Langhorne Slim

Late Bloomer: a brilliant folk album by Allie Moss

I have worked alongside Allie Moss for nearly a year and heard her new album, Late Bloomer, around the end of last year. The album opens with a familiar song, Corner, which was featured on the BT Infinity advert in the UK last year. Her beautiful voice, combined with her gentle acoustic songs, makes it an amazing album that any folk enthusiast can enjoy.

Love and Theft by Andreas Hykade

Traditional folk music was distributed by word of mouth, with musicians trading songs and making other people’s melodies their own. There was no such thing as copyright law. These days, all sorts of media follow the same model, and this video by Andreas Hykade illustrates how the contemporary culture maker can make beautiful new things out of old, recognizable images.

Mihaly Dresch

I heard the Hungarian jazz and folk saxophonist — Mihaly Dresch — in Budapest one Christmas and I fell in love completely. I put the CD on and straight away his tone, control and dexterity was enough to make me get up out of my seat and turn the volume way up. I wanted to just be immersed in this music. But aside from his playing, his compositions are breathtaking. Read more

FAIL! Man wears crack jacket to drug trafficking court date

From the ‘what were you thinking’ file comes this news report of a man in Fort Lauderdale accused of drug trafficking who turned up to court for his trial wearing a jacket with a cartoon recipe for cooking crack cocaine. Yes, smart indeed.

New Banksy artwork angers the Catholic Church

Banksy has struck again, this time offending the Catholic Church with a bold artwork that critiques their stance on ongoing child abuse scandals. Banksy has taken a replica of a bust of an eighteenth century member of the Catholic hierarchy and added multi-coloured tiles to the face — pixelating it — as a comment on what he considers to be the Church’s cover-up. ‘I’m never sure who deserves to be put on a pedestal or crushed under one’, Banksy noted. And who are we to disagree? Read more

Tattoo artist sued by ex-girlfriend for obscene design

Oh boy, this is so bizarre it could only be true. Apparently a Dayton, Ohio, tattoo artist has been slapped with a $100,000 lawsuit by his ex-girlfriend for tattooing an image of, erm, excrement with flies on her back rather than the scene from Narnia that she had requested. The reason? He’d recently found out that she had been cheating on him with one of his buddies. Damn! And here we were thinking this was the hot new look for trailer park trash crowd.