Heimatklänge: The Yodelers are Alive in Them Hills [6 Dec. 2007, Amsterdam Weekly: The Alps: heavenly, imposing, sometimes downright oppressive. How can the Swiss stand living among all that awesome beauty? They have a broad range of responses, including joy, spiritual reverence, gratitude and a humility that periodically slips into the gloomier aspects of mountain living: loneliness, drink, depression, occasionally suicide. Yodeling covers all these responses in one sonic, eccentric leap from low to high register... Vocalist Christian Zehnder points out that yodeling is a kind of resistance. You have to stand up to the mountains... Read article.

• Erika Stucky: the new wave of world yodelers. Very talented, moving and funny. Check out her Suicidal Yodels on Traumton. [Early yodel sample].

• Randy Erwin: hip Tex-Czech yodeler with incredible epiglottal range, has worked with Brave Combo and was the yodeling voice of Alameda Slim in Home on the Range, also appears in David Byrne's True Stories. [Yodel sample].

• Shelley Hirsch flourished in the 1980s, becoming a versatile performer with a toolbox of tongues & voices that created a mesmerizing babble of impersonation, possession, altered states of consciousness, sonically depicting our contemporary zeitgeist along the way with a combination of storytelling, abstract vocals and a stage patter on the clever side of Borscht Belt comedy. Hear her yodel from the Rough Guide collection. See her perform an early version of her Bernard Hermann homage.

• Mike Johnson I produced a multi-media profile of him that was "performed" in Rotterdam and Tilburg during party events for the launch of the alternative fringe magazine Big Mag produced by de Player. Johnson is not a man to accept what others offer him as his just due. He is a feisty black ex-trucker and country singer and yodeler who also is a bit of writer. He is also featured on the compilation Rough Guide to Yodel. ["Yeah, I'm a Cowboy"] .More info at Roughshod Records.
• Turner Hall in Monroe, Wisconsin. Dedicated to Swiss-American culture.
• 4 yodel: a documentary by Arno Kranenborg [with bart plantenga] about yodeling as a global phenomenon. Why do people yodel. Filming has started. See some YouTube examples of yodels. Produced by Dutch Mountain Movies Van Hallstraat 52, 1051 HH Amsterdam

• Janet McBride: the grand dame of cowgal yodelers. Has taught or inspired many of the younger generation of yodelers.[Early yodel sample].

• Wylie Gustafson: He of Wylie and the Wild West is one of North America's most popular and most suave yodel acts. His yodel may be the 2nd most famous in the world behind Tarzan's as he continues to be the trademark voice for Yahoo! He now has a how-to book+CD called "How to Yodel: Lessons to Tickle Your Tonsils" (Gibbs Smith, $9.95). Check out this story in

the Spokesman Review, which also features some quotes by the author formerly known as bart plantenga: "Yodeling originated some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, when animals were first domesticated, says DJ and writer Bart Plantenga, author of Yodel-Ay-Ee-Ooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World (Routledge, 2004). It's believed the first yodels were heard in central Africa, Plantenga says. 'The yodel as commonly understood has to do with calls over long distances, and this came in handy for farmers and herders to communicate with one another and with their herds,' he says in an e-mail interview. 'The yodel is unique in that its fast and dramatic pitch change is what helps give it its range, distance, detectability. So a kind of long-distance calling before phones and cell phones.'"



• WILL THERE BE YODELING IN HEAVEN?: original article on yodeling written for Cups after an outer space musicological event, a 2+ hour WTM show devoted to the art of yodeling as my farewell show to WFMU, just before moving to Amsterdam.

direct bart contact
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