Beck / Record Club

Record Club: Skip Spence “Weighted Down” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Beck Hansen (yes, that Beck) has been keeping his site full of killer content for the last few months. Interviews, dj mixes and new tracks, news, and weird videos make up some of the content, but one of the sites most prolific new features is the “Record Club“.

Record Club is an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time.

This month’s Record Club points it’s attention to the music of Skip Spence. Fiest, Nels Cline, and members of Wilco join Beck for unrehearsed covers of songs off of Skip’s album Oar. Pevious Record Club sessions featured songs by The Velvet Underground and Leonard Cohen.

As much as I dig the stuff Beck has been posting, bad website design prevents me from being able to link directly to his entries (because of some lame top down domain name thing or something). So I can’t point you to the insightful writing Beck posted about the experimental musician Harry Partch. Beck even wrote a song in Partch’s unusual and distinct scale. Again, I wish I could point you to this content (annoying fucking site design grrrr), but you can find the song as well as Beck’s notes on this page (for now).