The Helios Live-ing It Up

Just before backing up Mulatu Astatke for his live session at Cargo (see post below), The Heliocentrics performed solo at the very same gig. That was back in April this year. As always, RBMA Radio recorded the session and made it available on demand at their online radio station. Yours truly worked the magic and now (finally!) you can also download the Heliocentrics’s solo show and listen to it wherever you want without having to be online all the time.

The quality clocks in at a nice 192 kbps, which is the same as the radio stream. So no loss there. I’ve listened to the finished set of MP3s before uploading—to make sure that everything is in order—and it sounds just dandy. The single file is now split into the nine individual tracks. I just hope I didn’t mess up. It was quite tricky at some points. And since this session was performed and recorded on the same night as the one with Mulatu, it ended up having the same album title in my collection. But it IS a different album / release / bootleg. So don’t let that confuse you.

On the music side of things, this is a stellar set. Five of the nine tracks are new and the four others are taken from their LP “Out There.” All songs are beautifully interpreted and ear candy of the best kind. I especially enjoyed “Calabash,” one of the new songs. It has an incredibly long and slow build-up of about three minutes before it culminates in a vocal frenzy by Anthony Joseph, who sounds like one of those crazy preachers for a strange religion you can see in Central Park or Hyde Park. The song is wonderfully experimental and psychedelic. Of course, all the other tunes are breathtaking as well.

But without further ado, here’s the tracklist and download.

The Heliocentrics – Live At Broad Casting, Cargo, London. 17 April 2008 (2008) @ 192 kbps

Download

1. Haunted House (Live) – 6:13
2. Collateral Damage (Live) – 7:00
3. String Solo (Live) – 3:16
4. Second Chance (K2’s Prayer) (Live) – 6:45
5. A World Of Masks (Live) – 8:56
6. Sirius B (Live) – 6:26
7. Calabash (Live) – 7:12
8. Shish Kebab (Live) – 6:45
9. Age Of The Sun (Live) – 7:21

Personnel (according to the run-down at the beginning of track 9):
Keyboard: Ollie Parfitt
Cello: Danny Keane
Violin: Antonio Campbell
Bass clarinet: Adam Bishop
Baritone sax: James Arben
Vocals: Khadijatou, Asli, and Anthony Joseph
Drums: Malcolm Catto
Electronics and other oddities in the corner: Tom Hodges
Guitar: Adrian Owusu
Bass: Jake Ferguson

Once again, granjeros over at Dailymotion has video material for this session. Full-length clips for seven of the songs are available. Go check them out. The audio mixing and mastering is a lot different from the RBMA stream. It’s hard to believe that the videos and MP3s are of the same gig. But they are.

There’s even more Heliocentrics live material out there. Before today, I thought that the sessions at Cargo (including Mulatu’s and The Helios’s) were the same as BBC’s Maida Vale Sessions, i.e. I thought they were just two different names for the same thing. In fact, they’re two entirely different things. Back in February, The Helios did a solo session at the Maida Vale studios, and in April, they did another one together with Mulatu. This means that in the near future (maybe even by the end of next week), several additional live tracks from Mulatu Astatke together with The Heliocentrics and Helios solo ones (altogether about five to eight) will be available right here. I’ve already got the audio material, but the songs are buried in two-hour-long radio sets. So I gotta dig them out first.

Until then, enjoy the Broad Casting session and leave some feedback. I wanna know what you think of this.

I’m off to Psych-Land,
eardrummer

Mulatu & Helios Live Set Updated

Finally, it is here: the update for the Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics live set. I made you wait long enough. Sorry about that.

You can find all the necessary info, the new download links, and the new tracklist in the original post. If you downloaded the old and slightly wrong material, you might want to download it again. The tracks aren’t really different, but if you are anal about songs having the correct titles (like me), this is the way to go.

Thanks to Sun|Rah for the initial legwork and hunting down all the material.

Also, I found video material for the entire gig, minus one song (“Ethio Blues”). You can find all the clips right here on Dailymotion. If you click on “watch playlist” at the top of the left sidebar, you can watch all nine of the videos without interruption and in the original setlist order. Many, many thanks to granjeros for providing this stuff. Surprisingly, many of the videos don’t have a lot of views yet. Let’s go change that right now; and if you have a Dailymotion account, leave some comments and ratings. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.

No news on the collaborative-studio-album front. At least not as far as I know.

