Music Tuesday: David Choi, Meklit Hadero and more
Last week on youtube.com/music, we brought you a full album of vintage psychedelic music, a playlist of space-themed videos to commemorate the New Pornographers’ new sci-fi offering, and eMusic’s Six Degrees of Beirut playlist, which traced the band’s influences. We also featured a few awesome videos we thought you should see. This week, we’re ignoring the massive bunch of new releases from everybody from Lady Antebellum and Bob Seger (!) to Blitzen Trapper, Katy B, Mogwai, Neon Indian, Laura Marling, Das Racist, The Kooks and Trombone Shorty. Instead, we’re taking music discovery to a whole new level.
Get More Into Singer-Songwriters With David Choi David Choi has become one of YouTube’s biggest stars, a singer-songwriter whose reach is equalled only by his following. This week, David put out a call to the community to help him get more into singer-songwriters on YouTube. The community responded with over a thousand suggestions. He whittled the list down to his favorites, who are featured today on the homepage and youtube.com/musictuesday.
Introducing Meklit Hadero Meklit Hadero is hardly a household name, but she should be. The Ethiopian-American singer-songwriter’s jazzy, soulful style has drawn enthusiastic accolades from anybody who heard 2010’s On A Day Like This. (And we think more folks should hear it.) Hadero spent a good part of her time honing her sound at the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco, a crucible for innovative musicians, and the time she put in shows. In June, she visited Google and gave a live performance, which you’ll see here, paired with her debut video for “Leaving Soon.”
Raleigh Moncrief: Lament For Morning Debate has raged among music geeks about whether “chillwave” is a genuine phenomenon or just a term cooked up to link disparate, laptop-based artists. We won’t label the work by the young Sacramento, CA-based producer Raleigh Moncrief (who recently signed to the genre-defying independent label Anticon) -- but a pop-meets-ambient vibe is certainly there. The song’s basic architecture rests on Philip Glass-style repetition before wreathing itself in respectably-sized beats -- and the result is absorbing. Perhaps equally impressive is this abstract, impressionistic video, which Moncrief directed himself.