140 posts tagged with music by Kattullus.
Displaying 1 through 50 of 140.
The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas and so many more
Motown Junkies is a blog where Steve Devereux is reviewing the entire Motown singles discography in sequential order from the beginning. You can also browse tracks by songwriter, label and artist. He’s currently up to 1966, though he’s been on hiatus for a few years. He also used to present Discovering Motown on Radio Cardiff, and the archive is on Mixcloud.
The Lost Symphony of Jean Sibelius
A century ago saw the premiere of Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, the culmination of decades of experimentation and refinement of the form, as Alex Ross explains (with musical examples). A few years later, he started work on an eighth symphony, which he never completed to his satisfaction, and eventually he burned his manuscripts of it. In 2011, after sifting through the Sibelius manuscript archive, it was possible to record roughly two and half minutes of the thirty minute work. Despite some subsequent hints from correspondence with Sibelius’ copyist, no further fragments have been uncovered, and the Eighth Symphony remains lost.
emo ambient
Claire Rousay has gained prominence [NYT, archive link] as an experimental, ambient musician, but her most recent album, Sentiment, [Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music] is closer to lo-fi indie pop. Her website has links to her whole discography.
crankin' out tunes
In her article Th'infernal Drone: In Praise Of The Hurdy-Gurdy Jennifer Lucy Allan notes that in "Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights the soundtrack to hell is a giant and infernal hurdy-gurdy". She discusses, among others, Stevie Wishart, who can be seen here giving a quick introduction to the hurdy-gurdy, and performing her composition Vespers for St. Hildegard and duoing with daegeum player Hyelim Kim. Corinna de Fonseca-Wollheim profiled Matthias Loibner in the New York Times [archive link] and his performance with Nataša Mirković of Schubert's Winter's Journey. For an overview of the history of the instrument, hurdy-gurdy player Fredrik Knudsen made a half-hour video or you can read A Brief History of the Hurdy-Gurdy by Graham Whyte.
Whatever else Farley’s work is, it isn’t AI—even when it barely seems I
Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify? [NYT] by Brett Martin [archive link] is an essay about Matt Farley, who we last met ten years ago when he had released 14 thousand songs on Spotify, earning him 23 thousand dollars per year in royalties. Now he’s pulling 200 thousand dollars from 25 thousand songs. He’s also made multiple movies. Farley’s website, Motern Media, has a decent overview of his creative output.
Karen Carpenter, the Drummer Who Sang
An eighteen-year-old Karen Carpenter going wild on the drums on Dancing in the Street (and the same song again). This is from back when the Carpenter siblings were two-thirds of the Dick Carpenter Trio. At fifteen she was already a fantastic drummer, as can be heard on their cover of Caravan. Here she is in 1976 on stage doing a drum solo on multiple sets that turns into a drum duet and here's a similar routine from the 1976 Carpenters TV special except she's duetting with herself. By then she rarely drummed on their songs, though here she's drumming on Help in 1974. But in 1971 she still drummed on most tracks and that version of the band was recorded for the BBC in a 40 minute concert. Finally, here's a discussion thread by fans about her as a drummer.
recorded off German radio in the mid-80s but otherwise totally unknown
The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet was the subject of a short little discussion on the BBC's Today programme this morning (1:47:10). Since it was posted to MetaFilter back in 2019 a lot has been unearthed about the track, but while a number of its fellow lostwave songs have been identified, it stubbornly refuses to give up its secrets. A week ago, Mike of All Things Lost made a video essay with a thorough recap of the evidence, theories, drama and characters and for the latest speculation and news you can dive into the subreddit r/TheMysteriousSong.
Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Sweete
Singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry shot to fame with Ode to Billie Joe and had a smattering of later hits, notably Fancy, covered by artists such as Irma Thomas, Spanky Wilson, Orville Peck and Reba McEntire. Though a flop at the time, her fantastic second album, The Delta Sweete, picked up many fans since, including Mercury Rev, whose The Delta Sweete Revisited covered eleven of twelve songs, each with a different singer: Norah Jones, Hope Sandoval, Rachel Goswell, Carice van Houten, Lætitia Sadier, Margo Price, Susanne Sundfør, Vashti Bunyan & Kaela Sinclair, Phoebe Bridgers, Marissa Nadler, Beth Orton, closing with Ode to Billie Joe as sung by Lucinda Williams. Missing track Louisiana Man was released later, sung by Erika Wennerstrom. Stuart Berman interviewed Mercury Rev about it.
