The Civil War (album)
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The Civil War (album)
''The Civil War'' is the fifth studio album by experimental duo Matmos, released via Matador Records. It explores the boundaries between Americana, Medieval folk music and electronica. It features many live instruments such as drums, brass and guitars. A hurdy-gurdy is also sampled. There is also a satirical take on "Stars and Stripes Forever." Critical reception Review aggregator website Metacritic gives ''The Civil War'' a score of 77 out of 100 based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Heather Phares of AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5, calling it "an album whose subtly oxymoronic title suggests the inherent contradictions of its sound." Mark Richardson of ''Pitchfork A pitchfork (also a hay fork) is an agricultural tool with a long handle and two to five tines used to lift and pitch or throw loose material, such as hay, straw, manure, or leaves. The term is also applied colloquially, but inaccurately, to ...'' gave the album a 7.3 out ...
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Matmos
Matmos is an experimental electronic music duo originally from San Francisco but now residing in Baltimore. M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel are the core members, but they frequently include other artists on their records and in their performances, including notably J Lesser. Apart from releasing twelve full-length studio albums and numerous collaborative works, Matmos is also well known for their collaboration with Icelandic singer and musician Björk, both on studio recordings and live tours. After being signed to Matador Records for nine years, Matmos signed with Thrill Jockey in 2012. The name ''Matmos'' refers to the seething lake of evil slime beneath the city Sogo in the 1968 film '' Barbarella''. Notable work In 1998, Matmos remixed the Björk single Alarm Call. Subsequently, Matmos worked with Björk on her albums ''Vespertine'' (2001) and ''Medúlla'' (2004), as well as her ''Vespertine'' and ''Greatest Hits'' tours. In November 2004, Matmos spent 97 hours in the ...
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Stylus Magazine
''Stylus Magazine'' was an American online music and film magazine, launched in 2002 and co-founded by Todd L. Burns. It featured long-form music journalism, four daily music reviews, movie reviews, podcasts, an MP3 blog, and a text blog. Additionally, ''Stylus'' had daily features like "The Singles Jukebox", which looked at pop singles from around the globe, and "Soulseeking", a column focused on personal responses in listening. Even though they never reached the readership of other music magazines such as PopMatters or Pitchfork, they still had a very consistent and fired-up audience. In 2006, the site was chosen by the ''Observer Music Monthly'' as one of the Internet's 25 most essential music websites. ''Stylus'' closed as a business on 31 October 2007. The site remained online for several years, but did not publish any new content. On 4 January 2010, with the blessing of former editor Todd Burns, ''Stylus'' senior writer Nick Southall launched ''The Stylus Decade'', a web ...
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2003 Albums
3 (three) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4, and is the smallest odd prime number and the only prime preceding a square number. It has religious or cultural significance in many societies. Evolution of the Arabic digit The use of three lines to denote the number 3 occurred in many writing systems, including some (like Roman and Chinese numerals) that are still in use. That was also the original representation of 3 in the Brahmic (Indian) numerical notation, its earliest forms aligned vertically. However, during the Gupta Empire the sign was modified by the addition of a curve on each line. The Nāgarī script rotated the lines clockwise, so they appeared horizontally, and ended each line with a short downward stroke on the right. In cursive script, the three strokes were eventually connected to form a glyph resembling a with an additional stroke at the bottom: ३. The Indian digits spread to the Caliphate in the 9th ...
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Stars And Stripes Forever
"The Stars and Stripes Forever" is a patriotic American march written and composed by John Philip Sousa in 1896. By a 1987 act of the U.S. Congress, it is the official National March of the United States of America. History In his 1928 autobiography, ''Marching Along'', Sousa wrote that he composed the march on Christmas Day, 1896. He was on board an ocean liner on his way home from a vacation with his wife in Europe and had just learned of the recent death of David Blakely, the manager of the Sousa Band. He composed the march in his head and committed the notes to paper on arrival in the United States. It was first performed at Willow Grove Park, just outside Philadelphia, on May 14, 1897, and was immediately greeted with enthusiasm. Following an Act of Congress in 1987, it was officially adopted as the national march of the United States of America. Historically, in show business and particularly in theater and the circus, this piece is called "the Disaster March". In the ea ...
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Satirical
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or exposing the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society. A feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm —"in satire, irony is militant", according to literary critic Northrop Frye— but parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre are all frequently used in satirical speech and writing. This "militant" irony or sarcasm often professes to approve of (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to question. Satire is found in many artistic ...
