Yard of Blondes

 

 

Yard of Blondes is a French alternative rock band now based in Los Angeles. They started out as a folk pop act made up of singer/songwriter and guitarist/vocalist Vincent Walter Jacob and bassist/vocalist Fanny Hill, and after relocating to L.A., they expanded the band lineup with the addition of guitarist Burak Yerebakan and drummer Forrest Mitchell. They were featured on the 2016 compilation I love you all the time, along with Eagles Of Death Metal, Florence & The Machine, Kings Of Leon, Jimmy Eat World and many more. All the proceeds were given to the victims of the Paris attacks.

On November 1, 2019 they released the first single “You and I & I” from the forthcoming album, and returned on Valentine’s Day with a second single “Lowland“. The single is accompanied by the release of a wonderful video produced by Fanny and Vincent, featuring footage filmed at LAX and Disneyland on their phones. About the song, Vincent explains “‘Lowland’ depicts the dark place we always go to when we are distressed. It’s the place where all our monsters live. In the song I feel I’m going back to that dark place, but this time you’ll accompany me to get out of here, just like Orpheus going to get Eurydice from death, except here the roles are reversed because Fanny is the one who is pulling me out from inside.”

The song features chugging riffs of exuberant layered guitars, propelled by hard-driving rhythms. Vincent and Burak’s guitar work is superb, and Forrest’s drums are spot-on, assertive yet restrained where needed. Fanny lays down a solid bass line while lending her soft backing vocals to the mix. Vincent’s beautiful, plaintive vocals convey a strong sense of vulnerability as he pleads for emotional support. Everything explodes in the bridge into a maelstrom of blistering riffs and thunderous percussion, Vincent’s raw, impassioned vocals rising to the occasion, and covering me with chills. 

 

 https://www.yardofblondes.com/

Tesla, the true inventor of radio

 

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) is said to have invented the 20th century. We owe him the coils for the alternating current electric generator, the spark plugs, the alternator, the remote control and many other discoveries that have made our lives easier. However, the general public is unaware of this Croatian genius born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in July 1856, since what was brilliant was also impractical and many of his inventions ended up filling the list of other less scrupulous subjects. Perhaps one of the most striking cases is that of the radio.

Tesla used his alternating current technology to invent, in 1895, the radio transmission system. However, the Italian Guillermo Marconi used the oscillator developed by Tesla and 17 other Croatian patents to transmit signals across the ocean in 1901, patent the invention in 1904 and, to finish off history, win the Nobel Prize in 1909. Marconi He did not mention or acknowledge the role that Tesla had indirectly played in his discovery and without which it probably would not have been possible. In 1943, the same year as Tesla's death, the United States Supreme Court recognized Tesla's merit and returned the patent to him.
 

As a child he had a talent for mathematics and a prodigious memory. It is said that he did not need to make plans, as he kept everything in his head, and that he only slept three hours a day. He studied engineering in Vienna and Prague, worked in various European electrical companies, and in 1884, at the age of 28, he moved to New York. In the big city he would go to work under the orders of Thomas Alva Edison, with whom he disputed the 'War of the Currents' because Edison defended the use of standard direct current for the lighting of cities and Tesla opted for alternating, that it would end up showing itself better and imposing itself.

The purely financial interests of Edison made him reject the idea of ​​Tesla and try to sabotage and ridicule him, so the Croatian inventor ended up resigning and joining the Westinghouse company, which bought his patents and installed a generator in Niagara Falls (the first hydroelectric power station) with which he saved his economy. The funny thing is that Tesla, in another of his impractical gestures, waived the royalties as a thank you to the company and went bankrupt.

In the later years he became darker and more eccentric. Tesla lived in hotels that he left when he couldn't pay the bill and embarked on such strange projects as lighting up part of the Sahara desert for Martians to see or building the Wardenclyffe Tower or Tesla Tower. This imposing structure would serve to materialize Tesla's dream and be able to transmit free energy through the air, without cables, taking advantage of the conductivity of the ionosphere. He never got there and died poor and alone, accompanied only by the pigeons he fed.

After his death, a campaign of forced oblivion took place so that his figure and achievements were hidden. Many of his inventions and discoveries began to be associated with names that did not correspond instead of Tesla's and even the FBI went so far as to requisition most of the documents of the Croatian inventor, whose family had to recover after long trials. The little affection that the academic community felt for Tesla and the clash of interests with the electricity companies for his idea of ​​creating a free energy system caused a temporary oblivion that has been disappearing in recent years, returning to Nikola Tesla the merit and the place he deserves in history.

Alba

 

The Spanish-born singer and guitarist has developed a timeless yet fresh pop-rock sound with undertones of neo-soul, funk and R&B.

