Music

Nobody’s sure yet — and, in truth, we may never be — but there’s at least a good possibility that archaeologists in New Orleans may have found the House of the Rising Sun.

This winter, a nonprofit organization called the Historic New Orleans Collection decided to expand. The organization, which runs a museum and research center, owned seven buildings in the heart of the French Quarter but needed another to serve as a vault. The group bought a one-level, ramshackle parking garage on Conti Street — pronounced KAHNT-eye — and announced plans to tear it down.

The purchase was serendipitous. If just about anyone else had bought the lot, no study would have been conducted. But the organization — dedicated, after all, to Louisiana history — wanted to know the story behind its property. It asked a scholar at the University of Chicago and a New Orleans archeology firm called Earth Search to perform an excavation and document search.

[…]

The archeologists, who plan to launch a more exhaustive study on Tuesday, found that a hotel called the Rising Sun appeared to have operated on the site from the early 1800s until 1822, when it burned to the ground.

In an 1821 advertisement from the newspaper La Gazette, a company called L.S. Hotchkiss explained that it had taken over the hotel but offered reassurance to customers: “No pain or expence [sic] will be spared by the new proprietors to give general satisfaction, and maintain the character of giving the best entertainment.”

The next sentence: “Gentlemen may here rely upon finding attentive Servants.” Similar language, Gray said, was used in old bordello advertisements to make it clear — without explicitly saying so — that extracurricular services were available.

And there’s more in the linked article, of course. Just neat.

Also of note, and a page I want to revisit later: this listing of 250 different recordings of the traditional tune. It’s pretty slow, and would take a while to trawl through, but there’s a wealth of stuff there I’d love to listen to.

(via MeFi)

“Train” by Pigface from the album A New High In Low (1997, 24:18).

Lately I’ve been getting more and more into Mashups — songs created by taking two or more different songs and “mashing” them together into one. While some aren’t much more complex than the simple beatmatching I did while I was dj’ing, others I’ve found are jaw-droppingly cool, with layers of multiple tracks that really shouldn’t work together as well as they do.

The first one I can remember finding I stumbled across a few years ago, long before the term “mashup” gained popularity. A fairly simple mashup, it laid the vocal track from Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” over the acid electronica of Winx’ “Higher State of Consciousness”.

Over the past few months, as the mashup trend has become more and more mainstream, I’ve been able to find a lot of really good stuff, often thanks to links on either Boing Boing or Waxy.

The Kleptones‘ “A Night at the Hip-Hopera“, for instance, combines Queen’s music with a lot of old- and new-school hip-hop. More recently, they’ve released “From Detroit to J.A.“, which plays similar tricks with a ton of old Motown tunes.

DJ Danger Mouse‘s “Grey Album“, combining vocals from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with The Beatles’ “White Album” got a lot of attention last year, leading to the “Grey Tuesday” campaign. It also led to more experiments with Jay-Z’s vocal tracks, including Cheap Cologne’s “Double Black” album using Metallica’s “Black Album” as the musical background.

The Beatles have proven to be a favorite of the mashup scene (much to the consternation of their record company and the RIAA). DJ BC combined the Beatles and the Beastie Boys to create The Beastles; and ccc just released Revolved, a re-working of their Revolver album.

The Who Boys is a mashup of The Who and The Beach Boys — not one of my personal favorites of the mashups I’ve found, but still interesting.

I also just grabbed a torrent of tracks from DJ Earworm that has some incredible work.

So, then, I’m curious about two things.

Firstly — is there anyone else dropping by here that’s been following this trend? If so, are there any mashup artists or particular tracks that you’d recommend?

Secondly — all the “how-to” tutorials I’ve seen for creating mashups so far have been PC-oriented. I poked around a little bit at GarageBand, but it doesn’t seem to be the best tool for this kind of work (specifically, while I can easily import tracks from my music library, there doesn’t seem to be a way to time-stretch or -compress imported audio to ensure that the tempos match). Any recommendations for Mac-specific audio software or tutorials in this realm? I may not actually be able to come up with anything, but there are a couple of ideas floating around my head that might be fun to play with.

“Policy of Sweet Dreams” by Depeche Mode/Eurythmics from the album www.djearworm.com (2004, 4:43).