1) Tyler, The Creator Wolf (Columbia)

2)  Blu No York! (New World Colour/Greenstreets)

3) Tyga Hotel California (Young Money/Cash Money)

4)  Lil’ Wayne I Am Not a Human Being Pt. II (Cash Money)

5) Macklemore & Ryan Lewis The Heist (Macklemore LLC)


Holding down the number one slot for the second week in a row is the new Tyler, The Creator album Wolf  on Columbia Records on the latest chart from Amoeba Music Hollywood. Chart re-entries include Blu's No York!,), Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' The Heist, and  Lil’ Wayne's I Am Not a Human Being Pt. II  on Cash Money Records.  Also being released through Cash Money on Lil Wayne's Young Money Entertainment imprint is the brand new chart entry from Tyga Hotel California which is the rapper's third album to date and features the aforementioned Lil Wayne among the many artists making cameos. Others include 2 Chainz, Chris Brown,  [The] Game, Wiz Khalifa, Nicki Minaj, Future, Jadakiss, and Rick Ross who appeared on the lead single "Dope" (scroll down to see video). When the artist first announced the album last year he had promised that it would also include a track featuring Tupac Shakur on a verse or two - culled from some lost tapes - but this highly anticipated posthumous 2Pac feature never materialized.  Meanwhile the new album title he said was a dedication to his Cali home state with the production theme of the album to be based on the samples utilized in popular 1990s West Coast rap.

      

Don Buchla may not be a household name but the pioneering electronic music instrument inventions of this avant-garde artist have shaped what modern electronic music is today.  His creation in the 1960's of a unique analog synthesizer (the Buchla) completely altered how people think about, compose, and perform music. To tell the Don Buchla story and to help make the general public more aware of this oft overlooked, avant-garde, modern music innovator, Bay Area filmmaker Connie Field set about making a documentary on Buchla.

"He has been called a mad scientist, a genius, an innovator, a recluse, an iconoclast, and has gathered a horde of fiercely loyal admirers by following his own visionary path, and dancing to his own muse," wrote Field on the Kickstarter page she set up to fund the filming of the documentary. [To date only 5% of the shooting has been done.] Working closely with Field on the film is editor Gregory Scharpen (a longtime Bay Area theatrical sound designer, musician, and KALX DJ) who has worked on eight other films with Field to date. Earlier today I caught up with Scharpen to ask him about this film and the importance of its subject to modern music.


Amoeblog: What is it that makes Don Buchla such a unique and worthwhile subject?

Gregory Scharpen: Don is both an engineer and a musician; a very unusual combination. Plus he has an innate sense of the theatrical, as well as an extreme dedication to craftsmanship. And there's the small matter of him being a genius.

     

After reading the story about the Michigan woman who awoke from a five year semi-coma with the first words out of her mouth being "I want to go to a Bob Seger concert" my first reaction was really? Of all the things to utter after that long time and of all the artists to pick: Bob Seger? But such was the choice for 79 year old Evie Branan of Flint, Michigan who had already seen the Michigan born Seger in concert and was already a diehard fan. But still even she wondered why of all the things to say after five years of silence that those would be her first words. "Why would I say that?" she laughed. "Maybe my last thoughts were Bob Seger before I had my stroke," she told Michigan Live who reported the story yesterday about Branan abruptly awaking  from her five-year semi-coma back in May 2011 and how this week (tomorrow Thursday April 11th) she will finally have her wish granted when she goes to see Seger in concert at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Not only that but she also got an invitation to the private after party and will be riding to and from the event in a rented limo thanks to the generosity of an administrator at Willowbrook Manor, the long term care unit, where she lives and where many folks see her recovery as "a miracle." Below are the videos for live concert versions of a couple of Bob Seger's many hits they he will likely perform at tomorrow's show: "Still The Same" and "Hollywood Nights" - both from his 1978 album Stranger in Town.
 

Welcome to installment number 27 in the weekly Amoeblog report New York State of Mind direct from the Big Apple where events of the past week included the eighth annual Pillow Fight Day in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village near NYU on Saturday when hundreds of New Yorkers descended (with pillows under their arms) to partake in the goodhearted annual fun day that is simultaneously celebrated in other cities round the world. On Sunday evening at several bars and clubs around Manhattan, there were Mad Men themed costume and booze parties to celebrate the kick off of the new series of the popular AMC TV show. Dressed like Don Draper and company, fans gathered at places such as The Millesime at the Carlton Hotel on (where else but) Madison Ave. and The Carnegie Club (situated on 56th St. just behind Carnegie Hall), dressed in '60's chic and enjoying period-appropriate music and newly-invented retro-styled cocktails such as the Sterling Cooper Spritzer (Aperol + Grand Mariner + Veuve Clicquot Champagne + soda) and the Womanizer (bourbon + Galliano liqueur + grapefruit bitters) before and during the 9pm airing of the sixth season premiere of Mad Men. 

At Glam I. Rock's in-store performance at Oaklandish last Friday evening the new female rapper from The Town delighted the hometown audience at the downtown retail store, that transforms itself in a concert space every first Friday of the month, as she ran through a string of songs off her recently released debut EP, The Feel (Savvie1ent/The Olive Street Agency). The 21 year old rapper was literally born into hip-hop since her mom is Oakland female rapper Nic Nac who came to fame two decades ago when she recorded with such artists as The LOX and Eve but most notably with Dru Down and the Luniz, and toured and performed with such legends as Too $hort, Ice Cube, and 2Pac.  Nic Nac has been a consistent positive influence in her daughter's artistic growth. "She's played a huge part in influencing me from a young age even before I was rapping.  Just being everywhere she was -- show rehearsals, video shoots, sessions. She had already put me in that element," Glam I. Rock told the Amoeblog in a recent interview noting that, in addition to her mom's music, some of the very first rappers she heard (and likely influenced her) from a  young age included A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Big Daddy Kane, The LOX, Jay-Z and Nas.