Having started her musical journey as the front woman for Sons of Rock in her teen years, ALBA has taken stages by storm, captivating audiences with her unique songwriting style and by playing guitar behind her head in reminiscence of Hendrix.

ALBA embarked on her solo project after moving to London in 2016 and making it her base of operations. She has performed on stages across the UK including The Cavern Club, Ronnie Scott’s, Lancaster Music Festival, or The Alternative Escape, and opening for acclaimed acts such as The Waterboys.

ALBA is a passionate environmental campaigner and likes to use her music to make a difference and speak up about social and climate issues. She joined forces with several nonprofit organisations to raise funds and awareness around climate change and how music can be greener.

Following a string of critically acclaimed single releases; her music has been added to rotation in radios around the globe, and has received coverage from well-known publications, blogs and tastemakers such as Guitar magazine, Amazing Radio, Wonderland Magazine and BBC Radio. Guitar magazine, Amazing Radio, Wonderland Magazine and BBC Radio.

 

Site:  https://www.musicbyalba.com/

The Just Imagines

 

 

 

Tyler Cressman is a member of The Just Imagines with Ciroyelle. They are a real life power couple who met through music and are now engaged and have formed a band. From the USA, the instrumentalist and producer in the band and Ciroyelle is from Germany and they compose the lyrics and do vocals. Ciroyelle is in charge of all visual art and promotion of the band. They are in the process of releasing their debut album, which tells their true love story as they wait for Ciroyelle to be able to move to the USA. This album includes songs from across the musical spectrum, including blues, folk, jazz, reggae, rock, funk, classical and more! The intention is that the album sounds as diverse as their love for one another. 

The first single, Not a Chance Encounter, is out now and is a sultry and psychedelic blues epic proclaiming their meeting could not have been by accident.  They both do vocals in this song and it features long and powerful guitar solos conveying the vibes of the song.  It has already been featured on multiple FM stations, podcasts, youtube shows, and internet radios. There is a pop art style music video for this song on their youtube channel as well. 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheJustImagines.music

 

Ten books about music subcultures

 

 

 

1. Deep Down in the Ghetto by Roger D Abrahams
In 1964, a folklorist based in Philadelphia managed a neat trick: he published one of the most important books ever written about hip-hop, long before hip-hop actually existed. In this classic study, Abrahams records and analyses a trove of mid-century Black oral literature, setting down street-corner rhymes, tall tales and boasts – some of which are as violent, and as bawdy, as the rap records that shocked the world in the decades to come.

 

2. The Nashville Sound by Paul Hemphill
Hemphill was not exactly a Nashville insider, which explains part of the charm of this book, published in 1970: he captured the genius and the weirdness of a country-music industry that was just starting to think of itself as such. Like virtually everyone who came after him, he noted that the genre seemed split between “traditionalists” and “the new breed”. He noticed that the town was full of performers who were “modernising the simple music of their rural southern childhoods and blurring the distinction between country and pop music” – and of course it still is.

 

 3. Like Punk Never Happened by Dave Rimmer
A very strange book: a sharp treatise on the aesthetics of pop, masquerading as a just-in-time biography of Boy George and Culture Club. In fact by the time this book was published, in 1985, Culture Club’s time at the top of the charts was pretty much over. Knowing this adds some wistfulness to Rimmer’s narrative. And it adds some context to his argument, which is that, in the aftermath of the punk explosion, a new “pop” sensibility emerged, rebelling against the punk-rock rebellion by steadfastly refusing to be rebellious. So what if it didn’t last? Who says great pop is supposed to last?

 

 4. I’m With the Band by Pamela Des Barres
When this book was published, at the peak of the hair-metal craze, some readers might have mistaken it for a gossipy compendium of backstage tales. The book’s subtitle is Confessions of a Groupie, but the main draw is the way that Des Barres, sometimes drawing from old diary entries, charts her evolution from a curious consumer of rock ’n’ roll records to an important participant in the scene that helped create the myth of the rock star. Her writing is precise and perceptive, affectionate but unsentimental. In one memorable passage, she remembers listening to Led Zeppelin II while hanging out in Jimmy Page’s hotel room. “I had to comment on every solo,” she writes, “and even though I believed the drum solo in Moby Dick went on endlessly, I held my tongue and went on pressing his velvet trousers and sewing buttons on to his satin jacket.”

 

5. The Death of Rhythm and Blues by Nelson George
For much of the 1980s, George was a music editor at Billboard magazine, which gave him extraordinary insight not only into the genre of R&B but the industry that nurtured it. This classic study is both a history and a manifesto – and also, more than 30 years later, a time capsule. George writes tenderly about the Black business owners who supported R&B, and skeptically about the way that 80s R&B singers (including Michael Jackson and Prince) found pop success, sometimes seeming to leave the genre behind. Was that really progress?

