex-fueled music videos affect teens' sexual activity? And does listening to music give you a bird brain?
As part of Science Week, we've gathered several of the latest studies. Open the gallery above to check out the researchers' fascinating findings.
If it wasn't for technology, popular music as we know it today wouldn't exist. From the electric guitar to the Vocoder, we look at 10 game-changing tech innovations that have shaped popular music.
And for more great science and music stories, check out our Science Week page all week, because we'll be adding new stories every day.
Most Canadians know that spring has arrived because the Stanley Cup playoffs began last night. (Apologies to Leafs fans stuck in an eternal winter — at least you have the Raptors.)
The arrival of the hockey playoffs also means that we're one week closer to music festival season, and one week closer to the CBCMusic.ca Festival.
Yes, our fest is back in Toronto on Saturday, May 23, at TD Echo Beach. Performers include Bahamas, Patrick Watson, Shad, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Coeur de pirate, the Strumbellas, Lindi Ortega, Jenn Grant, Choir! Choir! Choir! and Tanika Charles, with still more to be announced.
In preparation for the festival, we're asking some of the musicians who are performing to share their tips for festival dos and don'ts. Last week The Strumbellas shared their tips. This week Joel Plaskett, Lindi Ortega and Tanika Charles drop by. Check it out below.
Tickets for the CBCMusic.ca Festival are already on sale. General admission is $39.50 (plus FMF and service charges), free for kids 12 and under. Tickets are available at LiveNation.com, at all Ticketmaster outlets and by phone at 1-855-985-5000. The show is suitable for all ages.
Rolling Stone has been working on an excellent short doc series called Mastering the Craft, and the latest episode features Canada's favourite twin Quins, Tegan and Sara.
In it, the duo speaks candidly about the recent change of the band's DNA, the effect it had on their most loyal fans, and their attempt to bridge the gap.
Each day, Rich Terfry and Radio 2 Drive wraps up your day with music and stories about the interesting things going on in the world. Here are the stories we're talking about today.
Every year, Time publishes a list of who they think are the 100 most influential people in the world. Last year, Beyoncé graced the cover, and this year the honour goes to someone who is, arguably, Beyoncé's biggest fan: Kanye West.
"Now that he’s a pop-culture juggernaut, he has the platform to achieve just that. He’s not afraid of being judged or ridiculed in the process," entrepreneur Elon Musk wrote about the rapper/producer/designer, who was included in the magazine's "titan" section. "Kanye’s been playing the long game all along, and we’re only just beginning to see why.”
"I don't care about having a legacy," West said in an interview with the magazine, in which he talks about what he thinks his role is as an artist. You can watch the full thing at the bottom of this post.
Country-pop crossover superstar Taylor Swift was included in the "icon" section, with actor Mariska Hargitay praising her ability to write music "that’s personal, of the moment and impossible to resist."
Also included was Bjork, an "Icelandic high priestess" and artist who is "always on the edge of everything," writes artist Marina Abramovic.
Turns out that it’s not the end for the moniker: remaining member Ethan Kath released a new song today, "Frail," on the Crystal Castles Soundcloud page.
Kath also made a statement on Soundcloud regarding his former bandmate, although most of these words have since been removed since it was first posted. It read:
"i wish my former vocalist the best of luck in her future endeavors. i think it can be empowering for her to be in charge of her own project. it should be rewarding for her considering she didn't appear on Crystal Castles' best known songs. (she's not on Untrust Us. Not In Love, Vanished, Crimewave, Vietnam, Magic Spells, Knights, Air War, Leni, Lovers Who Uncover, Violent Youth, Reckless, Year of Silence, Intimate, 1991, Good Time, Violent Dreams etc.). people often gave her credit for my lyrics and that was fine, i didn't care."
"i wish my former vocalist the best of luck in her future endeavors. i think it can be empowering for her to be in charge of her own project. <3 this is Edith on vocals"
This is the first new music from Crystal Castles since 2012.
Now McGill physics grad student Tim Blais has returned with "Surface of Light," a hilarious scientific twist on the Lion King track, "Circle of Life."
In the process, he talks about the origins of the universe, the Big Bang, gravity and the surface of light.
It's not exactly a replacement for a Ph.D in physics, but it's an incredibly entertaining, and impressively geeky start. Watch, then check out all of our other great Science Week stories:
This week, My Playlist connects with Alex Cuba, the award-winning singer-songwriter from Smithers, B.C.
