The Song of Helltoppr

Helltoppr is an evil draug, an undead warrior who appears in the novel Frostborn and menaces my heroes. We get a snatch of "The Song of Helltoppr" in the book, and the full lyrics are printed in the appendices. When it came time to writing the song, I enlisted the help of my nephew, Jonathan Anders, who not only helped me compose the lyrics, but performed the song as well at the party for my book launch. Now, through the magic of YouTube, you can hear "The Song of Helltoppr" too.

This is a Sheng

This is a Sheng, one of the oldest Chinese instruments, dating back to 1100 BC.
And it is totally awesome.

Good Old Girl

Marian Call says she didn't have the TARDIS specifically in mind when she wrote "Good Old Girl," but there was obviously some timey-wimey stuff going on when she wrote this:



"Good Old Girl" appears on the album Got to Fly.

Kill 'em by Parnell Hall

Signing in the Waldenbooks by Parnell Hall

Thanks to Mike Resnick for turning me onto this brilliant bit of musical honesty and self promotion:



And here's one of Parnell Hall's books.

Print Your Own Flute

Via New Scientist:

The NaNoWriMo Song

I love John Anealio's music. His NaNoWriMo Song is just priceless! It got me through NaNoWriMo last year in fact. You can download it, and the new "dance remix" in a pay what you want transaction, starting at free. But you should pay at least $.99 for it, shouldn't you?

MASKED on largehearted boy

Today is Masked official publication day, and to celebrate we've worked up a special post made available through the kindness and generosity of music, literature and pop culture blog, largehearted boy. In what I'm sure you will admit is a rather unique way to talk about an anthology, largehearted boy invited yours truly and each of the anthology's contributors to write a short piece selecting a song and explaining that song's relationship to their own story (or in my case, the anthology as a whole). Every single contributor chimes in, and the result is a very interesting "soundtrack" to the book. Check it out. Meanwhile, here's the table of contents once again:

Introduction: The Golden Age by Lou Anders
"Cleansed and Set in Gold" by Matthew Sturges
"Where their Worm Dieth Not" by James Maxey
"Secret Identity" by Paul Cornell
"The Non-Event" by Mike Carey
"Avatar" by Mike Baron
"Message from the Bubblegum Factory" by Daryl Gregory
"Thug" by Gail Simone
"Vacuum Lad" by Stephen Baxter
"A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows" by Chris Roberson
"Head Cases" by Peter David & Kathleen David
"Downfall" by Joseph Mallozzi
"By My Works You Shall Know Me" by Mark Chadbourn
"Call Her Savage" by Marjorie M. Liu
"Tonight we fly" by Ian McDonald
"A to Z in the Ultimate Big Company Superhero Universe (Villains Too)" by Bill Willingham

Robyn Hitchcock in "Black Cab Sessions"

Via YepRoc: Yep Roc artist Robyn Hitchcock is the latest musician to take part in the Black Cab Sessions. The Black Cab Sessions is a series of one-song performances by musicians and poets recorded in the back of a black taxicab. The sessions are recorded while the cab that serves as the studio travels through city streets, usually in London, England. The motto of the Black Cab Sessions is "one song, one take, one cab." 

Robyn Hitchcock's latest release Propellor Time (Sartorial Records) features guest appearances from Nick Lowe, Johnny Marr, John Paul Jones, Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey and more. Propellor Time is available now on limited-edition import CD/LP and for digital download at the Yep Roc Webshop while supplies last. 

ROBYN HITCHCOCK from Black Cab Sessions on Vimeo.

I Often Dream of Trains in New York

From I Often Dream of Trains in New York:

Is Rachel Rosen Really an Android?

My review of musician John Anealio's new CD, Sci Fi Songs, is up at Tor.com.

In short, I loved it and want a sequel CD.

Also, I can't get this out of my head...

Is Rachel Rosen really an android
Can Rachel Rosen really be alive
Is Rachel Rosen really an android
Can Rachel Rosen really be alive

Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3: Goodnight Oslo

I just picked up Goodnight Oslo, the latest from Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3, the Venus 3 being R.E.M.'s Peter Buck on guitar, Minus 5/Young Fresh Fellows/R.E.M'er Scott McCaughey on bass, and Ministry/R.E.M.'s Bill Rieflin on drums. It's a very interesting album, quintessentially Hitchcock and yet very different from his other work, even different from the previous Venus 3 album, Ole! Tarantula. If I had to describe it to those-who-will-understand, I'd say it's almost like the complete Groovy Decay/Gravy Deco Sessions, filtered through middle-period R.E.M. With horns. Hitchcock says the CD is about saying goodbye to cycles of negativity, moving out of the "smoke age" of cigarettes and gasoline, and about hope and change.

"You never know when the clock will stop," he says. "I will probably never time-travel, heal the sick or levitate, which were the natural ambitions I had as a boy. But I have trained myself to write songs and perform them, and I'm still developing those abilities. I am past my peak as an animal, but not as an artist. Of course, your work doesn't necessarily improve with age; it just mutates. You have to give birth to those mutations, I guess. So my songs may be no better now than 30 years ago; they're merely alive in a different way, fed on different emotional nutrients, as I am."

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Byrne and Eno, together for the first time in three decades:

I'm a Believer: Eric Spitznagel and the Mountain Goats

I love the Internet. Here's why today.

I spent 1991-1994 living in first England and then Chicago studying and performing theater, with a guy named Eric Spitznagel. Then in '94, I left Chicago for Bama and then California, and, back in the Stone Age, that would have been the end of it. Intermittent letters and phone calls maybe, long years of silence. Timothy Leary defined life and death as a continuum state, not an either/or, pointing out that you were already "dead" in parts of the world where you had no influence or contact, whether you were still alive in another locale or not, and you were still "alive" even after your physical death in areas where your ideas and concerns still had active impact. So, for all intents and purposes, in the pre-Internet age, Eric and I would be effectively dead to each other (with the occasional séance).

