A Morning Walk With Sauti Sol: The Afro-fusion quartet from Nairobi greets the morning birds and joggers on the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge in Austin, Texas, with a version of its recent single “Love or Leave.” WATCH THE VIDEO!

(Taken with Instagram by Mito Habe-Evans/NPR)

An awesome Field Recording of Filastine at the Cathedral of Junk in Austin, Texas. Sweet work, Mito!

harshbarge:

Dry The River field recording, they played such a pretty song #NPRsxsw #sxsw (Taken with Instagram at Joe’s Crab Shack)

Mito is making cool, spontaneous videos with musicians at SXSW in Austin. Look at some previous Field Recordings here.

As a gaggle of videographers, musicians, industry types and hangers-on stepped gingerly through tall brush to enter a dilapidated section of Fort Adams in Newport, R.I., you couldn’t blame us for feeling like unwitting participants in a horror movie. Standing amid hundred-year-old rubble as the 2011 Newport Folk Festival clattered merrily in the distance, we were either going to capture two breathtaking minutes of music or get eviscerated by maniacs as part of The Newport Witch Project. Thankfully, we made it out with the footage you see above.

Like a ray gun that shoots weaponized gorgeousness, the Vermont trio Mountain Man fit an awful lot of moony harmonies into this all-too-brief performance of “Sewee Sewee.” As a self-explanatorily named group called The Seeger Clogging Allstars clomped away behind them, Mountain Man’s three members — Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Randall Meath — sang and stared sweetly into each other’s faces. If the scene above once seemed destined to devolve into a grisly horror movie, at least we had a choir of angels on hand to escort us into the afterlife.

See more Field Recordings: http://www.npr.org/series/144918893/field-recordings

nprmusic:

Mantra: Post-Minimalist Percussion In Aisle 12

There’s something primeval about guys banging on wood. But the New York percussion group Mantra takes such primitive pounding to a surprisingly refined level. For composer Michael Gordon’s mesmerizing new work — Timber, written for six two-by-fours — Mantra set up a public performance of the piece in the lumber department of a big-box hardware store in Alexandria, Va.

David Wax Museum: Folk Among The Ruins: The band climbed through broken window frames to perform amid dilapidated ruins in Newport, R.I.

Mito was there and made this awesome video with help from our buddies at NPR Music. It’s all part of a new video series called “Field Recordings.”

- Becky