Born Alexis Puentes in Artemisa, Cuba, his father was a respected guitarist and teacher there. Alex was just four when he performed on Cuban television in a children's guitar ensemble led by his father and including his twin brother Adonis.
In 1999, Alexis moved to Canada. His brother was already living in Victoria. They started working and recording together and got noticed quickly. But musically they were going in slightly different directions. Adonis was more mainstream latino and Alexis was more Cuban soul rock with side order of pop. He changed his stage name to Alex Cuba and went solo.
His first two releases each won the Juno for best world album. His third, called Alex Cuba, featured his first English track and gave him international success. He won best new artist at the 2010 Latin Grammy awards and was nominated for a Grammy. He began writing with other artists including Nelly Furtado. The next year Alex took home a BMI Latin Award for his songwriting on Furtado’s #1 Spanish hit "Manos Al Aire."
This week on My Playlist, Alex Cuba takes us through some of his favourite music including "Say No More" by Ray Charles, "Bad Timing" by Blue Rodeo and Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now."
My Playlist airs Sunday at 3 p.m. (3:30 NT) and Wednesday at 7 p.m. (7:30 NT) on CBC Radio 2.
Carmen: everyone knows the music, but who knows the woman?
George Bizet’s tale of love, lust and betrayal is one of opera’s most familiar stories. Carmen herself is arguably the most famous character in all of opera — but does anyone actually understand what makes her tick?
Canadian mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy has sung the role a number of times throughout her career. “Carmen is very intelligent, extremely quick witted and tremendously fun,” she explains. “This is all part of her appeal.” But, McHardy surmises that any deeper knowledge of Carmen’s inner life is beside the point. “I don’t know that we want to know more about her,” she says. “We want to see that iconic femme fatale, period.”
That “femme fatale” interpretation is pretty much the default for Carmen, both onstage and onscreen. From Elīna Garanča’s anger to Anita Rachvelishvili’s joie-de-vivre to Julia Migenes’ smirking seductiveness, the character is known and celebrated for being the very embodiment of sex appeal, and is almost always portrayed with big hair, open shoulders, big bust, and bare feet.
But, while McHardy sees the character as a genre trope (one that audiences heartily enjoy), opera blogger Jenna Douglas doesn’t think it’s that simple. “I think we want to think of Carmen as this foil of all the other characters as opposed to a character of her own,” she says. “She’s the anti-Tosca, the anti-Lucia — like, all these ‘good women.’”
But, presenting Carmen as a mere foil doesn’t acknowledge the agency and power that Carmen has over her own story. She is very much her own woman — she works a factory job. She flirts with officers. She dances; she drinks; she fights; she frets. Carmen’s life is complicated. One minute, she gleefully plays the temptress. The next, a bad tarot card reading sends her spinning into an existential crisis. (“Carmen has her spiritual side,” Douglas explains, “but it’s not the God of the bible.”)
Douglas has dealt with Carmen both as a writer and in her role as a rehearsal pianist. To her, Carmen is no mere femme fatale, but rather a clever woman who emulates that cliché in order to exert control over the men surrounding her. “She’s doing exactly what men would love women to do,” Douglas says. Maybe that way, it’s possible for her to attain some relief from her clearly impoverished circumstances.
And nobody can deny Carmen’s opportunism; she is particularly adept at manipulating men to get what she wants. Initially, her seduction of the straight-arrow soldier Don José isn’t purely about romance; she’s trying to avoid going to prison. Carmen convinces José to free her using her feminine wiles, telling him they’ll “drink manzanilla” later.
“If she tried to do that every day, she wouldn’t have her job in the cigarette factory,” reasons Douglas. “She’s permanently at this bottom tier of social status, but she’s made it to the top of the bottom tier.”
But, the trouble with trying to flesh out Carmen’s character like this is that the opera’s libretto doesn’t offer a whole lot of detail. It rarely alludes to the specific circumstances that may have shaped and influenced Carmen’s choices. We know she works in a factory, we know she is poor, we know she likes to flirt. But what else? “We never see Carmen at home, so we don’t know what else is there,” Douglas says. “We don’t know if she’s got sisters, daughters, or whatever. And if she was about racking up numbers [sexually], we’d see her with more than two [men] in the opera.”