Instead, the following:

A few weeks ago, I realize that one single on a compilation CD that came with the Believer magazine keeps sticking in my head. It's "Palmcorder Yanja" by the Mountain Goats, and since Eric, in addition to being an author,is an editor at the Believer I shoot him an offhand email asking if he's familiar with them. He doesn't respond. I forget about it. Weeks go by. Then he pops up in my inbox explaining that not only is he obsessed with the Mountain Goats, but rather than respond to my email, he's blogged about his love of John Darnielle (the man behind the band) at great length. Here's a sample of what he wrote:

I love that the band's name is plural, even though it's just one guy playing an acoustic guitar. I love that John Darnielle, the lead singer (okay, the only singer), has a piercing nasal tenor that makes most people scrunch up their face and say, "What the hell is that?" I love that he's written hundreds of beautiful and sometimes hilarious songs about gardening, talking animals, abusive relationships in Florida, Aztec mythology and ancient Danish burial traditions - sometimes all at the same time. I love that most of his songs were recorded on a Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox, giving them the same crisp sound quality of an answering machine circa 1988.

So I read his blog, which so expressively communicates his passion that it inspires me to go to the Mountain Goats website, where I discover a horde of mp3s for free download. (There's also an equal amount of material available to stream, but I'm still hooked on ownership, so I only sample the music I can download into my iPod.) Well, I'm enough of a musical obsessive myself that I go hunting the net for photos of live performances I can use as faux CD-covers and to make sure I get the year of recording correct. I convey this to Eric while I'm still in the process, who happens to be online at the time I write him, and he response with a flurry of additional mp3s in my inbox - all bootlegs, live gigs, and rarities - not commercially available stuff I could buy - as neither he nor I want to take food away from an artist, particularly not one working on this scale. And besides, I know that having amassed around 30 or so songs for free, I'm not going to make it out of the day without going to iTunes and picking up something by the Goats as a dual act of thanks and clean karma. (I got "New Asian Cinema" - you should too). So now I'm a die-hard Mountain Goats fan. I've taken my iPod off "Shuffle Songs" for the first time since I got it, am playing Darnielle constantly, memorizing lyrics so I can sing them out of tune in the shower, and am working on converting my wife and child.

Which is why I love the Internet. Because, apart from being a case-in-point that Cory Doctorow is totally right when he argues that giving it away free generates sales, someone on the other side of the country who would have remained an increasingly-distant memory receding into my past has an active, vital, ongoing influence in my life in real time. All hail techology and old friends and the way the one brings us together with the latter.

You've Got, I've Got...

So, Jeff Vandermeer has a movie.
Martin Sketchley has a band.
Chris Roberson has a new book.
And I've got a provisional TOC.

The table of contents for Sideways in Crime: An Alternate Mystery Anthology, folks.
Here it is:

The People's Machine by Tobias S. Buckell
Running the Snake by Kage Baker
Via Vortex by John Meaney
The Blood of Peter Francisco by Paul Park
G-Men by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Adventure of the Southsea Trunk by Jack McDevitt
Sacrifice by Mary Rosenblum
Murder in Geektopia by Paul Di Filippo
Fate and The Fire-lance by Stephen Baxter
Chicago by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Worlds of Possibilities by Pat Cadigan
Conspiracies: A Very Condensed 937-Page Novel by Mike Resnick & Eric Flint
A Murder in Eddsford by SM Stirling
The Sultan's Emissary by Theodore Judson
Death on the Crosstime Express by Chris Roberson

The Music of Pyr

Jeff Vandermeer takes an unusual tack for a literary blog in his first Amazon Bookstore Book Blog about Pyr's books: music!

Jeff talks about the suggested soundtrack Ian McDonald supplies for his latest novel, Brasyl, as well as the elf rock song that Icelandic-based band Cynic Guru supplied as the official music track for Justina Robson's Keeping It Real.

To round it off, Jeff asked me who would score a soundtrack for the entire Pyr line if such a thing were possible. My answer got truncated, so with Jeff's kind permission and tongue firmly in cheek, I'll run the whole thing here:

From the get go, I've wanted Pyr to have both a respect for speculative fiction's illustrious history and an eye on the future.

I've maintained that you can have mild blowing concepts and good characters in the same book, action/adventure with sensawunder, literary sensibilities with mass appeal - that commercially-viable action set pieces did not preclude asking the big questions or aiming for the stars. One can have their cake and eat it too.

I've mixed old masters like Moorcock, Resnick and Silverberg with new voices like Edelman, Robson and Williams.

And we've published everything from epic fantasy to space opera to literary soft-science SF to urban fantasy to new weird to wacky sci-fantasy with elves on motorbikes.

I've tried to publish a diverse line where the only thru line is quality.

Obviously, the Pyr soundtrack can only be scored by one musician.

A man who can be as deep and mysterious as 2001 and as relevant and dangerous as 1984, or as surface and pop as fashion and dance, sound and music.

He writes about sex and drugs and gender issues, and spacemen and aliens and technological innovation slash alienation.

He has been there first in glam, soul, new age, fusion and a dozen other muscial genres.

He never does the same thing twice and he never runs out of imagination and he never gets tired.

He puts out fire with gasoline.

He is the Man Who Fell to Earth, the Man Who Sold the World, the Laughing Gnome, the Goblin King.

Obviously, only David Bowie could possibly score Pyr.