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As you can see by the above photo, my workspace is a disaster area. It is the downtown Detroit of workspaces. I’m currently working on imposing some desktop order, which means doing something about the many unorganized piles of CDs all over the place. Which means listening to a lot of CDs–because unless it’s, say, something as dire-looking as a collection of Disney Christmas songs, I give every promo disc I get at least a cursory spin. Which means listening to a lot of shitty music–because there are, and always will be, far more shitty musicians in the world than good ones. But I’m digging up some fine stuff here.
Lo Còr de la Plana, who came to Chicago for this year’s World Music Festival, are a French sextet who sing in a disappearing language (Occitan) accompanied only by percussion and foot stomps and sound like nothing else in the modern Western tradition. If I were directing a sci-fi fantasy movie I’d cast these folks as the village minstrels.