WikiFlix and WikiVibes
WikiFlix is a tool to browse and search the films uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons. Created by Magnus Manske, and inspired by Sandra Fauconnier's project, it is a companion to WikiVibes, which is a similar tool for songs. Among the movies on offer are classics like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and a whole bunch of Chaplin.
"an epistolary novel in the form of twelve folksongs"
Correspondence was a project where Swedish musicians Jens Lekman and Annika Norlin (a.k.a. Hello Saferide) wrote and sent each other songs in English on alternating months over the course of 2018. You can listen to the original versions on the website but the pair also rerecorded many of the songs with strings and released it as an album which is available to buy from Bandcamp or stream on various services.
Björk Sings from the Icelandic Songbook
As filler material during their coverage of the 1991 Icelandic parliamentary elections, TV station Stöð 2 asked Björk to perform some jazz tunes with Tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar off their record Gling-gló. The trio had been asked by Icelandic public radio to record some old Icelandic standards and recruited the singer, who chose the 14 Icelandic songs, as well as a couple of foreign standards. The recording was then released as an album. Below the cut I'll include links to originals of the Icelandic songs, and here's one more TV performance from 1990 of Kata rokkar. [more inside]
"Mysterious but lovable"
Unraveling One of Rock’s Deepest Mysteries: Les Rallizes Dénudés [NYT, archive link] by Ben Sisario, is a good, short introduction in English to the Japanese underground rock band, who never released a studio album. Bandleader Takashi Mizutani passed away late in 2019, and since then his former bandmate Makoto Kubota has been restoring existing recordings. Now there is an official website, with an oral history, photos and more. The latest release, of a performance at Kawasaki's Club Citta' in 1993, has been remastered in high fidelity, a process Kubota likened to, according to a Pitchfork review, "restoring an ancient Buddhist statue". A good introduction to the band, Citta' '93 is available on various streaming services, and also YouTube and Bandcamp.
"female music caught on dusty records and tapes, in the hidden archives"
Ladies on Records is the project of record collector, DJ and cultural anthropologist Kornelia Binicewicz. Her SoundCloud page is full of her mixes, for example, two volumes she made in support of feminist activists in her native Poland. Her main focus, though, is on female singers of the 60s and 70s, for example in the mixes Polish Ladies on Records, Ladies of the Arab World and Turkish Ladies. She used Turkish music to explore the lives of Turkish immigrant women in Germany in the essay Intimacy of Longing.
Love Honk
“I had a dream last night that there was a new popular form of music called Love Honk. Every song was basically just smooth jazz or soft rock instrumentals, but where the lead singer or main instrument should have been playing, there was just a loud, constant car horn.” My fellow Nordics will probably be reminded by Silverspots’ Cohost post of the Ylvis sketch Car Horn Classics (English subtitles in captions).
“Digging through some of the best music ever made”
Digging the Greats is a YouTube channel by bass player and DJ Brandon Shaw, with 10-20 minute videos with musical analysis of individual songs and albums, mostly hip hop, but also soul, R&B and whatever takes his fancy, and how they fit into music history. Shaw’s explored The Roots’ Dynamite, the story of Native Tongues, the album Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, how J Dilla’s timefeel works, Daft Punk’s Discovery, Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. and dozens more. He’s also got a separate channel for long-form interviews, which are also released in podcast form.
Same place, different songs, half a century apart
Asking for Love was a music video made by Egill Eðvarðsson in 1973 for a song by Jóhann G. Jóhannsson, who was filmed walking backwards around downtown Reykjavík, and then reversed to make it seem everyone else’s walking backwards. Now, fifty years later, Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson and Ívar Kristján Ívarsson have recreated the video with singer-songwriter Árný Margrét, walking the same route backwards, for her song Waiting.
“Who are these insects, the Beetles?”