It’s worth noting that Bizet’s opera cuts out some key points from the Prosper Mérimée novel that it’s based on — José killing a man back home, and the fact that Carmen was married, for instance. But, it retains Don José’s obsession with Carmen — his desire to have her as a wife, rather than just a casual lover.
José’s obsession famously turns murderous in the opera’s final act. Perhaps we can interpret this in a larger sense as a reflection of society’s deep-seated fear of unbridled female sexuality, and of the patriarchal drive to contain and punish it. This fear, coupled with fascination, could be a part of what has enchanted audiences about the character for over a century.
Clearly, Carmen is more than a genre trope. And, as much as Allyson McHardy relishes that good-old-fashioned lady in red, she admits that Carmen “knows her own mind. If that makes her a bad girl, as Carmen would say, so be it.”
Calgary Opera’s new production of Carmen, starring American mezzo Sandra Piques Eddy, opens on April 18 and runs to April 26.
Around 1980, the American composer David Cope was failing to write an opera. The commission had been hanging over his head for a while, but he just wasn't making any headway. So, he did what any forward-thinking late 20th-century artist would do: he figured out how to make a computer do his work for him.
The software he developed — Experiments in Musical Intelligence, abbreviated as EMI and pronounced "Emmy" — was able to analyze and imitate the work of a specific composer based on a sample of their work. It proved unable to imitate Cope's style, leading him to turn in his completed opera seven years late, but EMI did manage to come close to some of music history's better known names:
If you find that disturbing, you're not alone. This music sits smack in the middle of the uncanny valley. Some classical musicians expressed interest in performing EMI's music, only to be shot down by their frightened agents, who thought that the controversy of those performances could outweigh the novelty.
But, here's the thing: humans have been fascinated by the idea of algorithmic music— music made by some formal process with minimal human intervention — for ages. In fact, this fascination even pre-dates computers.
In the 18th century, there was a brief craze for dice games that allowed people to "compose" their own simple music. The first of these dates from 1757, but the best-known one has been attributed (probably misattributed, actually) to Mozart.
It works like this: Mozart (or whoever it was) wrote 11 possible first measures for a minuet, 11 second measures and so on. So, all you have to do is roll two dice to find your first measure, roll them again to find your second, and keep going until you've got a complete 32-bar piece of music. The system can produce nearly a septillion different minuets, although most of them sound basically the same:
In concept, this isn't so different from EMI. Both the dice game and the computer program use a set of pre-determined parameters — in one case, many distinct measures of many possible minuets; and in the other, a sample of musical works by a specific composer — to produce an output that can differ due to an element of randomness.
In a sense, the key difference between the two is that the dice game's human-determined parameters are on full display, whereas EMI's are hidden from view. Maybe that's why EMI creeps us out so much: because it gives the illusion that a machine is making music without human aid. But it is an illusion, as Cope is swift to point out: "A human built the machine, listens to the output, and chooses what's the best. What's less human about that than if I had taken years to just compose the whole thing myself?"
There have been plenty of other novel and successful musical algorithms since EMI started churning out Vivaldi and Beethoven imitations. Brian Eno got in on this approach with his "generative music." He explained: "Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results."
There are elements of this kind of rule-based, adaptive music in modern video games like Portal 2, as well. That game's music changes depending on the actions of the player.
Even CBC Music's gotten on board, with Scott Tresham and Ben Didier's C.P.E. Bach machine, which allows anybody with a printer and a pair of scissors to generate two-part counterpoint in the style of that famous composer.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most impressive algorithmic music around today is still the handiwork of Cope. He followed up EMI with an even more flexible computer program, one so advanced that Cope even felt it deserved a proper human name: Emily Howell.
The main difference between EMI and Emily Howell is that, where the former was only able to imitate specific composers, the latter is able to synthesize a huge amount of pre-existing music into what Cope argues is "Emily's own style."
This, of course, is what human composers do. They take inspiration from the whole history of music, and use elements of it as ingredients in their own music. So, is this the point where algorithmic music finally becomes truly creepy? Remember, Emily Howell is still beholden to a set of parameters set out by David Cope — but this is a computer that makes music in a unique style.
Listen to her works, ye mighty, and despair. Or don't. I'll let you judge for yourself:
For more great science and music stories, check out CBC Music's Science Week page.
For four decades, the award-winning CBC Radio program Quirks & Quarks has been bringing fascinating stories about science to audiences across Canada and around the globe.
Along the way, the show has talked to top researchers about science and music, from how music affects our brains to why some people have no sense of rhythm.
