Posts Tagged ‘Haiti Benefit’

Salad Fork // Mixtapes for Haiti

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Couldn’t come up with a better 200th post for PT Music even if I sat all week thinking about it:

Lou down at the amazingly awesome music site Salad Fork just cut the red ribbon on his incredible Mixtapes for Haiti project. We all know the devastation the 7.0 earthquake inflicted on the fragile Caribbean country and, odds are, we all donated the first few weeks after the disaster. Although most media outfits have packed up shop a month or two after the quake once they felt the story had been exhausted, Haitians are still in dire need to not only rebuild their country but to receive much needed supplies for day-to-day survival.

So with this mixtape project it seems that Lou is trying to drum up a second wave of support — and with a killer tracklist, he is giving us a good reason to open up all wallets and pocketbooks and dig deep for a second time. Complete with a blend of solid hits and unreleased material, the cassette features some of the best work from up-and-comers and SXSW show-stoppers. Here is a list of who’s featured on the tape:

  • Memoryhouse
  • Speculator
  • Cloud Nothings
  • RxRy
  • Craft Spells
  • Woodsman
  • Sunnybrook
  • Nate Grace (Pure Ecstasy)
  • Memory Tapes
  • Rene
  • Twin Sister
  • Weekend
  • Mount McKinley
  • Tan Dollar
  • Prince Rama of Ayodhya
  • Ppalm

So yeah, a lot of great music which you can get for as little as $5 (digital download of compilation)! If you splurge and donate $10 or more, then you’ll get both the digital and physical cassette versions as well as “something completely random” thrown into your package. But let’s be honest here, the music is playing second fiddle to the much needed charity support — with all profits going towards Partners in Health: Stand With Haiti. So go without that twelve pack of Pabst for a week or hold off buying that new record and help support this amazing project!

You can check out more info as well as donating directly to the cause from Lou’s kickstarter page.

Memoryhouse // Foreground (Grizzly Bear Cover)

Cloud Nothings // Hey Cool Kid

Grouper // Portland // January 24, 2010

Monday, January 25th, 2010

The good folks down at Holocene put together an awesome Haiti Benefit show yesterday that rivaled other efforts across town. With all of the money from the $10 tickets and bar profits going to Mercy Corps, the event, entitled “L’Union Fair La Force”, certainly generated thousands of dollars for a good cause. And hey, it didn’t hurt that the attendees got their money’s worthy from a bill including local-studs Grouper and Pyramiddd (formerly known as the less eloquent Starfucker).

I only caught the Grouper set because, well, I knew that all the other acts would pale in comparison to her performance (plus I had some Wire to watch). Like always, Liz Harris puts on a show not meant for musical entertaining but spiritual awakening. With cassettes of pre-made eerie sounds specifically designed for each song, Harris records, loops, and layers guitar and vocals lines and places them on top of the tapes’ creepy noises — kind of like a more haunting Imogen Heap.

To be honest, I don’t know how Harris draws enough courage to go up on stage for live performances. Her music isn’t particularly conducive to casual listening, requiring complete silence from the audience in order to fully experience it. In a town where casual listening is the norm and crowd chatter drowns out even popular acts, if I was Harris I would pull a Sally Shapiro and just let the records speak for themselves and stay away from the stage whenever possible. Thankfully for us true fans, she braved the inevitable disruptions and stage fright associated with solo performing and gave us a gift with her music while helping the people of Haiti at the same time.

Here is “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping”, one of my favorite tracks from her hit album Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill that she unfortunately didn’t perform last night, and a new track entitled “Hold the Way” off of her new split EP with Roy Montgomery which she did play:

Grouper // Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping

Grouper // Hold the Way