The Beatles at Stowe School is a 27 minute BBC radio feature by Samira Ahmed about a 1963 concert played by a just-about-to-be-huge Fab Four at an upper class all-boys boarding school in England. While reporting the story, Ahmed found out that one of the pupils, John Bloomfield, had taped the whole thing on an old open reel recorder, the oldest recording of a full performance by the band in the UK. Ahmed gives the backstory behind the feature on her personal blog.
“No one must know or they’ll kill us and destroy the book.”
The Sarajevo Haggadah has been kept in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina off and on since the late 19th Century. It is a medieval Hebrew codex, made to be read at the Passover Seder, and is beautifully illuminated, with a focus on the story of Joseph. The Haggadah has inspired plenty of art, including The Sarajevo Haggadah: The Music of the Book, by Bosnian composer and accordionist Merima Ključo, here performed with the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra (with a panel discussion afterwards), which itself drew inspiration from Geraldine Brooks novel, The People of the Book. Brooks recounted the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, and its incredible rescue by Islamic scholar Dervis Korkut during World War Two in a 2007 New Yorker article called The Book of Exodus.
"You came with a bunch of records to see if it worked or not"
De La Soul is available for streaming everywhere for the first time ever. This is a bittersweet development, as rapper Dave Jolicoeur, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, passed away just three weeks ago. Kelvin Mercer and Vincent Mason, the surviving members of the group spoke with Ben Sisario of the New York Times [archive]. Several artists and fans who were influenced by De La Soul reflected on their legacy for the Gothamist.
“I pray you, if it please you, fine amours”
Trobairitz: The Lady Composers of Medieval France is an introduction to the female troubadours of Occitania by Sarah Berry. Only one whole song, music and lyrics, attributed to a trobairitz survives in whole, the Comtesse de Dia’s A chantar m'er de so qu'eu no volria (here in the rendition of Ensemble Céladon and Paulin Bündgen, but many versions exist). Here is another poem by her in Magda Bogin’s translation. About twenty other trobairitz are known by name, and a number of anonymous poems show hints of female authorship. Claudia Keelan published a book of her translations, which she discussed in an essay including some translations and you can see her read dialogue poems with other readers. Finally, here is a translation by Samantha Pious of Bieiris de Romans’ love poem to a woman.
“I'd like to take you now, on wings of song as it were…”
Last month Tom Lehrer put all his songs online for free streaming or downloading, and relinquished all rights to them. You can browse them by album, title or category, and also download the sheet music for each song. But get those songs fast, because the website is only staying up for a limited time yet.
“We played with no rules or conventions”
Strike! How 80s post-punk band Lining Time crystallised a moment in feminist protest history by Tayyab Amin is a profile of the early 80s all-woman band from Totnes in Devon, whose only album, Strike!, has been reissued on Bandcamp and is available in full on streaming services, including YouTube Music. The reissue of the album was at the behest of Les Amis de Cathy Josefowitz, an organization devoted to safeguarding the artistic legacy of one of Lining Time's founding members, the others being Claire Bushe, Cathy Frost, Lisa Halse and Mara de Wit.
M. A. Numminen sings Wittgenstein
The Tractatus Suite consists of six songs, each in a different style, composed and performed by Finnish singer-songwriter, author and national treasure M. A. Numminen, using phrases from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. UbuWeb doesn't have the sixth song, A Proposition Is… but it is available on YouTube. You can also watch him perform Wovon man nicht sprechen kann in a television studio and also live accompanied by orchestra (who are desperately trying to keep a straight face).
"to dwell on the mysteries of feeling and memory"
Soul Music is a long running BBC radio series. Each episode focuses on a particular piece of music, concentrating less on the artists behind it, but on the way the music has affected its listeners. Recent episodes have featured songs by Massive Attack, John Denver and Nina Simone. Besides pop songs, it covers classical, hymns, folk, jazz and more. The music is mostly drawn from the Anglophone world, but it ventures further afield too, like Finland, Japan, Wales, France, and South Africa. Hua Hsu wrote about Soul Music for The New Yorker in a piece called The Anti-Explainer Insight of “Soul Music”.
