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Live 8 has added a concert in Moscow’s Red Square, ensuring that all of the G8 industrialized nations will be represented at Saturday’s (July 2) event. At deadline, the only act confirmed for the show was the Pet Shop Boys. Last week, a concert was added in Tokyo, featuring Bjork, Good Charlotte and McFly.

Live 8 will now encompass 10 shows in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Philadelphia, Barrie, Ont., Johannesburg and Eden Project in southwest England. AOL Music will cybercast each show live.

It was also confirmed today that the Barrie show will be closed by Neil Young, making one of his first live appearances since suffering a brain aneurysm in March. He will be accompanied for select songs by the Fisk University Jubilee Choir.

Meanwhile, Sheryl Crow has dropped off the Paris bill due to “substantial logistical and personal challenges,” according to her official Web site.

Source billboard.com.

Gang Of Four has finalized the track list for its new album, “Whitey’s Gift,” which features 14 new versions of classic tracks from its back catalog. Due Sept. 20 via V2, the album will also be available with a second disc of remixes from such acts as Hot Hot Heat, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Dandy Warhols, No Doubt’s Tony Kanal, Faultline and Ladytron.

In October, a selection of those tracks will be released separately with other new remixes and covers for the U.S. market. The full rundown has yet to be finalized.

“Whitey’s Gift” focuses on Gang Of Four’s first two seminal albums: 1979’s “Entertainment!” and 1981’s “Solid Gold,” via such cuts as “Damaged Goods,” “Natural’s Not in It,” “Anthrax,” “At Home He’s a Tourist” and “Paralysed.” Also featured are a handful of tracks from 1982’s “Songs of the Free,” such as “I Love a Man in Uniform” and “We Live As We Dream, Alone.”

Gang Of Four recently concluded its first spate of touring with its four original members in more than 20 years. The lone upcoming date on its schedule is Sept. 24 at London’s Barbican, at which it will perform “Entertainment!” in its entirety.

The band’s willingness to offer its music up for remixing to a new generation of artists is striking a chord with longtime fans. “It’s a really gracious thing to do,” Slint/Papa M principal David Pajo tells Billboard.com. “Isn’t it cool to see a band like Gang Of Four and realize that so much time has passed, but there is still nobody who sounds like them and does it like that?”

Here is the track list for disc one of “Whitey’s Gift”:

“Not Great Men”
“To Hell With Poverty”
“Damaged Goods”
“I Love a Man in Uniform”
“Natural’s Not in It”
“Ether”
“Paralysed”
“What We All Want”
“Why Theory?
“Anthrax”
“At Home He’s a Tourist”
“Capital”
“He’d Send in the Army”
“We Live As We Dream, Alone”

Source billboard.com.

Toward the end of winter 1998, Phish began preparing to record “Story Of The Ghost”, their first studio album since 1996’s “Billy Breathes”. The band gathered alone for pre-production recording and practice sessions in a rented farmhouse in rural Moscow, Vermont. Using a four-wheel drive vehicle to navigate the driveway during mud season, they practiced and recorded the beginnings of many new songs like Shrine, Roggae, Shafty (Olivia’s Pool, funkified), Frankie Says, What’s The Use, Fikus, Birds of a Feather, Meat, the Meatstick and My Left Toe.

Soon after this first of two “Ghost Meat” sessions, the band decided to play some live shows in the northeast. So-called Island Tour was quickly scheduled and the result was standout shows at once extraordinarily risky, playful and emotive. With little time to warm up, the band hit the stage running with two shows at Nassau Coliseum immediately followed by two at Providence Civic Center. The four nights-in-a-row were a whirlwind of energy with each set building on the last to a funky crescendo that left the band headed back to work on Story Of The Ghost with an electric swagger.
The band has released all four nights of the famed run that hit both islands- Long Island and Rhode Island. Each 3 CD set is available in mp3 and FLAC livephish.com

Apple Computer Inc. released new software Tuesday designed to make it easier for users to listen to the increasingly popular, but largely unstructured podcast offerings.

Apple, which also announced color screens for its iPod digital music players, said the new iTunes software comes with a podcast directory that lists more than 3,000 free audio programs. It also sports a new menu and the ability to automatically send new episodes of podcasts to the user’s computer.