 

6. Black Noise by Tricia Rose
This book, published in 1994, was one of the first academic investigations of hip-hop, although, like many of the books that came afterward, it was not entirely celebratory. Rose was devoted to hip-hop, but she was also devoted to the idea of hip-hop as a vehicle for resistance and emancipation, which means she can’t help but notice the ways in which it often failed to live up to these ideals. In describing (and sometimes decrying) the genre’s tendency to focus on “male predatory sexual behaviour”, and its existence within a network of white-owned, multinational businesses, she anticipated the way hip-hop would continue to delight and frustrate its biggest fans for decades to come.

 

7. Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds
An enthusiastic and often contagious history of dance music, with a focus on pleasure: Reynolds conjures up not only how house and techno (and their many offshoots) evolved, but what it really feels like to love them. This feeling has not always been entirely organic: Reynolds pays close attention to the relationship between dance music and drugs, explaining how often, when the high changes, the beat changes, too.

 

8. Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind
An intense, scary book about an intense, scary scene: black metal, which in the 1990s took heavy metal’s obsession with darkness and evil to its logical conclusion. Moynihan and Soderlind chronicle a world of murder, hatred and madness; even if you don’t have any interest in the bands (or in the 2018 Jonas Åkerlund film based on this book), you may come away with a new appreciation for what it means for music to be truly extreme.

 

9. Love Saves the Day by Tim Lawrence
How do you capture a party? Often, you don’t: the revellers go home, the DJ packs up, people move on. But in this careful work of excavation, Lawrence shows how, in 1970s New York, casual get-togethers spawned glamorous nightclubs, and eventually an entire musical subculture, reconstructing the prehistory of disco, and gesturing toward all the sounds and scenes that came afterward.

10. Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus
Riot grrl was at least two things at once: a musical movement, which bloomed briefly in the 1990s, and a literary movement, sparked by fanzines, which jammed together punk rock and feminism, challenging and changing the identities of both of them. This book is an indispensable cultural history that emphasizes both the strangeness and the sensibleness of riot grrrl, an unlikely movement that seems, in retrospect, inevitable.

Great Spanish-speaking rock bands

 

Do you love Spanish rock bands? Read on to learn about 13 huge bands in the Spanish music industry. It’s a wonderful genre to enjoy while practicing your Spanish.

Spanish rock bands with female singers are somewhat rare, but there are many great solo female artists in Spanish rock.

1. Hombres G

Hombres G is a Spanish rock band named after the American movie G-Men who made their debut at Madrid’s festival, Rockola, in the 80s. They signed to an independent label called Twins and their song Devuélveme A Mi Chica was the smash hit that took them to stardom. 

In 1986, La Cegaste was released and also became a huge hit. Because of their songwriting skills and catchy lyrics, Hombres G has been recognized as one of the best rock bands in Latin America and Spain. 

The band consists of Javi Molina on the drums, David Summers on the bass and vocals, and Rafael Gutierrez and Dani Mezquita on guitar. Hombres G stood out in large part thanks to the captivating talent of their drummer. 

Their unique sound is evident in their catchy songs, such as: 

• Devuelveme mi chica (Give me back my girl)
• Si no te tengo a ti (If I don’t have you), and 
• Te quiero (I Love You).

 

2. Enanitos Verdes

Enanitos Verdes is another Argentinian band that came out in the 1980s. This legendary Spanish rock band gained popularity with their second album Contrarreloj. 

Their single La muralla verde (The Green Wall) was a smash hit throughout Latin America and Spain. People love to sing along to their incredible hits. Lamento boliviano (Bolivian Sorrow) is another of this band’s greatest Spanish rock songs. 

3. Café Tacvba

Café Tacvba (or Café Tacuba) is one of the most famous Mexican rock bands of all time. Their rebellious and unique sound fits into the alternative and pop rock genre. 

The group began in 1989. Their best songs include Eres (You Are), La Ingrata (The Ingrate), and El Aparato (The Apparatus). International music buffs compare their sound to The Cure. 

The band’s sound uses traditional Mexican music styles, reimagined, in their songs. They honor their country in the music that they write. Listening to Café Tacuba is a splendid way to learn more about the Mexican culture. 

4. Maná

Maná is another famous Spanish rock band from Mexico. Although they started in the 1970s, Maná had to wait almost for 11 years to gain popularity. 

Finally, in the 90s they became the phenomenon that they are today. Their album, Dónde jugarán los niños, (Where Will The Kids Play) took them to stardom. 

Some of their best songs are: 

• Labios compartidos, (Shared Lips)
• Rayando el sol (The Rays of Sunlight), and 
• Bendita tu luz (Bless Your Light).