Vinyl Album of the Week
Vínill vikunnar is a weekly radio program on Iceland’s state broadcaster RÚV. The idea is simple, the play a whole vinyl album from start to finish. Each album is introduced in Icelandic, before playing side A, and the presenter speaks in the middle while they turn the record around and play side B. The picks range from canonical albums from the 20th Century ( Billy Holiday, David Bowie and Lauryn Hill), to world music (Osibisa, Umm Kulthum and Mulata Astake), to indie classics ( Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, P. J. Harvey and The Pixies), to the overlooked (Alberta Hunter, Alice Coltrane and Maki Asakawa), and of course Icelandic music (Einsöngvarakvartettinn, Björk and Ellý Vilhjálms). There’s lots more to choose from, and shows are streamable for a whole year.
No knowledge of German required
Since its first release in 1961 the hymn “Danke” by Martin Gotthard Schneider has been one of Germany’s most popular Christian songs. But in 1993 comedian and theater director Christoph Marthaler made it a comic centerpiece of his popular play Murx den Europäer, often reprised. Marthaler’s version has itself been covered, such as by the Hafnarfjörður Brass Band and the male choir Voces Masculorum.
“the alchemy of total opposites”
Soprano Jóna G. Kolbrúnardóttir sings Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “Odi et Amo” from the album Englabörn, accompanied by the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. Usually when the piece is performed, the Latin poem by Catullus is sung by a computer and played off a tape.
The World Is Finally Ready for Beverly Glenn-Copeland
[Glenn-Copeland] also belongs […] in the tiny group of people whose lives could be a realistic inspiration for a young, queer artist today. I wanted to know how he did it: How did he make it to 76 years old so completely unjaded? As a young person, he explained, “I was very independent of what other people thought. I didn’t really care.” It was only in his teens that he learned psychiatrists considered queer desire “to be an emotional disease.” But he “never gave it two thoughts. I just considered they were out to lunch.”– From a biographical essay about Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his music by Josephine Livingstone.
Master KG – Jerusalema (feat. Nomcebo Zikode)
In February, Fenomenos do Semba, an Angolan dance studio, posted a video of members line dancing to the track while carrying their plates of food and eating. The video gave the song a whole new lease of life as a pan-African African pop anthem. The Angolan clip kicked off the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge across the continent and soon beyond from nuns and monks in France, to a bridal party in Zimbabwe, and a flash mob in Germany–How South Africa’s “Jerusalema” became a pan-African hit, then a global dance favorite by Norma Young. Here is the video for Master KG’s and Nomcebo’s Jerusalema, and here is Burna Boy’s remix. [via Chisomo Kalinga, PhD]
“I know you’re going through sorrow, but babe, there’s always tomorrow”
Since April of this year Neil Sedaka has been posting mini-concerts nearly every day to his YouTube channel, and has recorded over a hundred videos of himself playing the piano and singing. Besides that, he did a parody version of one of his best known songs, Masking Up Is Not Hard to Do.
Hunnu Rock
Wolf Totem and Yuve Yuve Yu have racked up tens of millions of views on YouTube, which isn’t bad for Mongolian folk metal band. The HU released their first album, The Gereg, last year. Their YouTube channel has all kinds of content, from a benefit concert for Covid-19 relief in Mongolia, to HU’s in the Kitchen, a series of food-making videos by various members of the band and crew. The band sings in Mongolian and aims its message at a Mongolian audience, but interpreters in the west have wondered about their politics. Mongolia experts Niels Hegewisch and Julian Dierks did a deep dive on that topic (tl;dr not fascist). For a good introduction to The HU, read Katya Cengel’s NPR piece and an interview with the band by Jim Farber in The Guardian.
Number 1 tops the chart in a ridiculously strong year for music releases
The 100 greatest UK No 1 singles is a Guardian listicle ranking songs that reached the top of the UK singles chart from the 1950s until today. But there is much more than just the list, including essays by Guardian critics about each track in the top twenty.
"that's what Handel would've done, but not Bach"
J.S. Bach’s “Twisted Hacker Mind” is a lecture by violinist Kathleen Kajioka about the strangeness of Bach's music. She plays two of his pieces and explains what is so odd about them.
