Art Rock guys who play Latin Music

…because there may not be another blog showing the many sides of guys like Arto Lindsay and Marc Ribot.

Aurora en Pekin by Marc Ribot – if you like this I highly recommend his two albums with Los Cubanos Postizos. They are basically a tribute to one of this earliest musical influences – Arsenio Rodriguez (who I featured in this blog a while back).

Disposable Head by Marc Ribot – here is the art rock side of Ribot(who also plays guitar with Tom Waits). Some of it can be difficult to listen to but I did really like his album Yo, I killed Your God which sounds like punk jazz for lack of a better term.

Mar De Gavea by Arto Lindsay – I don’t own any of his latin albums but that needs to change. His voice reminds me a lot of Caetano Veloso’s son Moreno.

Blonde Red Head by DNA – Arto was the lead singer of DNA(and the Ambitious Lovers) back in the 80s. This excerpt was taken from the movie Downtown 81 (with Basquiat). This is also the song that gave the band Blonde Redhead their name.

…and just because I mentioned Moreno Veloso above…

Duesa do Amor by Moreno Veloso – FINALLY a good youtube clip featuring Moreno’s music. He has a loose association with two other musicians who he plays with quite a lot. They take turns with who “leads” the band, but it’s essentially all the same. Moreno leads on “Moreno+2” and then there is “Domenico+2” which he plays on…you get the idea. I don’t think the 3rd one has made an album just yet but the first two are fantastic – especially Moreno’s album.

Dada

I happened to be in Washington a few years ago and caught a performance of George Atheil’s 1924 piece Ballet Mecanique at the National Gallery of Art during their huge Dada exhibition.  The piece originally called for a percussion orchestra of three xylophones, four bass drums, and a tam-tam (gong), two “live” pianists, seven or so electric bells, a siren, three airplane propellors, and 16 synchronized player pianos.  For the performance at the National Art Gallery, however, the entire band was robotic.  Actually, I can’t imagine it performed any other way – it seemed to perfectly fit the prevailing mood of the Dadaist works – mostly a reaction to the war machine.  There seemed to be these recurring themes of mechanization and war in the Dada exhibit and to have a piece (originally written when Atheil was 24 to accompany a Dada film) that was performed completely by these cold robotic arms was just perfect.  Anyway, check out the performance below.  I’ll tell you the one thing it doesn’t capture is that of the power and chaos of a long row of pianos playing together like that – I mean, it really felt like a war was about to start in that gallery – it was so jarring.

Enjoy.

Ballet Mecanique by George Atheil