“Podcasting is the next generation of radio,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement.

Podcasts are downloadable audio files that are often similar to radio programs. They allow anyone to become a Web broadcaster.

On iTunes, podcasts focus on a range of topics from electronic gadgets to movies and astronomy. Shows come from mainstream organizations such as ABC News and Newsweek as well as Web journals, or blogs, like Engadget.

The software is available for both Mac and Windows computers.

Apple also said it is merging its iPod and iPod photo lines, so all models will now have color displays that can view photos and play slideshows.

The 20-gigabyte model can hold about 5,000 songs and costs $299, while the 60-gigabyte version holds 25,000 songs and sells for $399. That means customers will get a photo model for about the same price they previously paid for the standard, black-and-white screen.

The new offerings come amid warnings from some analysts that cell-phone makers could threaten Apple’s grip on the market for digital-music players if portable phones can be rigged to play music.

“We do think cell phones are a legitimate threat but it could end up like what happened to the camera-phone market,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst for American Technology Research in San Francisco. “Cameras may have helped the cell phone guys to get customers to buy new phones and upgrade but it didn’t slow down the digital-camera market.”

Too many questions remain about whether cell phone batteries can handle the extra load of playing music, or whether phone companies would want customers to burn battery power listening to music instead of talking on the phone, Wu noted.

Apple also said it was cutting $20 off the price of the $149 iPod Shuffle, which uses flash memory instead of a hard drive and can store less music.

As Apple introduced its podcasting features, search company Blinkx Inc. was expected Wednesday to begin making podcasts and their video counterparts fully searchable using its speech-recognition software to transcribe and index feeds.

Suranga Chandratillake, the company’s founder and chief technology officer, said Tuesday the company’s indexing software has identified about 20,000 channels of user-generated audio and video, generating about 500 hours of programming a day.

Search engines and podcast directories generally index audio and video by analyzing text that appears near the file or using humans to create summaries. Some also pull closed-captioning transcripts from video programming, but user-generated content generally carries no closed captioning.

Chandratillake said Blinkx attempts to fill the gap by using speech-recognition softwre to transcript feeds when closed captioning is unavailable. It already indexes feeds, mostly video, from companies with which it has deals, including CNN, the British Broadcasting Corp. and Movielink LLC.

Source yahoo.com.

The Intonation Music Festival will be the Midwest’s landmark
independent music event this summer on July 16 &17. Curated by the online music magazine Pitchfork Media, the two-day festival will showcase a multi-genre line-up featuring many of the most innovative acts in music today, with 2 stages as well as a DJ Tent created by Biz 3 Publicity pairing unlikely musicians spinning together. There will be a WLUW Record Fair and a unique variety of food, clothing, and art vendors.

Due to a tremendous response to the festival announcement from music
lovers coast to coast, the festival site has been moved to Union Park in Chicago, one of the city’s wide-open green spaces. With far
greater capacity than our previous site we will be able to
accommodate a higher expected festival attendance and create a
spacious and comfortable festival environment for all. Admission
price is $15 per day or $22 for a limited number of two day passes
which will be available on-line only.

SATURDAY, JULY 16:
1:00 pm Head of Femur
1:30 pm Pelican
2:00 pm The M’s
2:45 pm AC Newman
3:30 pm Magnolia Electric Company
4:30 pm Four Tet
5:30 pm Broken Social Scene
6:30 pm The Go! Team
7:20 pm Prefuse 73
8:00 pm Death From Above 1979
9:00 pm Tortoise

DJ Stage-presented by Biz3
3:30 pm Laurent from Pelican
5:30 pm Will Oldham/Jean Grae
7:30 pm Will Oldham/Jean Grae

SUNDAY, JULY 17:
1:00 pm Thunderbirds Are Now!
1:30 pm Dungen
2:00 pm Xiu Xiu
2:45 pm Out Hud
3:30 pm The Hold Steady
4:30 pm Andrew Bird
5:30 pm Deerhoof
6:30 pm The Wrens
7:30 pm Les Savy Fav
8:30 pm The Decemberists

DJ Stage-presented by Biz3
3:30 pm Reine from Dungen
5:30 pm El-P
7:30 pm Diplo

On August 2nd, 2005, the Atlanta-based Terminus Records will release Get Myself Together, the latest solo effort from bluegrass legend Danny Barnes. Get Myself Together, a collection of 13 originals and select covers, is the follow up to Danny’s highly acclaimed 2003 release, Dirt On The Angel. The album is a showcase for the multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter Barnes, who plays banjo, tuba, guitars, harmonicas, and more.