"as in the best it is"
Murder Most Foul is a new 17 minute song by Bob Dylan about the JFK assassination. Alex Petridis of the Guardian puts it in context here.
"They were good, they were young"
Concert by Young Marble Giants is a 44 minute live performance shot in black and white on video in Vancouver in November 1980, just weeks before the hugely influential post-punk band split up. [previously on MeFi]
The Book of Prince
“Now, let me stop you right there,” Prince said. “Why did you write that?” It occurred to me that he might have flown me in from New York just to tell me that I knew nothing of his work. “The music I make isn’t breaking the law, to me,” he said. “I write in harmony. I’ve always lived in harmony—like this.”—The Beautiful One is an essay by Dan Piepenbring about his collaboration with Prince on a memoir, which had barely started when Prince passed away.
“When he smiles at the camera, it’s almost impossible not to smile back”
Silent film clip appears to show Louis Armstrong as a teenager according to jazz historian James Karst, writing in 64 Parishes. The magazine has uploaded the eight-second clip to YouTube. Gwen Thompkins writes about the footage for The New Yorker in the short essay
An Eight-Second Film of 1915 New Orleans and the Mystery of Louis Armstrong’s Happiness.
"I truly and literally had made my living with jazz"
While [Eric] Vogel was imprisoned by the Nazis—first in the so-called model camp, Theresienstadt, and then later at the Auschwitz death camp—he and a dozen or so others played in a jazz band called the Ghetto Swingers. There were similar groups at many camps throughout Nazi-controlled Europe: musicians who were forced to perform, on command and under inconceivable duress, for the S.S.—The Jewish Trumpeter Who Entertained Nazis to Survive the Holocaust by Amanda Petrusich.
"They looked so great when they played." - Charlie Watts
Sharp suits, thin ties and the coolest musicians on Earth is an appreciation by the Guardian's Richard Williams of BBC Two's Jazz 625 series of concerts, which were all recorded in 1964 and '65, featuring the giants of the jazz scene, from Dizzy Gillespie to the Modern Jazz Quartet. This is a good sampler of music from the show, but a few whole episodes are available online, and I've put links to the ones I found below the cut. [more inside]
"an intricate guitarist, an astute songwriter and a stylistic innovator"
Memphis Minnie — Guitar Queen, Hoodoo Lady and Songster is a site by guitarist Del Rey dedicated to blues musician Memphis Minnie. It has a biography, telling her story from her birth as Elizabeth "Kid" Douglas in 1897. It also includes an appreciative review from 1942 by Langston Hughes. Memphis Minnie recorded over 200 songs, most of whom are available on Spotify and other streaming services, but Del Rey curated a list of 28 songs on the website, and made a DVD tutorial on how to play the guitar like Memphis Minnie. She passed away in 1973, shortly after Led Zeppelin reworked one of her early recordings with Kansas Joe McCoy, When the Levee Breaks. Other well known songs by her include Me and My Chauffeur Blues, Hoodoo Lady Blues and Bumblebee.
"Funk Fillets From Iceland’s Groovy Side"
Breaking the Ice is an 87-minute long mixtape of rare Icelandic funk- and soul-inspired music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, made by Iceland-born, Oakland-based DJ Platurn, with the crate-digging assistance of his cousin Sveimhugi, and his father's extensive record collection. Released by Needle to the Groove Records, the project started life as a three-part series on the webzine Nerdtorious (parts 1, 2, 3). For more about Breaking the Ice, you can read an article by Brandon Roos, an interview with DJ Platurn by Marke B, a short introduction by DJ Platurn to eight of the seventy records in the mix, or watch a six-minute mini-documentary before diving into the mix. [via RÚV]
RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ
The Spectacular Personal Mythology of Rammellzee by Hua Hsu is a fine introduction to the works of New York graffiti artist, sculptor, rapper, and painter Rammellzee, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 49. Known to hip hop afficionados for Beat Bop, his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat and K-Rob, which was the subject of a Spin oral history. To get a feel for his aesthetic, this interview excerpted from the documentary Guerilla Art is a good place to start. If you want to know more, Alexxa Gotthardt wrote a good overview of his career and hip hop historian Dave Tompkins reminisced about Rammellzee and placed him in context.
