Remembering Ranbanda Seneviratne There is a song written by Malini Jayaratne which her husband, T. M. Jayaratne sings. It makes the poignant statement that not enough songs have been written about the love a father has for his child: piya senehasata kav gee liya una madi (there’s a conspicuous absence of songs dedicated to fathers’ love). True. There are countless mau guna ...
“The alchemy of the masters moving molecules of air, we capture by moving particles of iron, so that the poetry of the ancients will echo into the future.” I’ve seen Kavi Alexander seated under the coccolaba tree at Sooriya Village, apparently one of the only two such trees in Sri Lanka, the other being at Peradeniya. With long hair and a ...
He led “The Fireflies” band in Ceylon from 1963, a personal friend of mine, Milroy de Silva has passed on, in Vancouver, Canada, after a long illness, leaving family, friends & fans, deeply saddened by his death, at the age of 84. Milroy was indeed, a superb guitarist, self-taught, as most of us were in the good old days. ...
Little more than two weeks ago during the busy Christmas season, I got a very sudden and rare opportunity of meeting a person whom I wanted to see and meet in person for quite a long time, who was on a very short holiday to his motherland and when visiting a relative over here in the hill capital of ...
W.D.Amaradewa (pic by: fragmenteyes.blogspot.com) As an art form, as a means of self-expression and articulation, music is largely self-referential. It has nothing outside itself: the standards and the yardsticks created for it, by various exogenous factors, are subsumed, sometimes eventually, almost always at once. This is why of all the art forms we are acquainted with now, music is ...
Victor Ratnayake (National Film Corporation in Sri Lanka) For Iraj and for Victor. For you and for me. Three years ago, when I was happily unemployed, I was a joyful drifter, aimlessly wandering here and there. I had some money of my own (freelancing does pay, though it doesn’t pay much), enough for me to roam around and look ...
I first encountered T. M. Jayaratne through the films of K. A. W. Perera. I never bothered to check out his other work because, for me, he was at his best when he was crooning about love, be it young, requited, spurned, or revived. The themes these movies evoked, I felt, were most sincerely articulated by his voice. It ...
pic by : fragmenteyes.blogspot.com ගංගා තරංග රාව දී රිදී වනින් මල් පිපී කුලින් කුලේ හැපී ගායනා කරන්නේ ආකාශයේ නැගී වීරයින්ගෙ ඒ යශෝ ගීතයයි… His songs roll off the tongue easily, as though their lyrics were stuck in our throats and needed his melodies to be unleashed. They are addressed to us, the collective “we”, the entire country, in ways ...
Pic by Sandra Mack There are rain clouds, not too dark and not threatening. It might rain later. There was rain last night. Tomorrow, there will be other clouds of similar shade. Non-threatening for a while. There might be rain. The city pulsated in rhythms acquired over the years. In some village in the Dry Zone, there are children ...
Young people revel in being philistines not because their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles don’t understand them (to be sure, they don’t), but because they want to show that they care, that they understand what their elders want them to understand. Some of the greatest art was born out of that kind of philistinism. And some of ...
‘Plantation songs’ as referred in common parlance are Black American slave songs that emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries during the times when predominantly cotton, corn along with, sugar cane, tobacco and potato plantation in America prospered and thrived. History Cotton was the predominant cash crop in America until the end of the 19th century. The south west ...
I’ve been a die–hard music fan since my youth, but I began to understand the structure of music when I learned to DJ 12 years ago. After a few years of DJing with vinyl, a program called Serato was introduced that allowed me to DJ using MP3’s with the same control I had with vinyl. As a bonus though, unlike vinyl, MP3’s can ...
DJ Lowtempo is pleased to announce additional dates to the 2017 North American tour! Spicy jalapeno bacon ipsum dolor amet quis sunt beef ribs t-bone shankle, sint ut labore nulla eiusmod aliquip. Excepteur velit commodo leberkas. Sint in jowl jerky, spare ribs t-bone veniam tri-tip nulla aliqua cupim swine andouille. Prosciutto landjaeger in, cillum leberkas hamburger pork chop pariatur ball ...
Following an already impressive catalog that includes last year’s “Primus EP”on NBGS, “High Key” is LowTempo’s first full-length album on Croma. Crunchy guitar licks, intricate solos and occasional improvisations are the order of the day, combined with hip hop beats, skillfully chopped vocals and tight synth lines to devastating effect. We’re now exactly one week away from the release date. ...