So as part of Science Week, we are bringing you some of Quirks & Quarks' very best stories about music and the brain, including a feature interview with Daniel Levitin, author of the bestseller This is Your Brain on Music.
Listen in below, then check out all of CBC Music's Science Week stories here.
We Got the Music In Us
Music is a universal part of the human experience. It saturates our lives, and exists in every human society we have ever discovered. But why?
Is music a cultural artifact that we've created using our large brains? Or is it part of our biology that gave us an evolutionary advantage? Are specific tissues in our brains devoted to music? And how does music change our brains? Scientists are just starting to investigate these questions.
Included are McGill neuroscientist Robert Zatorre; University of Montreal psychology professor Isabelle Peretz; Rotman Research Institute senior scientist Christo Pantev; Ohio State University professor and composer Dr. David Huron; and McMaster University psychology professor Laurel Trainor.
Daniel Levitin went from being a session musician and producer working with world-famous recording artists to an academic in neuroscience with a fascination for the link between music and the brain.
In his book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Levitin explores how humans seem to be adapted specifically for music. Music activates the pleasure centres in ways similar to drugs, food and sex. We also perceive the patterns and features of music as distinct from ordinary sounds, which explains some of what we find attractive in musical harmonies and rhythms.
Levitin is a professor in the department of psychology and Bell Chair in Psychology of Electronic Communication at McGill University.
Many of us have experienced getting a pleasurable "chill" when we listen to music. Now, research "orchestrated" by Valorie Salimpoor, a PhD candidate at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, has shown that this "chill" is the direct result of music affecting our brain chemistry.
Researchers looked at dopamine production and uptake while subjects listened to chill-inducing music, and what they saw was a burst of dopamine.
Since dopamine is the same neurotransmitter that activates the brain's reward circuitry when we eat or have sex, this suggests that the enjoyment of music might well be a deeply evolved human behaviour.
A dancer who sticks out in a crowd because "he's got no rhythm" may suffer from more than just a lack of talent: he may have a new scientifically described disorder called "beat deafness."
Dr. Jessica Phillips-Silver, a postdoctoral researcher at the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research at the Université de Montréal, reports the first case of the disorder ever studied in the lab: a 23-year-old man named Mathieu.
Mathieu is a music lover who has taken both music and dance lessons. Despite that, Phillips-Silver's experiments showed he could not bounce to the beat of a merengue song, nor could he tell whether someone else was dancing in sync with the music. Phillips-Silver suspects beat deafness is a new form of congenital amusia similar to tone deafness.
Music has been thought to be universal among humans, appreciated by everyone in all cultures. Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, was interested in testing that fact.
There was already anecdotal evidence of people who didn't appreciate music, and researchers suspected this might be the result of a deeper problem, such as depression or an inability to appreciate positive experiences.
But in his study Zatorre found there is in fact a small percentage of people who do not respond to music, despite having the ability to perceive it accurately. Further, they respond normally to other rewarding experiences, so their lack of appreciation may not relate to any other deficit.
If you started taking music lessons before you were seven, you may have boosted the area of your brain responsible for motor skills. That is the finding of a study by Virginia Penhune, a psychology professor at Concordia University in Montreal.
In Penhune's study, brain scans determined that musicians who started taking lessons earlier had more and thicker fibres in a tissue known as "white matter" in a part of the brain called the corpus callosum, which plays an important role in a person's ability to coordinate both hands — a significant skill for a musician.
When the brain scans of musicians who started playing later were compared to a third group comprised of non-musicians, there was little difference. This suggests that there is a critical developmental period when musical training interacts with brain development.
It's April, and the big date on the calendar for music fans is the annual event known as Record Store Day.
If you're a serious vinyl collector, you've probably already been studying the massive list of exclusives and preparing to get up early on Saturday to raid your local store for a copy of Father John Misty's I Love You, Honeybear on heart-shaped red 7" or The Darjeeling Limited Original Soundtrack on coloured vinyl.
As usual, there are more than enough too many exclusives to wrap your head around — you almost just have to go down to your local store and hope for the best. If you are looking for some guidance, however, check out our picks in the gallery above. All exclusives go on sale at 8 a.m. in participating Record Store Day stores on April 18. Find out which stores are participating with sales and events here.
What is on your list to pick on Record Store Day? What is your favourite local record store? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @CBCRadio3.
