I got a chance to hear some wild, experimental sounds and participate in a mini-ecstatic experience in Peterborough on Sunday afternoon, featuring Ros Bobos and 23, but sadly missing The Low Anthem. I wrote a blog, which includes a few pictures of Ros Bobos, in my LiveJournal (http://nhpeacenik.livejournal.com/28377.html)

If you hurry, you can still catch the last two days of http://neffa.org/ NEFFA (http://www.last.fm/event/1042580 a.k.a. The New England Folk Festival Association Folk Festival) in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Denise and I ducked out of our myriad commitments and sneaked down to the Friday night session last night and were part of workshops on

1. Filk Music
The Boston area has a thriving Filk community in http://www.massfilc.org/ M.A.S.S F.I.L.C. You can find out virtually anything you want to know about Filk music, including what it is, at their website. They will be hosting http://www.concertino.net their Filk convention called ConCertino, on June 19-20…

Fri 7 Nov – Whaling Country Showcase IV

I've only missed this twice-a-year event once, and hope never to miss it again. Jeff & Benares were their wonderful generous selves as hosts, making everybody feel twice as at-home as possible. They sang and played material from both their CDs along with some additional stuff. At the end, they invited everybody up to put on a rousing rendition of "We've Got Franklin D. Roosevelt Back Again", and we all joined in on the chorus to celebrate a certain recent event in the public sphere…

All ages were represented. At the last…

I've just started a group called "350 Songs About Global Warming" 350+Songs+About+Global+Warming (http://www.last.fm/group/350+Songs+About+Global+Warming)after hearing an inspiring talk by Bill McKibben (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben) and reading his new book Deep Economy (http://www.billmckibben.com/deep-economy.html). There is a worldwide movement, coordinated at the website http://www.350.org/ that is aimed at publicizing the fact that the human race must reduce its Carbon Dioxide (CO2) output to the point where a level of 350 Parts Per Million (PPM), or less, of CO2 is found in the Earth's atmosphere if it is to avoid catastrophic Global Warming (or Climate Change or whatever you want to call it).

People all over…

As the Age of Oil approaches its end, our young singer-songwriters, artists and poets are dreaming of whales. Whales were the original source of oil for heat and light that powered the rise of the British-American empires, and petroleum took over from the whales just barely in time to save them from complete extinction. Somewhere in our collective consciousness and our collective unconscious the whale remains as a symbol and a powerful guide to the present dilemma facing the human race and This Island Earth.

While this video (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/jul/31/whales) may not remain in place for too long, it serves as…

http://www.halfredhouse.biz/pictures/hollowscove2.jpg

Listen to this song: it's amazing, a dream song that I've been going back to again and again since I first heard it. Ayla Nereo wrote Hollows Cove, and it appears on her album Play Me A Time. In May, 2008, Beatbeat Whisper recorded it on their album Wonder Continental

It starts with the feeling of a Child ballad with a nonsense chorus "Oh Darkened Deadeye" repeated after each line, but the refrain melts away in the second verse and is replaced with a rhythmic pattern. Somehow the words "Oh Darkened Deadeye" seem to be repeated many times…

Preview/Review of I Sing by Marybeth Hallinan, 2 CD set scheduled for release in February, 2008.
by Jim Giddings

Marybeth Hallinan is the lead singer of the Peterborough (NH) based group Full Cold Moon. Her new solo venture is a double-CD set called I Sing. Both the lyrics and the melodies of all the the songs on the two discs were written by Hallinan herself. The new album is pretty much uniformly downtempo, with Hallinan's dreamy piano playing forming a background for her precise delivery and multi-octave vocal stylings. In contrast, Full Cold Moon as a group…

Wed 28 Nov – Beatbeat Whisper in Providence RI

First of all, of course this is a rave review. It's the first time I got to see Ayla and Davyd in person. In person, all the qualities that come through so strongly in their gentle singing and, playing and songwriting are manifestly present. BBW did several songs from their album, plus "Up the Long Tracks" and two songs that haven't been recorded.I was fascinated to see the way Davyd made those ethereal sounds in "Lulu" with an electric guitar and a slide. And the brother-sister synchronization was almost as much…

Thu 25 Oct – Flip Side

Flip Side is a play written by Ellen Maddow and directed by Paul Zimet, with music composed and arranged by "Blue" Gene Tyranny. It's playing at Smith College through Sunday afternoon, and I highly recommend that anyone within reasonable driving range of it see it (we drove for two hours each way and it was worth it!). The play will be back in the United States (off Broadway in New York) in Fall of 2008, and in the meantime it will be presented in Debrecen, Hungary (in Hungarian).

It's hard to outline the plot…

Village Harmony (music can be heard at: http://www.myspace.com/villagenorthernhamrony ) is performing in Temple NH on
August 16; 7:30 pm
Congregational Church (603) 878-2602

My daughter sang with them a few years ago and I attend as many of their shows as I can. It's some of the most interesting choral music around. I'm especially impressed with how quickly the young people learn their parts and how the intricate harmonies and polyphonies of styles such as Georgian and Bulgarian music, sung in the native languages, come so naturally to singers who are mostly monolingual English speakers

Their Publicity packet for this…