A collective of producers lead by Damon Albarn will visit the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to produce a new album for Oxfam.
Travelling with Damon to Congo are T-E-E-D (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs), Dan The Automator, Jneiro Jarel, Richard Russell, Actress, Marc Antoine, Jo Gunton and Kwes. They hope to make an album in 7 days.
Wracked by years of conflict, the DRC is home to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, and proceeds from the album will go to helping Oxfam's work, helping thousands of the DRC's poorest people.
Albarn previously visited Mali with Oxfam in 2001 which produced the album Mali Music. He has since recorded in Nigeria with Tony Allen and has visited Congo, Mali and Nigeria with Africa Exprez.
I watched the last Harry Potter movie a few days ago, and walking out of the theatre, I can't help feeling a little melancholy about the "end" of an era. An era of Harry Potter fandom and kids growing up along the world of wizards, Hogwarts and the actors that play these wonderful characters.
Surprisingly, I was reminded by TracyJackAlbarn, a fellow Blur fan, that Damon Albarn actually met Harry Potter - or lets call him Daniel Radcliffe, during an interview in the Jonathan Ross Show on March 2007.
Quoted from the 2007 Friday Night with Jonathan Ross episode summary found here: Daniel Radcliffe, who has gone from boy wizard to horse fondler, returns to the show as does Damon Albarn with yet another new band, The Good, The Bad & The Queen. Has he finally formed a good one?
There's a footage, just a snippet of them on the show together, chatting together, I am not sure whether it was backstage on the show or on the actual Harry Potter set, which appeared in another video interviewing Daniel Radcliffe about the movie.
Apparently, Daniel views Damon Albarn as one of his mentors and person he looks up to!
Watch below, Damon's part is at 0:48:
Anyone offer an opinion on where Damon and Daniel met in the video ? Is it on the Jonathan Ross show in March 2007, or was it on the Harry Potter movie set ?
And why is Daniel Radcliffe dressed up ? Did Damon actually go visit him on set ?
Damon Albarn's opera Doctor Dee has now reached the end of its run as part of the Manchester International Festival and has received almost universal acclaim and positive reviews.
"I'm making an album for Warp," Damon reveals in The Guardian's latest article on Doctor Dee, his new opera . This is the only new thing that the article reveals, oh, and that Damon stumbled quite a lot around the stage during his opera....
Warp is a Sheffield-based record label usually renowned for techno.
"I'm taking six young English producers with me and we'll make it in a week. Then I'm going on a six- week holiday to dispel rumours I'm a workaholic." said Damon.
And my thoughts on this is exactly northernmonkey's, which goes like this:
A six weeks holiday should recharge the creative juices for getting started on a new Blur album!!!
Lastly, watch the recent short interview Damon Albarn did for BBC Two Culture Show on July 12th 2011 about his opera. Quite interesting.
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It's time for a review! Since I have no chance of seeing Doctor Dee live, I will present to you the first proper review, by The Guardian, on Doctor Dee - Damon Albarn's opera, which premiered last Friday night at the Manchester International Festival 2011.
4/5 stars
It is perhaps as much a disservice to call the 16th century alchemist and astrologer John Dee a Renaissance man as it is to refer to Damon Albarn as the former frontman of Blur. Neither scratches the surface of their achievements.
Dee was an occultist, hermetic and spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I who appointed the Queen's coronation day through the alignment of the planets.
A world famous scholar who dabbled in the undefined area between science and sorcery, he was reputed to be the model for Marlowe's Dr Faustus and Shakespeare's Prospero. And by applying Euclidean principles to navigation, he laid the visionary blueprint for the British empire.
Now latter-day polymath Albarn has created an opera based on the life of this mysterious philosopher. The pairing seems irresistible: an inscrutable but undeniably beautiful meditation on Englishness inspired by the man who coined the term "Britannia" and written by a musician who made it cool.
Dr Dee is an erudite affair, inspired by the philosopher's exile to Manchester in the 1580s, where he founded the English speaking world's first public library. It's extraordinary to think that whereas Albarn has been bringing himself up to speed with concepts of hermeticism, Euclidian geometry and Rosicrucianism, his erstwhile Britpop rival Liam Gallagher has formed Beady Eye.
Damon Albarn performs on the preview night of the opera 'Dr Dee' at Manchester Palace Theatre. Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage
Even so, Dr Dee is by no means an opera in the conventional sense. Instead director Rufus Norris lays on a sumptuous array of scenes and tableaux that draw upon the lavish stage mechanics of an Elizabethan masque. If there's a parallel to be drawn it might be with Berlioz's similarly grandiose "dramatic legend" the Damnation of Faust.
You suspect that the main reason Albarn creates a sound-world combining kora, theorbo, and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen is because he can. More contentious is his decision to cast himself as a kind of troubadour-narrator, as it slightly negates the dramatic function of Bertie Carvel's Dr Dee, whose role becomes largely mute.
Yet there is genuine dramatic frisson delivered by the ice-cold counter-tenor of Christopher Robson as Edward Kelley, the psychic or "scryer" who became Dee's ultimate undoing.
Dee commissioned Kelley to commune with the angels; the angels apparently suggested that Kelley be allowed to sleep with the Doctor's wife.
Albarn's opera can seem obscure and sometimes wilfully perverse. But it reaches to the heart of the tragedy of an overreaching intellect destroyed by a deal with a second-rate Mephistopheles. Dee was haunted by his shortcomings: "You know I cannot see, nor scry" he lamented.
Yet for Albarn, who ends the evening triumphantly aloft against a panorama of the cosmos, the scry's the limit.
Pretty good review, in fact it's EXCELLENT. Damon's reached a whole new level with his opera performing, and I can't wait for footage of it to surface, or perhaps there'll be a soundtrack album like Monkey Journey to the West.
You must watch Damon Albarn talk about Doctor Dee in the video below. He discusses his opera (mistakenly named "Dr. John Dee" in The Guardian's website ! ) ahead of it's premier on Friday Night in Machester International Festival.
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