Tag Archives: music archive

Whit’s Picks: Take 3 – Gems from the HMRC

Resident poet and rock and roll star Harold Whit Williams is in the midst of a project to catalog the KUT Collection, obtained a few years ago and inhabiting a sizable portion of the Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC).

Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.

Earlier installments: Take 1, Take 2


Snowdrift / Starry All Over

Available at Fine Arts Library On Site Storage

Icy, ethereal dream pop from the Pacific Northwest. Kat Terran’s ghostly vocals haunt and swoop high above her band’s north wind din of swirling looped guitars and bass/drum drone. Classic 4AD followers take note.

 

Champian Fulton / The Breeze and I

Available at Fine Arts Library On Site Storage

Award-winning jazz pianist/vocalist leads her top-notch trio through a thoughtful batch of standards. Tickling the ivories à la Monk while crooning like Sarah Vaughan, thirty-something Fulton champions bebop and bravely marches it forward into the 21st century.

 

Near the Parenthesis / Music for the Forest Concourse

Available at Fine Arts Library On Site Storage

From the excellent Oakland electronica label n5MD comes this natural world-inspired ambient theme album. San Francisco-based artist Tim Arndt filters his soft piano through leafblown beats and pulsing synths. To be aurally absorbed as an autumn dusk falls – ask your doctor if Near the Parenthesis is right for you.

 

The Sojourners / The Sojourners

Available at Fine Arts Library On Site Storage

Vancouver, B.C.’s powerhouse gospel trio strips it all down to the very essence of soul with roots-rock producer/multi-instrumentalist Steve Dawson at the helm. Dense rich harmonies uplifted over a backporch stomp. Whether believer or skeptic, the listener is promised joy, peace, and transcendence.

 

International Jetsetters / Heart is Black

Available at Fine Arts Library On Site Storage

This side project of Jesus & Mary Chain guitarist Mark Crozer and drummer Loz Colbert thrills with a filled to the brim imperial pint-sized EP of bittersweet Brit-pop. Not quite shoegaze, not quite psychedelia, just amped-up, fuzzed-out rock and roll glory.

Harold Whit Williams is a Library Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources Cataloging for Content Management. He writes poetry, is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather, and releases lo-fi guitar-heavy indie pop as DAILY WORKER.

 

 

Whit’s Picks: Take 1 — Gems from the HMRC

Resident poet and rock and roll star Harold Whit Williams has recently taken on a project to catalog the KUT Collection, obtained a few years ago and inhabiting a sizable portion of the Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC).

Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so on occasion, he’ll be presenting some of his finds here on the blog.


Recently added (and highly-recommended) Music from the KUT Collection at the HMRC

Angela Faye Martin / Pictures From Home

North Carolina singer/songwriter turns Appalachian music on its head with odd synth and fuzz burbling background. Quietly brooding and beautiful. Produced by Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous.

Ruxpin / Where Do We Float From Here?

IDM electronic musician Jónas Thor Guðmundsson hails from Iceland and creates blips and bleeps as Ruxpin. Less frenetic than Autechre, not as dark as Aphex Twin, Where Do We Float From Here shines with bright and melodic northern lights.

Olivier Messiaen / Visions de l’Amen

French avant garde composer’s challenging suite of seven pieces for two pianos. Marilyn Nonken (piano I) and Sarah Rothenberg (piano II) in a brilliant performance captured at Stude Hall, Shepherd School of Music, Rice University.  

Jews and Catholics / Who Are? We Think We Are!

 Following in that grand Southeastern tradition of rock duos (House of Freaks, Flat Duo Jets), Winston-Salem’s Jews and Catholics bring their amped-up indie pop to spike the punch at your summer backyard party. Audacious, nervy, overdriven. Produced by the legendary Mitch Easter of Let’s Active.

Georgia Anne Muldrow (as Jyoti) / Ocotea

 Muldrow takes a break from her breathtaking vocals and rhymes on Ocotea, as she deftly experiments with avant jazz swirled around inside chill electronica.