This week you get two new entries, including one from Coeur de pirate. Beth Moore is still killing it in the online vote, and Death Cab for Cutie jumps up high. Finally, there’s a new Canadian number one. Find out below.
Mumford & Sons have a new track on the poll, called "Wolf":
Radio 2 Top 20 for April 17, 2015:
1. Joel Plaskett, "Credits Roll"
2. Mumford & Sons, "Believe"
3. Whitehorse, "Baby What's Wrong"
4. James Bay, "Hold Back the River"
5. Of Monsters and Men, "Crystals"
6. Yukon Blonde, "Saturday Night"
7. Beth Moore, "OK OK"
8. Death Cab for Cutie, "No Room in Frame"
9. The Weepies, "No Trouble"
10. Great Lake Swimmers, "I Must Have Someone Else's Blues"
Dean Brody is the first country artist to visit CBC Music Studio 211 for a First Play Live session, and man, are we happy that we invited him.
Brody filled the room with 90 eager fans who made the noise of a thousand. Country music fans are rabid, and Brody fans are among the most loyal we have ever seen. People from as far away as Sudbury and Kingston made the trip to Toronto to see Brody play new songs live for the first time.
What those fans got was nothing short of spectacular. The new material from Brody's latest record, Gypsy Road, is among the strongest material the country star has released, and Brody and his band presented it in a semi-acoustic form that still rocked the house. And when the short set was over, Brody kept the party going by signing autographs for each and every fan who showed up.
Check out these First Play Live performances of Brody's new material from Gypsy Road.
Listen to Rich tell you the story behind Bobby Womack!
So many talented musicians never find a break and are doomed to obscurity. Bobby Womack had the opposite problem. He couldn’t get away from the musical spotlight, even when he tried.
Womack’s father was a man named Friendly, and he was a gospel singer. Taking after his old man, Womack and his brothers formed a gospel quintet named, appropriately enough, the Womack Brothers. One night, as fate would have it, the group was spotted and heard by legendary soul singer Sam Cooke, who was blown away, and offered them a contract on his label SAR Records on the spot.
Cooke encouraged them to try their hand at secular music and the outfit’s name was changed to the Valentinos. They had a few hits, including one young Womack wrote called “It’s All Over Now.” Shortly afterward, a new young band from the U.K. scored their first hit with a cover of that song, and that band was the Rolling Stones.
Cooke passed away in December of 1964 and, having taken the Valentinos under his wing, the band’s career dwindled. They soon broke up and when Womack struggled to make headway in the business on his own, he retreated into the shadows and sought work as a session musician and songwriter.
He did quite well, to say the least. He wrote songs for Wilson Pickett and Janis Joplin and played on classic recordings by Sly and the Family Stone and Aretha Franklin. After applying his golden touch to several hit songs, Womack was pulled from the shadows and into the spotlight again in the early ’70s, close to 10 years after the death of his mentor, Cooke, and the demise of the Valentinos.
After signing a new record deal and scoring a few hits under his own name, Hollywood came calling. Womack was tapped to create the soundtrack to the critically acclaimed 1973 film Across 110th Street. The title track became one of his signature hits.
Throughout the 2000s, Womack still had a hard time escaping the spotlight. His music has been used in recent blockbuster films, TV commercials and video games. In December 2010, he became a member of Daman Albarn’s supergroup the Gorillaz, and joined them on their world tour.
Bobby Womack passed away in 2014.
Here’s some signature Womack, the classic “Across 110th Street.”
Here are some other great editions of Rear-view Mirror:
Dinosaurs, giant vikings, surrealistic high-flying gun fights, keytars, karate, wolves with glowing eyes and a Lamborghini Countach. It's all there in "True Survivor," the brand new action-packed '80s homage music video starring David Hasselhoff, the man best known for running down in the beach in slow motion and eating burgers off the bathroom floor.
The completely absurd music video, which is like an Old Spice commercial on bath salts, is in support of a self-described "over-the-top action comedy" inspired by '80s excess called Kung Fury which has already raised over $630,000 on Kickstarter.
The abundantly self-aware Hasselhoff relishes in the opportunity to riff on so many '80s stereotypes, doing Van Damme splits, riding a dinosaur and, well, so much more. It's no "Jump in My Car," but what is, really?
The Hoff, of course, also lends his vocals to the campy, anthemic song which sounds designed to be played over pretty much any 80s training montage, ensuring that it will probably be a huge hit in Germany. Check it out below.