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Hurdy-gurdy
The hurdy-gurdy is a string instrument that produces sound by a hand-crank-turned, rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to those of a violin. Melodies are played on a keyboard that presses ''tangents''—small wedges, typically made of wood—against one or more of the strings to change their pitch. Like most other acoustic stringed instruments, it has a sound board and hollow cavity to make the vibration of the strings audible. Most hurdy-gurdies have multiple drone strings, which give a constant pitch accompaniment to the melody, resulting in a sound similar to that of bagpipes. For this reason, the hurdy-gurdy is often used interchangeably or along with bagpipes. It is mostly used in Occitan, Aragonese, Cajun French, Asturian, Cantabrian, Galician, Hungarian, and Slavic folk music. One or more of the drone strings usually passes over a loose bridge that can be made ...
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Electronica
Electronica is both a broad group of electronic-based music styles intended for listening rather than strictly for dancing and a music scene that started in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term is mostly used to refer to electronic music generally. History Early 1990s: origins and UK scene The original wide-spread use of the term "electronica" derives from the influential English experimental techno label New Electronica, which was one of the leading forces of the early 1990s introducing and supporting dance-based electronic music oriented towards home listening rather than dance-floor play, although the word "electronica" had already begun to be associated with synthesizer generated music as early as 1983, when a "UK Electronica Festival" was first held. At that time electronica became known as "electronic listening music", also becoming more or less synonymous to ambient techno and intelligent techno, and was considered distinct from other em ...
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Folk Music
Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted orally, music with unknown composers, music that is played on traditional instruments, music about cultural or national identity, music that changes between generations (folk process), music associated with a people's folklore, or music performed by custom over a long period of time. It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles. The term originated in the 19th century, but folk music extends beyond that. Starting in the mid-20th century, a new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This process and period is called the (second) folk revival and reached a zenith in the 1960s. This form of music is sometimes called contemporary folk music or folk rev ...
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Medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern history, modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early Middle Ages, Early, High Middle Ages, High, and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the ...
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Americana (music)
Americana (also known as American roots music) is an amalgam of Music of the United States, American music formed by the confluence of the shared and varied traditions that make up the musical ethos of the United States, specifically those sounds that are emerged from the Southern United States such as Folk music, folk, gospel music, gospel, blues, Country music, country, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, Bluegrass music, bluegrass, and other external influences. Americana, as defined by the Americana Music Association (AMA), is "contemporary music that incorporates elements of various American roots music styles, including country, roots-rock, folk, bluegrass, R&B and blues, resulting in a distinctive roots-oriented sound that lives in a world apart from the pure forms of the genres upon which it may draw. While acoustic instruments are often present and vital, Americana also often uses a full electric band." Americana as a radio format had its origins in 1984 on KCSN in Nor ...
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PopMatters
''PopMatters'' is an international online magazine of cultural criticism that covers aspects of popular culture. ''PopMatters'' publishes reviews, interviews, and essays on cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, films, books, video games, comics, sports, theater, visual arts, travel, and the Internet. History ''PopMatters'' was founded by Sarah Zupko, who had previously established the cultural studies academic resource site PopCultures. ''PopMatters'' launched in late 1999 as a sister site providing original essays, reviews and criticism of various media products. Over time, the site went from a weekly publication schedule to a five-day-a-week magazine format, expanding into regular reviews, features, and columns. In the fall of 2005, monthly readership exceeded one million. From 2006 onward, ''PopMatters'' produced several syndicated newspaper columns for McClatchy-Tribune News Service. By 2009 there were four different pop culture related col ...
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Electronica
Electronica is both a broad group of electronic-based music styles intended for listening rather than strictly for dancing and a music scene that started in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term is mostly used to refer to electronic music generally. History Early 1990s: origins and UK scene The original wide-spread use of the term "electronica" derives from the influential English experimental techno label New Electronica, which was one of the leading forces of the early 1990s introducing and supporting dance-based electronic music oriented towards home listening rather than dance-floor play, although the word "electronica" had already begun to be associated with synthesizer generated music as early as 1983, when a "UK Electronica Festival" was first held. At that time electronica became known as "electronic listening music", also becoming more or less synonymous to ambient techno and intelligent techno, and was considered distinct from other em ...
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