Daily Download: "It Never Changes to Stop," the Books, from "Lost and Safe"
The Books combine minimal, folky acoustic instrumentals with samples drawn from a vast library of found sounds and conversational snippets. And they do it very well. There's a calculated artlessness to the way the Books use samples, not processing them and not making any attempts to hide where they begin or end. It's not unlike the way Mark De Gli Antoni worked in Soul Coughing, and while the two bands couldn't be more different in other ways, there's a similar virtuosity at work in placing samples for maximum impact, each one triggering a palpable emotional response. "It Never Changes to Stop," from their upcoming LP "Lost and Safe," is somehow both effortlessly, glidingly smooth and unregulated and at the same time perfectly precise like clockwork -- clockwork in 9/8 time. Some of the nicest, most unusual music I've heard this year.
Great literary podcasts:
"In Walked Bud"
Amiri Baraka
"The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"
Charles Bukowski
"The House on Mango Street"
Sandra Cisneros
"A Reporter's Life,"
Walter Cronkite
"An Open Heart," by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
"Robert Frost Reads"
Robert Frost
"In Harry's Bar in Venice"
Ernest Hemingway
"The War on Drugs"
Bill Hicks
"I Have a Dream"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"King of Horror"
Read by Stephen King
"Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
"Long Walk to Freedom," by Nelson Mandela
Read by Danny Glover
"Shopgirl"
Steve Martin
"All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Brad Pitt
"The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison
"Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
"The Bell Jar,"
Sylvia Plath
"The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe
Read by Basil Rathbone
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," by JK Rowling
Read by Jim Dale
"Everything"
Henry Rollins
"Fast Food Nation," By Eric Schlosser
Read by Rick Adamson
"Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Dylan Thomas
"Slaughterhouse Five"
Kurt Vonnegut
"Hooking Up"
Tom Wolfe
Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