Harold Whit Williams is a Library Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources Cataloging for Content Management. He also writes poetry, is guitarist for Cotton Mather, and records ambient electronic music under the solo name The French Riot.

Other installments: Take 2

 

Students, Spaces, Collections, for a Win

Records in the Reia punk collection.
Records in the Reia punk collection.

A happy convergence of circumstances at the beginning of the recent academic year resulted in a creative endeavor that highlights the Libraries, its users and the students who represent the quality of talent at The University of Texas at Austin.

Early this fall, the Fine Arts Library’s (FAL) music librarian David Hunter received a generous donation of pristine and rare punk vinyl in the form of 700 LPs and 400 singles (45s) from a collection carefully amassed by the late Justin Gibran (Freud) Reia.

Justin Gibran (Freud) Reia

Reia was a guitarist for Berkeley-area punk band The Criminals in the 1990s, active during a time when the city was spawning a pop-punk revival that manifested bands that would go on to garner broad attention, such as Rancid, The Offspring and Green Day. His connection to the punk music scene and the various players in a place where record stores are in abundance made it possible for Reia to build an exceptional collection of genre-specific gems.

Reia’s collection was donated to the FAL’s Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC) by Reia’s mother, Flora Salyers, and his wife, Tamara Schatz, with the hope that the music he had spent his life compiling would benefit future students, faculty and researchers who rely on the archive as a resource. Salyers delivered the collection herself, hauling the records in her car on a road trip from Little Rock, Arkansas, after a series of consultations with Hunter.

Reia’s lifetime of collecting — and his family’s decision to make the donation of materials — serves to fill a genre gap in the HMRC. Punk music was notably underrepresented as a focus within the archive, but the addition of such a range of items, many of which are uncommon or even obscure, has opened a new avenue of development for the collection.

This fall also saw the opening of the new Learning Commons in PCL, including the new expanded Media Lab on the ground level of the building. The lab is designed to provide students and other users access to the tools needed to build creative multimedia projects that are increasingly the currency of productivity in the higher ed learning environment. The lab is managed by Libraries Teaching and Learning professionals, but is staffed by students — Media Lab Assistants — from the University Leadership Network, a program of the UT Provost’s office designed to help undergraduate students from historically disadvantaged communities develop leadership skills while achieving academic success consistent with graduating in four years.

Lab assistants come from a range of different fields of study across campus, and work in tandem with their supervisors to develop expertise in the use of hardware/software in order to share their skills with fellow students who use the lab. Some of the assistants were chosen by the Media Lab managers for skills and knowledge they already had, such as Charisma Soriano, a junior Marketing and Radio-Television-Film major, who has experience with filmmaking and production. Charisma brought with her an understanding of that process which has been invaluable for Libraries staff.

ULN lab assistant Charisma Soriano and Learning Technologies Librarian Cindy Fisher.
ULN lab assistant Charisma Soriano and Learning Technologies Librarian Cindy Fisher.

To expand the opportunities for the ULN students in the Media Lab, as well as to fill a need for the Libraries, Charisma and her fellow lab assistants Lucia Aremu — junior  Government major — and Jocelyn Mendoza — junior, Education — were approached by their  supervisors to see if they would be interested in making a short film to highlight some aspect of the Libraries efforts; the subject matter was left completely to the students’ own interests. All three enthusiastically agreed to take on the project, and settled on the Reia punk collection as the focus for their effort.

Working in coordination with Media Lab Manager Andy Wilbur, the students toured the HMRC collection (located at the Collections Deposit Library) with David Hunter, conducted preliminary interviews with Hunter and Katherine Strickland — PCL Map Collection manager and punk music aficionado — then organized, shot, edited and produced a short documentary film on the collection, which is viewable below.

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The Libraries relies on the generosity of donors and the talent of students and staff to make efforts such as this possible.

The preliminary estimate for processing the Reia Punk Collection is estimated at $8,000 — covering the cost of a graduate research assistant and cataloging. Consider donating to the Fine Arts Library to make this collection available for use by students, faculty, researchers and scholars.