Dreaming Ant – Pittsburgh’s independent, documentary, gay, lesbian & foreign DVD rental source. Dreaming Ant is a double shot of local Pittsburgh as it is located in the back of the Bloomfield coffee shop – Crazy Mocha (on Liberty Ave in the heart of the Bloomfield buisiness district). So there is a place to rent independent video’s in Pittsburgh, no more waiting for the video that you had to order from the internet to arrive. So scoot on over to Bloomfield for a cup of coffee and a place to rent videos that is locally owned. (IheartPGH is a frequent Crazy Mocha visitors because we heart the free wireless internet)
Category Archives: Music
le sonique
I was just clicking around some other Pittsburgh blogs and found this gem of a site le sonique – there isn’t a whole lot of info about Jeffery on this site but that is okay. He seems to like Pittsburgh and he likes music and he looks like he is having a heck of a good time in this picture on the website so that is enought for me.
Check out the cover song contest – his rendidition of Kelly Clarson’s is definitly worth a listen (even if you aren’t an American Idol fan).
Jeffrey (or anyone can answer this) – are there any popular songs about Pittsburgh that we could submit to the cover song contest?
Congotronics
Konono No. 1, a 12-piece street band from Kinshasa, arrives in Pittsburgh TONIGHT!!!! at The Warhol Museum. The show starts at 8pm and tickets are $10.
From this is happening:
Using homemade “Congotronics”, electro effects, amplified thumb pianos, and makeshift percussion from pots, pans, and car parts, these unique musicians fuse traditional rhythms and homemade trance sounds in a mix that’s earned acclaim from both electronica and world music fans.
Konono No. 1, led by the septuagenarian Mawangu Mingiedi, performs in outdoor cafes in Kinshasa, Congo. To make its traditional trance music heard above the roar of the traffic-choked streets, it amplifies its toylike likembés, or thumb pianos, using pick-up microphones made from the magnets in car alternators and loudspeakers left behind by Belgian colonists in 1960. The squalling feedback this lo-fi system produces is worked into the polyrhythmic drumming and call-and-response chanting to create a brutal, neotraditional genre Kinshasa’s musicians call tradi-moderne.
“When I encountered it, I thought it was the equivalent of punk music in Africa,” said Vincent Kenis, a Brussels-based producer who first heard Konono No. 1 on a French radio station in 1980. ” From then it took me 10 years to go to Kinshasa and look for them and another 10 years to find them.” He finally tracked down the band in 2002 and discovered it sounded just as it had 20 years before: no equipment had been replaced.
Arts Greenhouse
The Arts Greenhouse is an interdisciplinary project organized by the Center for Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon’s College of Fine Arts. They recruit, train and actually record young musical and performing artists. Their 2005-2006 season is just starting, in fact, their first workshop starts this Saturday. Members of the community act as staff in the educational workshops. Students learn about recording their music, including production and marketing skills.
If you know anyone who is interested in developing their hip hop or spoken word skills, call Kat Agres at 412.268.5279. The workshops will be held at ID Labs (5272 Butler Street) in Lawrenceville.
WYEP – 91.3 FM
Thanks to WYEP, I can’t listen to commercial radio anymore. And that’s a good thing. The station is listener supported, and they play a mellow, interesting mix of new and old music. I have to admit that sometimes the station gets a little too folksy for my tastes, but they also take requests. When a friend from out of town visited me, he was amazed to hear Johnny Cash played up right against the Pet Shop Boys. Bands I have heard about through ‘YEP through the years include Tegan & Sara, Raul Malo, Ray LaMontagne, Jump Little Children, Andrew Bird, Shivaree, Citizen Cope, the list goes on and on …
The station has a rockin’ website at:
http://www.wyep.org/
It contains great information on the CD Live! series and other community programs. (For example, they are building a new Community Broadcast Center.) Check out their concert calendar here:
http://www.wyep.org/con%5Fcal/
One other thing I like about the website is that you can actually see all of their playlists in case you didn’t catch the name of that weird blues tune you heard at 6am :
http://www.wyep.org/music_programs/index.asp
So forgo loud car commercials and abrasive commercial DJs forever … tune in to 91.3 and makes your ears happy.
PS – They canceled their membership campaign this fall, so this is a great time to start listening.