Listen: Rock historian Ed Ward remembers the Austin, Texas label Domino Records (Fresh Air).
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From the category archives:
MixTape
Free ‘NPR Music At SXSW’ Sampler
Download a free 11-song sampler of the artists featured by NPR Music at this March’s South by Southwest Music festival in Austin, Texas, including music from Spoon, Broken Bells and G-Side. NPR Music will offer live streaming, podcasts and full coverage of the exhausting and exhilarating music event. Presented with KUT in Austin, WXPN in Philadelphia, WFUV in New York, KEXP in Seattle, and The Current in Minneapolis/St. Paul.
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has surfaced from the Roky Erickson & Okkervil River collaboration. “Goodbye Sweet Dreams” is the first track off of Erickson’s new album that will be released in April before the collaboration teams up for a hometown showcase during SXSW.
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Pitchfork has additional background
Hear ‘The Golden Archipelago’ from Austin’s Shearwater until Feb. 23
NPR: Artists can be forgiven for having control issues when everything they touch is gold. Britt Daniel, Spoon’s gifted frontman, crafts brilliantly understated pop gems that follow a strict protocol: Keep the mix clean, the orchestration tight and the lyrics a bit oblique. It’s a carefully plotted formula that’s helped make Spoon one of the most reliably gratifying bands of the past 15 years, with more than a dozen studio albums and EPs to its name.
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NPR: Iron and Wine is primarily the work of Florida native Sam Beam. [Beam now lives in the Austin area.] Beam started out as a film instructor in the late ’90s in Miami. He wrote and recorded songs in his spare time and started getting attention when his lo-fi basement tapes found their way to the indie label Sub Pop. In 2002, the record company released 12 songs by Beam on a collection titled The Creek Drank the Cradle. It was followed by Our Endless Numbered Days, which some music critics chose for the best album of 2004 for its gentle, acoustic strums, spare rhythms and simple poetry.
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Austinist let out a dirty little secret this morning. Austin’s White Denim is heading over to Marfa to play a cheap-cheap show (thanks to assistance from the Texas Commission on the Arts). You don’t really need a good excuse like this to make the trek to West Texas, but it doesn’t hurt.
Show starts at 9:30 on January 15. Tickets at the door only.
NPR: Musician Lhasa de Sela has died. The 37-year-old singer and songwriter died New Year’s Day after a 21-month struggle with breast cancer.
Lhasa de Sela lived a life that criss-crossed borders and influences, just as her music did. Her father was Mexican, her mother was American, and the family traveled often between the two countries in a converted school bus.
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