"I like these girls."
Kathy Acker interviewed the Spice Girls in 1997 at the height of their fame, just before they performed on Saturday Night Live. Here's a photo of them all together. BBC's Unpopped podcast assembled a three-expert panel to put the interview in the context of Acker's and the Spice Girls' career.
Dystopic dancing
Into the Dark is a music video for the new single by teenage indie duo Between Mountains from the rural Westfjords region of Iceland. The video portrays a society where dark-suited people must mimic everything their brightly-clothed betters do. Dancing ensues. The group, comprising Katla Vigdís Vernharðsdóttir and Ásrós Helga Guðmundsdóttir came to prominence after winning last year's Músíktilraunir, a national battle-of-the-bands. Their winning performance can be seen here (scroll down). They also performed for Seattle based KEXP last year, which can be seen here. While normally using keyboards and vocals, they do also sometimes break out an accordion.
The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897
The Magus of Paris is an article by Alex Ross about Symbolist author and art impresario Joséphin Péladan, and the artists he championed in his The Salon de la Rose+Croix in the 1890s, which is the focus of the Guggenheim exhibition
Magical Symbolism. The website has various articles, including one about Symbolist poetry (with an accompanying SoundCloud page with readings) and another by Nat Trotman on putting on a 19 hour concert featuring only a single piece three and a half minutes in length called Vexations, by the best known participant in Péladan's salon, Erik Satie. New York Times' critic Joshua Barone staid for the whole duration. The first full performance of the piece was in 1963, organized by John Cage in New York and the Times covered it then too.
Queen of Jamaican Culture
Miss Lou talks Jamaican proverbs and who is Miss Lou, you ask? She was Louise Bennett, poet, folklorist, television presenter, activist and all around Jamaican national treasure. Her archive is kept by McMaster University, and is especially rich in audio recordings, including interviews (e.g. with Sarah Ward on the BBC World Service), storytelling (e.g. her Anancy stories, part 1 and 2) and music (e.g. 1954 Folkways recording, parts 1 and 2). Her music can also be found on Spotify.
"it’s hard not to admire and be grateful for Tracey’s hubris"
Amanda Petrusich writes about a collector of African folk music named Hugh Tracey whose collection of more than ten thousand recordings has been digitized and partly made available online as the International Library of African Music on the South African Music Archive Project website. Petrusich also writes about the Singing Wells project, which aims to return copies of Tracey's recordings he made in Kenya and Uganda to the places where they were recorded, though their main focus is to make new recordings. Petrusich focuses on a recording of Kipsigi girls singing about a half-man half-antelope called Chemirocha, who turns out to have a rather surprising origin.
"The Straight Men Who Made America's First Gay Record"
Like a magic mirror held up to America's heteronormative postwar culture, its music reflected a dignified, and seductive, vision of gay life. Just below the album's title read the teaser: "For adult listeners only—sultry stylings by a most unusual vocalist."55 years ago Lace Records released "Love Is a Drag", where a male vocalist sang standards written for female singers. The people behind it were a mystery until one of them contacted J. D. Doyle of Queer Music Heritage in 2012 and was interviewed (transcript, mp3). YouTube has a few tracks: 1, 2, 3, 4. Doyle put the LP in context in an interview with Color Magazine.
gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori
From Revolutionary to Normative: A Secret History of Dada and Surrealism in American Music is an overview by composer Matthew Greenbaum of music influenced by dada and surrealism, focusing on the American context, but by no means limited to it. You can hear some dada music over at UbuWeb. If you want an overview of dada itself, Alfred Brendel wrote about The Growing Charm of Dada. [First two links via Open Culture.]
Improvisational hymn singing from the Scottish Isles
Noel Meek writes about Gaelic psalm singing and includes several recordings from the 1970s and 80s. A precentor sings the opening line from a hymn, and then the congregation joins in, improvising on the melody. With the decline of the Scottish Gaelic language the tradition is fading and lives primarily on the islands of Lewis and Harris in the Hebrides. Here is a video from Back Free Church on Lewis and a BBC radio documentary on Gaelic psalm singing by Ken Hyder.