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Musical Discussions
Topic: The many sounds of a City

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Posted by Romy the Cat on 04-26-2006

The best sound that I ever heard in my life ironically came from an amateur band. It was in the 1999 and I was in Munich, hanging around Europe in search for sensations. In the center Munich, where all visitors crowded around Munich’s center platz, the army of street musicians, side-show artists, and other typical summer tourists’ entertainers keep the August’s warmth up. I walking across the square and suddenly was completely shacked with the sound of a string quartet that was plaguing a few hinder feet away. To make the long story short I will tell you that I turn over my train tickets to Prague and spent another day in Munich, explicitly dedicating it to sitting on the pavement and listing the most stunning concert I ever heard. The quartet played phenomenally. It was a Polish girl, two Slovak guys and one Bulgarian man. All of then from some conservatory in Eastern Europe. I do not remember the details as I did not socialized with them a lot. They were kind of busy: practically without breaks running over the Mozart’s, Hayden’s, Schubert's, Brahms’s, Smetana's and Dvorák's repertoire. The play was very good, the instilments were so-so but the entire presentation of sound was like nothing else. Interning that they were sitting at the side of shopping center, inside of a roofed gallery, with one side wide open. In realty it was a mouth of  huge horn… Whatever it was the sound literally stopped “birds in fly” at least to me it was something absolutely hypnotizing.

It happened today again but this time it was not the Sound but the actual singing manner. I work nowdays  for a small client in Cambridge, right at the Harvard square. Taking the metro I was passing a guy in subways who was singing something in Haitian and playing his guitar. Suddenly his style of his singing and his actual attention to the singing impressionism, while he was not I concert hall but in a subways station, really touched me....

The artist was singer and songwriter Gifrants. It turn out that he has a web site:

http://www.gifrants.com/

Gifrants is a former HMO insurances company employee who abandoned all that corporate BS and now solely dedicated to perform Haitian music.  For the visitor of my site around the world I put a fragment of the Gifrants song in MP3 format. I do not like the Gifrants in studio version. It should be at a subway station when Gifrants try to out loud the sound of the approaching train and air is filed with thousands of urban noises… Pretend an army of hundreds busy people are rushing across the downtown’s subway platform, taking, chewing, scramming, calling,… now click the file….

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Audio_Files/Gifrants.mp3 (Do not run off my server but download the file… 6 meg)

Rgs,
Romy the caT


Posted by Thorsten on 04-27-2006
Roman,

If you dig this Cat, you might like Jephte Guillaume (his solo stuff on Spiritual Life Music) and to get an idea of my Wive's native music try Toumani Diabante and Mandingo, which you might also like.

Ciao T

Posted by hifitodd on 04-27-2006
I read this thread with laughter, as pretty much every-other-day this guy is playing at the Davis Square T station.  He always has his amplifier and microphone cranked up SO loud!!!  While I will agree his style is unique and he is a skilled guitarrest/vocalist, when you hear his same 6 song repetoire day in day out at 95db at 7:30 in the morning it gets a bit tiresome. 

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