However, more good news on the live-set front. I was able to grab The Heliocentrics’s solo live session, which they recorded at Cargo on the same night they joined Mulatu, from RBMA Radio’s website. Since it’s a single mp3 file, I still have to separate all the tracks. But the plan is to have it posted here before the weekend is over. And this time I really mean it. So come back soon for a full hour of live goodness from The Heliocentrics.

In fact, I found a way to get a hold of whichever RBMA Radio stream I want, without quality loss. I’m thinking about offering a request service. More on this a little later.

Many other good posts are in the works, especially from the Jazz / Funk / Instrumental department. Stay tuned.

Peace!
eardrummer

Mulatu & Helios – Live

© Gawain Hewitt (more photos from the event at TheirSpace)

Last week, I promised you the audio files of Mulatu Astatke’s gig with The Heliocentrics in London. Well, the time is now. Hopefully, the two videos from the session made the waiting period seem not as long. (This release is so hot that I had to start a new post category.)

Mulatu Astatke, born in Ethiopia in 1943, is the father of so-called Ethio-Jazz. It is safe to say that he has left quite a mark in the history of music. The 9-piece Heliocentrics, on the other hand, are a fairly new band. Their style consists of an unclassifiable mix of Jazz, Psychedelic, Funk, Soul, Rock, Percussion, Hip-Hop, Electronic, etc. (I could go on for hours.) Their phenomenal debut record, “Out There,” was released last year. For them it is also safe to assume that they will leave their mark in music history, if they have not already done so.

These two, Mulatu and The Helios, joined forces about two months ago for one of Karen P’s Broad Casting gigs at the Cargo in London. It’s already an incredible pleasure to listen to their individual records. So you can’t even begin to imagine how great it is when they’re live on stage together.

Thanks to one of the event’s organizers, the Red Bull Music Academy, we cannot only watch some clips from the session but also listen to the set in its entirety. They actually offer an on-demand stream at their online radio station. You can’t download the material there, though. But you can do so right here and right now.

According to Mulatu, he only rehearsed with The Helios for about six to seven hours. With that in mind, the result is even more awe-inspiring. Watch out for the improv bit starting around two minutes into track number 3, “Yègellé Tezeta.”

Sit down, hold on to your seats, and prepare yourselves for one hour and six minutes of music of eargasmic proportions. It does not, nor ever will it get any better than this. As always, Malcolm Catto’s performance on the drums is breathtaking. (Check my post from last Thursday again for two video clips from this very concert.)

Please remember to download both files for this. Otherwise you won’t be able to listen to any of it.

****UPDATE**** (November 21, 2008)
Since I posted this in June, I realized that a few things were wrong with this release. For one, a lot of tracks didn’t have the correct title. This is now fixed. Then, the first track was actually two separate tracks. I split it up and sorted everything out. The download links and tracklist you see below correspond to the “new” and fixed release. Everything is now perfect as far as titles, track order, and track separation are concerned.

To all those who have already downloaded this before, I advise you to delete the old material and get the fixed version. Simply retagging the existing MP3s won’t do the trick. To all others, you can safely disregard this update notice and download without having to worry about anything.

Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics – Live At Broad Casting, Cargo, London. 17 April 2008 (2008) @ 256 kbps (Total 1:06:31)

Part 1
Part 2
(Both files can be downloaded simultaneously.)

1. Yèkèrmo Sèw (Live) – 5:39
2. Gubèlyé (Live) – 4:27
3. Yègellé Tezeta (Live) – 4:04
4. Mulatu (Live) – 7:36
5. Kulumanqualeshi (Live) – 7:11
6. Kasalèfkut Hulu (Live) – 6:33
7. Ethio Blues (Live) – 5:29
8. Yèkatit (Live) – 5:43
9. Munayé (Live) – 5:57
10. Nètsanèt (Live) (RBMA Radio Version) – 7:22
11. Nètsanèt (Live) (Complete Version) – 6:34 (@ 320 kbps)

Okay, enough said. Let the music speak for itself. Most likely, this will be the best download I’ll ever offer on this blog. Not because there’s only crap music lying around at my place (though that may be the case), but because this is “the best of the best of the best.”

Many thanks go out to Sun|Rah for the initial legwork.

Drop me some comments about this release. I’m really curious what you think.

Selam, (that’s Amharic)
3ardrumm3r

P.S. Coming up every week now, full downloads of Gilles Peterson’s weekly two-hour-long BBC Radio 1 show.