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| Mississippi State Penitentiary Convicts |
30+ musicians from as far afield as Brazil, Turkey, Australia and USA remix and recreate the sounds of prison life in 1940s Mississipi when the population was almost entirely black.
The Prison Songs Project invited 30 artists such as Laurence Colbert, a member of the band Ride, and Karhide
a post-rock circles musician to rework the original folksongs recorded
and written in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the 1940s. The
results are both subtle and dramatic.
The
project examines the lives of the prisoners of the Mississippi State
Penitentiary in the late 1940s, by reimagining the work songs recorded
and sung there in the 40s and 50s.
The Mississippi State Penitentiary founded in 1901, is the oldest prison in the USA and was and is known by its inmates as “Parchman Farm”.
As well as a prison, thanks to Alan Lomax’s pioneering work, the prison
is also an important location in the history of field recording as a
practice and folk music as a culture.
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| Mississippi State Penitentiary Chain Gang |
From ‘Eighteen Hammers’ to ‘No More My Lawd’,
the songs are a moving portrait of prison life, and defiant statements
of hope and unity in the face of appalling conditions. The project is
one part of a global field recording and sound art project called Cities and Memory, which aims to present and remix the sounds of the world through a global sound map. Each location on the map has two sounds: a documentary field recording and a reworking of that sound.
Since its launch in 2014 the Cities and Memory project
has had nearly 300,000 listens, records both the current reality of a
place, alongside its imagined, alternative counterpart, a processing or
an interpretation that imagines that place and time as somewhere else,
somewhere new - "a remixing the world, one sound at at time". More than 240 field recordists and sound artists from as far afield as
Calcutta, Los Angeles and Cape Town have taken part, providing field
recordings and radical reimaginings of global sounds.
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| Mississippi State Penitentiary Convicts |
Playlist:
Weigh Five Hundred - Anthony Lyons
Barney Spigel - Prettiest Train (Spigelsound version)
18,000 Hammers - Cities and Memory
Fernando Ramalho - You Better Stay Off Ol' Parchman Farm
If The Rest Was Dead (Whoa Buck) - Jeff Dungfelder
Whoa Fuck - Laurence Colbert
No More My Lawd (I Am With You) - Walker Wooding
No More My Lawd (Alex Hehir version)- Alex Hehir
Old Alabama (Karhide version) - Karhide
Old Alabama (Ian Haygreen version) - Ian Haygreen
Penitentiary Blues - Andy Lyon
RMM - Solo1
The Wrong Side of the Tracks (My Baby Got to Go)- Nick St. George
Trapped in the Void (No Way Home)- Mark Taylor
Free Lab Radio Broadcasts Times:
On air on 104.4FM across London, online and on digital.
Saturdays 11-midnight UK time, (2-3am GST Gulf Standard Time)
Tuesdays (repeat) 4am UK time (7am GST)
Also broadcast on digital across Brighton and online:
Friday (following Resonance104.4FM broadcast) 19:30-20:30 UK time (10:30-11.30pm GST) on Resonance Extra
Podcasts:
