Enter The Slasher House by Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks
except the only dl I can find is shit quality and is missing track 8. Did anyone manage to get their hands on the complete album? (and if so, think that person could hook me up?)
Can that person hook me up too? I heard one track off this, and it's pretty great.
meccaleccaVoice of ReasonProfile The Land of Enchantment
I'm really excited about this. Today marks the release of Carl Creighton's album Brookings. Carl wrote and recorded this album following a pair of tragic events in his life, resulting in a deeply emotional experience (that I now see as a combination of Big Star's Third and Daniel Johnston's early home tapes). After recording, he basically shelved the record with his band Howth recording new versions of some of the songs. A few years later, I talked to him about the record and he had actually lost the files, but fortunately I still had them. I convinced Carl that he needed to share Brookings with the world.
I'm really excited about this. Today marks the release of Carl Creighton's album Brookings. Carl wrote and recorded this album following a pair of tragic events in his life, resulting in a deeply emotional experience (that I now see as a combination of Big Star's Third and Daniel Johnston's early home tapes). After recording, he basically shelved the record with his band Howth recording new versions of some of the songs. A few years later, I talked to him about the record and he had actually lost the files, but fortunately I still had them. I convinced Carl that he needed to share Brookings with the world.
It's seriously really good guys. I've been following 2014 really closely and this still managed to land among my favorites. (Also the abovementioned Howth's s/t album is well worth a listen.)
Enter The Slasher House by Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks
except the only dl I can find is shit quality and is missing track 8. Did anyone manage to get their hands on the complete album? (and if so, think that person could hook me up?)
19loveless91 wrote:
Can that person hook me up too? I heard one track off this, and it's pretty great.
Stay tuned. I may have something for you later today... _________________ Progressive Rock
Haven't heard it yet, but i know a lot of longtime fans saying it's horrible
I've only heard Brothers and El Camino, but I can understand longtime fans being pissed off about it. It seems like they've just made this track to cash in on the fact that they're popular now. It just feels like something that would be played on a pop station, just woeful. _________________
Hey guys. So it's no secret that BEA doesn't exactly have a strong focus on classical music; which isn't to say there aren't many users who listen to and even chart classical music ranging from pre-baroque to contemporary compositions, but at the very least, I think it's safe to say that classical music in general gets overlooked when speaking in terms of album releases by year. There have been some great contemporary classical works released this year, and if nobody minds, I'd just like to give a little exposure some criminally overlooked contemporary classical music releases from this still young year which I have been enjoying as of late. I'll start with 5 of my favorites, and if anyone has some recs that I may have overlooked or have yet to listen to, please, rec away. Anyway, onward:
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No 2 by Christina Vantzou
This seems as good a place to start as any. Actually this is probably the classical release that would be most widely received by the general BEA community, seeing as Christina Vantzou is 1/2 of Dead Texan, the other half being Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid, who I'm fairly certain are pretty well loved within BEA. There are definitely moments within Vantzou's No. 2 reminiscent of the hypnotic strings found on Tired Sounds, and while this is a comfortable, subtle, almost dreamy collection of works, the Stars of the Lid comparisons only go so far. Vantzou's compositions are subtle yet dynamic; her instrumental pallet is large (mainly a large string section, a smaller woodwinds section, and minor use of vocals) but her implementation of this large pallet is anything but the self-indulgent mess that other composers could make it into. While there are no remarkable standouts or anything particularly groundbreaking within No. 2, (yes this is a fairly inoffensive album), there is a understated beauty to each of Vantzou's short, melodic, almost pop friendly vignettes, each carrying its own unique emotional weight. For those who have difficulty with the dissonance and atonality fuckery whose omnipresence dominates much of the modern classical world, Vantzou's friendly neoclassical arrangements shouldn't (at worst) be anything less than inoffensively pleasant
And now for something completely different...
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Leaf Metal by Adam Roberts
Remember that dissonance and atonality fuckery I mentioned earlier? Well here it is, full force. I'm generally pretty good about adding the actual performers as the artists when adding classical music instead of just lazily designating the composer as the artist, but not this time. To somewhat rectify that, Leaf Metal contains five piece (all composed by American composer Adam Roberts) performed (in order of appearance) by the Arditti Quartet (who are something of a big deal in the Modern Classical world, having given world premiers of pieces from some of contemporary classical music's most eminent composers), French conductor Lorraine Vaillancour conducting the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (of which she is founder and artistic director), multi-instrumentalist Gabriela Diaz (who happens to be violinist on this particular recording), the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble, and Cellist Benjamin Schwartz. The album opens with the only thing predictable about this particular school of composition, which is, essentially, unpredictability. Tangled symmetries burns through a cycle of "didn't see that coming" bursts of dissonance (landing on a cadence right when you think they're about to peak at some kind of free improv jam), somewhat reminiscent of Penderecki circa Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima only less direct, more aggressive, and less downright terrifying. Tangled Symmetries is probably the most abrasive piece on the album, so if you've made it this far, congratulations, chances are you'll like what comes ahead. My particular favorite being Strange Loops, which is more or less what it sounds like; the dissonance and atonality are still there, but they act as part of a cycle that moves into an actual straightforward melody (ironically the only thing I didn't see coming) underneath of which, Roberts, taking cues from the likes of Xenakis and Varรจse, develops a series of understated electronic tones and tape loops (everything from what sounds like compressed air being intermittently released from a chamber to what sounds more like a syncopated bike chain) that guide the piece for most of its 11 minute duration as it teeters back and forth between harmony and chaos. The rest of the album is fantastic as well, but I'm moving onto something, well, completely different
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Pino by Otto A Totland
Maybe it's just me, but Q1 of 2014 is starting to feel like the year of minimalism. I might do a more in depth post on this later, but there have been a remarkable number of electronic and/or classically oriented minimalist works that excel wonderfully at doing so much with very little; among these "less is more" albums is German composer and pianist Otto A Totland's Pinรด. It's a simple album; slow paced, lovely melodic solo short-form piano pieces with plenty of breathing room. The most remarkable aspect of Pinรด might ironically be the way in which it was recorded; you can hear the light clicks of the piano, you can hear Totland taking slow, careful breathes, like he doesn't want to disturb the fragile aura he's crafting. I can't think of a good comparison, but for a bad comparison, think a slightly less-ambient-more-New-Age Music for Airports recorded in Elliott Smith's house after he was done with Roman Candle. (Wow that was a really bad comparison...) though Pinรด certainly exudes the same kind of fragile intimacy characteristic of Roman Candle, Pink Moon, etc. The pieces themselves already maintain this kind of fragility, and the lo-fi recording solidifies that beautiful feeling of intimacy...
