This week’s selection comes from Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music. This song was recorded in 1991 by ethnomusicologist Lesley Larkum at the Green Hotel, Mek’ele (Mekelle) in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia. It represents one of those wonderful moments of ethnographic fieldwork when… read more
This week’s selection comes from Stephen Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary & Creative Recordings. This seasonal offering comes from our African Writers Club collection and was recorded on 7 November 1966 in London on a Revox F36 tape machine. ‘No Room at Solitaire’ is a dramatization by Cosmo Pieterse of… read more
This week’s selection comes from Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision. Around this time of year as winter takes it hold, and into spring that follows, a daytime walk around one of Britain’s more remote coastal estuaries and mudflats, or over inland moorlands and heathlands will likely bring about… read more
Following the viral response on the internet to Jack Copeland and Jason Long’s 2016 blog concerning their restoration of the world’s earliest surviving computer music recording, the pair’s follow up is in two parts: (1) they explain how they resurrected the authentic sound of Turing’s long since dismantled Manchester computer,… read more
This week’s selection comes from Andy Linehan, Curator of Popular Music Recordings. Cyril Blake was a Trinidadian jazz trumpeter who moved to Europe and eventually settled in London in the 1930s. After playing with many well-known musicians in various house bands he became a bandleader and appeared regularly at the… read more