Lonnie Holley turns "I Snuck Off The Slave Ship" into short film

Watch the trailer for Lonnie Holley & Cyrus Moussavi's I Snuck Off The Slave Ship which premieres at Sundance in January.  

Sometimes Lonnie Holley just wants to dance

"Sometimes I Wanna Dance" and "I Woke Up In A Fucked Up America" are off Lonnie Holley's new MITH album.

Lonnie Holley opens for Dan Lanois @ Danforth Music Hall, Sunday

Improvisational soul sender Lonnie Holley makes his long overdue Toronto debut this weekend. Don't miss it!

LINKS
site http://www.lonnieholley.com/
label http://www.dust-digital.com/lonnie-record/
NY Times Lonnie Holley, The Insider's Outsider

Dan Lanois remixes Tinariwen in a Caddy

If you ever wondered what Dan Lanois likes to do when visiting Toronto, check the video below.

On the heels of remixing The Antlers’ song “Doppelgänger,” Daniel Lanois has reimagined the track "Adounia Ti Chidjret” by Grammy-winning desert blues band Tinariwen, capturing the collaborative spirit of Anti-Thesis, the Brooklyn concert event featuring all three artists on Monday.

Anti-Thesis follows Lanois' return to Toronto for a multi-media show at the Danforth Music Hall on Sunday in which Lanois and crew will provide live musical accompaniment to short films provided by Atom Egoyan, Mary Harron and others. Birmingham improvisational sound sculptor deluxe Lonnie Holley kicks off the evening in spellbinding fashion at 8 pm sharp.

Along with Lanois' Tinariwen collabo is a guerilla video (see below) of Lanois remixing the Tinariwen track live as he rides through the streets of Toronto in a 1972 Fleetwood Brougham; nobody said deep sonics couldn’t be fun.

“Anti-Thesis” is a celebration of “body music,” a sound more visceral than Lanois’ classic ambient experiments with Brian Eno, but with a similar bent towards the hypnotic and immersive, stretched out into structures that proclaim texture and rhythm over hooks and pop structure.  From Can to Ornette Coleman, this is music that often fails to cut through traditional media channels because the expansive nature doesn’t lend itself to our quick click culture, but music that lives on in secret societies until it becomes the defining sound of the decades that follow.

These three artists couldn’t be more different in terms of industry tropes like “genre,” but within this context of “body music,” they are bonded. Take Lanois’ remixes of The Antlers, and now, Tinariwen:  on The Antlers remix, he takes an already ruminative tune into an even more spiritual/ambient mode, while for the Tinariwen remix, he uses his sonic skills to amp up the patented rhythmic throb of the track, creating something that evokes both the past and future. Have a listen.

Video of the Week: Lonnie Holley

"All Rendered Truth" by Lonnie Holley, from the album Just Before Music out November 6 on Dust To Digital (see Links below). Video directed by George King, with footage from his upcoming documentary about Lonnie Holley. 
 

Lonnie Bradley Holley aka "The Sand Man" was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, the seventh of 27 children. From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events.

Holley did not start making and performing music in a studio nor does his creative process mirror that of the typical musician. His music and lyrics are improvised on the spot and morph and evolve with every event, concert, and recording. In Holley’s original art environment, he would construct and deconstruct his visual works, repurposing their elements for new pieces. This often led to the transfer of individual narratives into the new work creating a cumulative composite image that has depth and purpose beyond its original singular meaning. The layers of sound in Holley’s music, likewise, are the result of decades of evolving experimentation. “Just Before Music” features Holley’s first studio recordings made in 2010 and 2011.

LINKS
label  http://www.dust-digital.com/lonnie/
video director George King  http://www.georgeking-assoc.com/