Now that my laptop is mostly working and I have free hard drive space, I can do things like digitize more 33 RPMs again! hooray.

So I have digitized some 33 RPMs. :D This post is a birthday present for my sister, who has said I should do some of these, but the rest of you are welcome to share them too.

( Man On The Moon/CBS Enterprises/Narrated by Walter Cronkite + Sounds of the Space Age/National Geographic/Frank Borman/1969 )

( The In Sound from Way Out: Electronic Pop Music of the Future created by Perrey-Kingsley )

...and finally, this isn't a 33 RPM rip, it's a .zip file that contains both of Nichelle Nichols' vocal albums. Because stellar_dust once gave me a giant mp3 torrent/archive that had "all the albums ever put out by Star Trek people", and it didn't include these, which was a crime on several levels. And so I found them, and have been meaning to share them more widely for some time.

The .zip includes Down to Earth, produced in 1967, which is a collection of Ms. Nichols singing '60s lounge/pop/standards, and is unsurprisingly really very good if you like lounge/pop/standards (which I do. Why didn't they have *her* be the TNG holodeck crooner?) It also includes Out of This World, a later album of original songs themed around space and Star Trek, and is (perhaps surprisingly?) really bad. I mean, worse that Shatner's albums. Her voice is still excellent, but the songs they gave her to sing are cringingly bad; the music direction somehow even managed to screw up her vocal cover of the TOS theme.

Uhura.zip

(...also there will be cakes later. Under lock.)

So! Stuff has happened. The most relevant, however, is that I have fallen in love.

With a radio show!

I was driving home t'other night and stumbled on a re-run of Tapestry of the Times on my very own local public radio station, WYPR, and it's like it was a radio show designed solely for me. ¹

It's a hour of music, history, context and commentary that is entirely from the archives of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the non-profit record label started in the 1960s for the purpose of documenting folk and world music and later taken over by the Smithsonian. I'm sure it has some appropriation issues - rich white people recording other peoples' culture always does - but Folkways has always at least tried to be non-exploitative, and oh my god, if I had all the time and money in the world I would have already bought out the Folkways back catalog. This show did it for me and picks out an hour's worth of good stuff a week, just enough, and omg yay.

They have their entire archives up as mp3/podcast on the website (less than a year's worth, so far), and I am slowly (savoringly) working through it. The last episode I listened to features "blues piano from Memphis Slim, marimba music from Guatemala, labor union songs, World War II anthems, Tuvan throat singing, and classic old-time tunes from Doc Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb." SERIOUSLY, could there possibly be any radio show better made for me?

As a bonus, most of these songs are basically impossible to find as pirate downloads, so I can't go and download another gig of mp3s that I don't need after every episode. :D (so I downloaded the complete Smothers Brothers discography instead, help p.s. does anyone have any peggy seeger tracks i think i have fallen in love with her too.)

¹Mind you, I am the girl who spent her high school years with the radio tuned to the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential tapes instead of rock'n'roll, so my taste may not be yours.


Also, while I am on the topic of hippy music, wintercreek made an mp3 recording of herself singing Enterprise, Starship, the John Denver filk that gets sung on the Enterprise in the novel The Wounded Sky, and posted it to starry_sea. You guys, wintercreek is amazing; she has - no lie - fulfilled a childhood dream of mine. Even if that community never does anything ever again, it was all worth it for that.

Ain't fandom amazing? Ask, and it will be given!

Anyway wintercreek mentioned wanting to get a bunch more voices to add to make it a singalong, so I did: Enterprise, Starship four voices: this is my three best takes (recorded with headphones on, and then layered over the original in Audacity.) Y'all should do it too so nobody has to hear my singing in the final version.

...and, while I'm on Star Trek multimedia anyway I guess, gblvr posted the Star Trek Reboot Art Meme (which originated with annime1231 on dA) like, umm ... over a month ago? But I just finished doing it. So here it is:

( Long fanart is long. And has no text description. Also, warnings for tentacles, hybrid babies, cocktail metaphors, space floozies, old people, Rihannsu, crossdressing, Star Wars quotes, JF injokes, Captain Maddow, Vulcan-touching, anthropomorphization, bad art, and girlsex. )

..enjoy.