Ever since, critics and fans recognize Maná as one of the most influential Spanish rock bands of all time.

 

5. Soda Stereo

Soda Stereo is an amazing Argentinian Spanish rock band. Their music is legendary due to their poetic lyrics and catchy melodies. Many say that their approach to music has changed the genre for the better.

Their lead singer, Gustavo Cerati, wrote many of the songs. Soda Stereo reached the height of their popularity in the 80s. 

Two of their most famous songs are:

• De música ligera (Of Light Music) and 
• Persiana americana (American Blinds). 

 

6. Molotov

Molotov is a rebel Spanish rock band that mixes rap, heavy rock, and pop. Many of their lyrics are about doing whatever you want, whenever you want. 

Molotov is popular with younger audiences. They came out in the 90s and continue to impact the Spanish rock genre today. 

People compare them to Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys. If you’re into punk rock, this is the Spanish rock band for you.

 

7. Carlos Santana

Carlos Santana is one of the most famous guitarists in the world. Rolling Stone Magazine ranks him as one of the most influential artists of all time. Santana came out in the 60s and continues to play with both English and Spanish rock bands. 

Santanta has 13 Grammys so far, and he’s played multiple world tours. This 70-year-old rocker continues to play his guitar and inspire his multitude of fans. 

8. Aterciopelados

Aterciopelados is a unique Spanish rock band from Colombia. They use traditional Colombian sounds mixed with rock and roll. The lead singer is a woman, and their crossover style has gained them world recognition. 

Many say that their album El dorado (The Golden) is one of the best Spanish rock albums of all time. Florecita rockera (Rockin Little Flower) is an amazing pop rock song that’s super fun to dance to. 

9. Zoé

Zoé is one of the most unique Mexican Spanish rock bands out there. This grunge band started in 1994.

Leon Larrengui, their lead vocalist, created a one-of-a-kind lineup. Since the 90s, this Mexican band has found its own sound. Two of their most popular songs are Paula and Nada (Nothing).

10. Caifanes

Caifanes is a Spanish rock band from the 80s. Led by Saul Hernandez, they’re one of the most respected Spanish rock bands in Mexico. They blend British new wave, Latin beats, and progressive rock. 

Fans love them for their use of music to make social and political commentaries. Some of their most recognized songs are Afuera (Outside) and Viento (Wind). 

Hurricane Highway

 

Amazing things have happened Hurricane Highway in their short few years together. From a chance meeting in a pub, singer Ed Holland and guitarist Kevin Collins recorded their first single ‘Your Man’ in 2014. It received great critical acclaim and very quickly became a radio hit. A video of the same song they made also did very well for them.

The band plays a style of American Country Rock that appeals to a lot of people. Based out of the West Coast of Ireland the have been creating ripples in the industry which have become waves recently.

‘Yeah’ was their second release also accompanied by a video which was quickly picked up by satellite TV stations and started the brand building process for them.

Then came the recording and video of ‘Keep them Kisses Comin’ which catapulted Hurricane Highway to new heights. This reached nearly two million views between YouTube and Facebook and other internet platforms and still growing.

This was boosted by the amount of airplay on Sky channels 191, 266, 389 and other Country Music channels not to mention a slot on the Ray Darcy TV Show and being play listed by RTE 1 Radio. National exposure and regional airplay has driven national awareness and brand recognition for the band.

‘Hey Pretty Girl’ was the next single and was accompanied by a beautiful video which featured an older man looking back on his life. This has already touched over half a million people and won the Irish TV Country Music Award 2016 Best Video of the Year.

The hallmark of Hurricane Highways success has been the high quality of their recordings and videos. This is well recognised in the industry and Country Music channels and Radio stations always look forward to receiving their new material. Ed Holland and Kevin Collins come from two different musical backgrounds and sometimes when these are mixed something magical happens. Hurricane Highway is a perfect example of this.

April 2017 saw the release of their greatly anticipated album ‘EXPOSED’ which went straight to No. 1 in the iTunes charts and is doing really well for the band. Further singles from the album ‘If it Gets You Where You Wanna Go’ and ‘Make you Mine’ have received great airplay and the video for ‘Make You Mine’ won the Irish Post/TG4 Country Music Award for Best Video of the Year 2017 for the second year in a row.

They are definitely doing something right. Hurricane Highway was also nominated for the 2017 Best Live Band 2017 and Best Album of the Year 2017.Having played some of the biggest festivals of the year 2017 their new original single ‘If this is Goodbye’ is released early November 2017. This plus their song gave Hurricane Highway two GRAMMY nominations in 2019 and this brought the band to the notice of international audiences and promoters.

 

https://www.hurricanehighway.net