Each day, Rich Terfry and Radio 2 Drive wraps up your day with music and stories about the interesting things going on in the world. Here are the stories we're talking about today.
Rich's Pick:
In honour of International Ford Mustang Day this is my Pick
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin "Ford Mustang"
Junk In The Trunk:
Argument with a boxer
Cool cats
Why a dumpster fire is no place for a selfie
Rear View Mirror:
Each week onRear-view Mirror, Rich Terfry and the Radio 2 Drive team look back at a great R&B/soul song from the good ol’ days.
Listen to Rich tell you the story behind Bobby Womack!
So many talented musicians never find a break and are doomed to obscurity. Bobby Womack had the opposite problem. He couldn’t get away from the musical spotlight, even when he tried.
Womack’s father was a man named Friendly, and he was a gospel singer. Taking after his old man, Womack and his brothers formed a gospel quintet named, appropriately enough, the Womack Brothers. One night, as fate would have it, the group was spotted and heard by legendary soul singer Sam Cooke, who was blown away, and offered them a contract on his label SAR Records on the spot.
Cooke encouraged them to try their hand at secular music and the outfit’s name was changed to the Valentinos. They had a few hits, including one young Womack wrote called “It’s All Over Now.” Shortly afterward, a new young band from the U.K. scored their first hit with a cover of that song, and that band was the Rolling Stones.
Cooke passed away in December of 1964 and, having taken the Valentinos under his wing, the band’s career dwindled. They soon broke up and when Womack struggled to make headway in the business on his own, he retreated into the shadows and sought work as a session musician and songwriter.
He did quite well, to say the least. He wrote songs for Wilson Pickett and Janis Joplin and played on classic recordings by Sly and the Family Stone and Aretha Franklin. After applying his golden touch to several hit songs, Womack was pulled from the shadows and into the spotlight again in the early ’70s, close to 10 years after the death of his mentor, Cooke, and the demise of the Valentinos.
After signing a new record deal and scoring a few hits under his own name, Hollywood came calling. Womack was tapped to create the soundtrack to the critically acclaimed 1973 film Across 110th Street. The title track became one of his signature hits.
Throughout the 2000s, Womack still had a hard time escaping the spotlight. His music has been used in recent blockbuster films, TV commercials and video games. In December 2010, he became a member of Daman Albarn’s supergroup the Gorillaz, and joined them on their world tour.
Bobby Womack passed away in 2014.
Here’s some signature Womack, the classic “Across 110th Street.”
Here are some other great editions of Rear-view Mirror:
The Strombo Show runs the gamut this Sunday night, keeping the spirit of radio alive by delivering the best records in the best order. It's a show for music lovers by music lovers, ranging over three hours of commercial-free music to honour both old and new.
George Stroumboulopoulos is joined by two modern rock mainstays, Chuck Ragan and Nate Mendel for intimate conversations in his home.
Chuck Ragan is an American singer-songwriter and punk scene veteran, formerly of the band Hot Water Music. His scratchy pipes are passionate and distinguishable as heard on his fourth solo album, 'Till Midnight'. He joins George for an acoustic performance ahead of his European tour.
We'll also be joined by resident Foo Fighters bassist Nate Mendel to celebrate his solo venture, Lieutenant. He opens up about his decision to break independently, his legacy with the Foos and his hardcore youth.
As always, we tip our hats to those groundbreakers and game-changers with a Nod to the Gods, spinning the best new tracks, paying tribute to Tom Waits on Ten with Tom and we send you into the horizontal with the Big Lie Down.
Lock it. Crank it. Join the collective!
For further musical exploration with George Stroumboulopoulos, tune in to The Strombo Show every Sunday night on CBC Radio 2 or CBC Music from 8 to 11 p.m. for three hours of uninterrupted music for music lovers.
Self-anointed musical genius Chilly Gonzales made an instantly memorable appearance on German television, Thursday night. After demonstrating how he used Hamburg's Kaiser Quartett as "a very expensive sampler" on his latest album, Gonzales launched into a musical tirade against one of Germany's most towering cultural icons: Richard Wagner.
With the aid of the Kaiser Quartett, German rapper Dendermann and an enthusiastic studio audience, Gonzales offered the only rational reaction to Wagner's infamous horribleness.
Here's the whole video, including a performance of Gonzales's "Advantage Points," and several jokes that presumably only make sense to people living in Germany.