On this record, Grammy winning bassist/producer/engineer Garey Shelton, who also produced the record at his Seattle-based studio, Gary Shelton Productions, accompanies Barnes. Shelton also plays bass with The Believers and Bo Didley. Joining Barnes and Shelton is 19-year-old violin prodigy Brittany Hass (Darol Angers, Republic of Strings, Bruce Molsky, The Waybacks), who often performs with Barnes in the Yonder Mountain String Band.

Prior to the release of the record, Barnes will contribute banjo on Bill Frisell’s Canadian tour, which kicks off July 7th in Winnipeg at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and culminates with two shows in Chicago on August 8th at the Old Town School of Folk Music. In addition to performing with Frisell, Danny will open both shows to celebrate the release of Get Myself Together. Both Bill and Danny’s shows will be taped and played on a later date on XM Radio as part of Robbie Fulks’ Secret Country Radio Hour.

Barnes will celebrate the release of Get Myself Together with two CD release shows in the Pacific Northwest, including Friday, September 16th at Imbibe in Portland and Saturday, September 17 at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle.

This fall, Barnes will hit the road as a sideman for Tim O’Brien, opening on select dates.

In other news, earlier this year Barnes contributed banjo on Robert Earl Keens new CD What I Really Mean and recently accompanied him on several West Coast tour dates. He also produced Robyn Ludwick’s new CD For So Long, which will be released on July 12, 2005

More information and full tour schedules may be found at dannybarnes.com

For the first time in their 10-year history, Ozomatli is bringing the intensity, energy, and enthusiasm of their live show to a specially-priced CD and DVD companion package. The 10-track Live at the Fillmore CD, recorded at the historic San Francisco venue in late 2004, features incendiary live performances of such hits as

Starbucks has nabbed the exclusive first rights to sell “Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962,” an album of newly restored live recordings culled from Dylan’s performances at the New York cafe.

The 10-song CD hits more than 4,400 Starbucks’ locations in North America on Aug. 30, and will also be available through its Web site. The exclusivity window lasts 18 months.

Bootleg versions of the shows have circulated among fans for years, but the Aug. 30 release marks the first time a sanctioned release has occurred. Among the tracks are the earliest surviving live recording of “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.”

Source: Billboard

Chet Helms, the revered father of the 1967 Summer of Love and a music promoter who launched the career of singer Janis Joplin, has died of complications from a stroke. He was 62.

Helms, who once stood at the center of the 1960s Bay Area music scene, died Saturday surrounded by friends and family at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center.

“It was a beautiful death,” said his wife Judy Davis. “It was a goodbye party. We all sang to him and told stories. He died as he lived

Each winter, Hawaii’s notorious North Shore of Oahu draws the best surfers in the world to compete in six weeks of contests at the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, pro surfing’s longest running competition. The Vans Triple Crown is staged at the most legendary of Hawaii’s big waves, the coral reefs of Haliewa, the four-story high waves at Sunset Beach and the dangerous beach break at the Bonzai Pipeline. Now, the exciting highlights of this three-part contest, is edited down to sixty riveting minutes on DVD in the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing 04, released on July 26. The release also includes a bonus full-length CD featuring music from Epitaph’s biggest bands, from Pennywise to the Dropkick Murphys.

Surf fans will get the chance to see all the highlights from Winter ’04 from Sunny Garcia’s dramatic win at Haleiwa to kick off his quest for a 5th overall Crown to World Champion Andy Iron’s dominating performance at the O’Neill World Cup of Surfing to trial entry Jamie O’Brien winning his first ever WCT event in his own front yard at the Rip Curl Pro Pipeline Masters. The DVD also features 30 minutes of never-before-seen bonus features that go behind the scenes of the event and get into the personalities of legendary North Shore surfers, from Kelly Slater to Gerry Lopez.