and now for... ah fuck it you know
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Flying Soul by Aki Takase La Planete
Wooo more dissonance/atonality/other Modernist fuckery! Of course the most standout element of Japanese pianist and composer Aki Takase La Planete's Flying Soul is probably it's heavy jazz influence, both in terms of instrumentation and composition. (Arguably this is even more of a jazz fusion album that it is a classical album.) Instrumentally, Takase's piano is accompanied, to varying extents, by the reeds, cello, violin, and brass of the virtuosic French jazz trio consisting of Louis Sclavis, Dominique Pifarely, and Vincent Courtois, whose instrumentation ranges from acting as a parallel to Takase's modern classical sensibilities to contrasting (and thereby highlighting) those sensibilities with what is undeniably jazz. Compositionally, the album becomes a prime example of Third Stream composition when Takase & company partake in free improvisation (more characteristic of jazz) but in a classical context. The boundaries between Jazz, Third Stream, and Classical get wonderfully blurred as the album progresses, and the juxtaposition of these varying elements never feels unnatural or jarring (or at least no more jarring than the composer has intended). Perfect classical/jazz smoothie. MOVING ON:
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The Alchemist by John Zorn
And here it is, my current #1 of 2014 (which will be very, very hard to displace.) John Zorn is the epitome of "impossible to categorize into one genre blah etc. other shit generally attributed to David Bowie and Beck". Be it free-jazz on his tenor sax, orchestral composition, or dabbling in grindcore, Zorn seems to excel at whatever sounds for which he aims, and he makes it look really fucking easy. The Alchemist may very well be favorite of Zorn's classical works so far (possibly my second favorite Zorn album next to Naked City). The album consists of two long-form pieces, each of a very different nature. First there is the title track, performed by the aptly named "Alchemy Quartet" (consisting of Zorn contemporaries Pauline Kim, Jesse Mills, David Fulmer and Jay Campbell) which is notable just as much for the way in which it is executed as it is for the way in which it is composed. Kim/Mills/Fuller/Campbell work like some kind of hive mind, executing Zorn's strangely beautiful chaos as if working in perfect unison in free improvisation; that's the part that is remarkable about the composition of "The Alchemist": at times you can feel Zorn's firm grip over the varying tones occupying it's almost exactly 20 minute duration, but more often, Zorn has written a piece that I can only think to (awfully) describe as "pre-meditated improvisation"; When the Alchemy Quartet aren't working in unison to make slow builds to some kind of climax, they are executing that climax in a way such that the listener strongly receives the impression that this is an improvisational piece, and that somehow these four musicians know exactly what each other is going to improvise next, and in turn complement that perfectly. The pieces is extremely dynamic with frequent changes in pace and musical density, and as varied and as crazy (the kind of crazy only Zorn can execute) the piece gets, it never falls out of the performer's reach, making this something of an exercise in the magic of varying degrees of controlled chaos. Then we move into the second half, the purely A capella "Earthspirit" performed by the immensely talented vocal trio of Jane Sheldon, Melissa Hughes & Kristen Sollek. I have scarcely heard an A capella piece that has the individual voices playing off of and supporting each other quite as well as is done here, and certainly never in the same way. There are many an intriguing moment I could point out, but I think the most impressive (both on behalf of the composer and the performers) as well as the most obvious, is the use of the voice as a percussive force. (this becomes more evident towards the end) More specifically, three of these vocalists build up a repetition of alternating between their respective pitches, bouncing staccatoed vocal pops off of eachother (think Queen of Night Aria from The Magic Flute -you know the part) except with three participants, then one leaves her cycle in this staccato exchange to use the other two as a rhythmic platform over which she weaves chillingly ominous verse, before the three join back into a rising joint sustained dissonance (which is something of a motif throughout the piece) and ending on one powerfully finalizing joint staccato (pitched just slightly upward from where they were previously) which, very powerfully, marks the ending. You can still hear their voices ring... the "popPOPpopPOPpopPOP" forming a platform below the third vocalist's crooning... it stays with you for awhile and I am doing a terrible job describing it. But I suppose that's for the better because now you can go and listen for yourself to gauge just how bad I was at describing that (and that goes for pretty much this entire post. Go listen for yourself because my descriptions are sub-par at best, and this music deserves your attention ๐ )
Anyway, hope someone gets something out of this. These pieces need more love ๐ฅฐ
Here's some other misc 2014 classical recs that come to mind:
4 Scenes by Nuage (Very (very) short impressionistic vignettes for solo piano with occasional string accompaniment)
Fragmentations, Prayers And Interjections by John Zorn (another John Zorn suite (the man's released 4 albums already this year. And they're all really good wtf), but this time less chamber music-more broad orchestral music, complete with all that shit I said about Zorn earlier, except in an orchestral context)
Kazesarai by 3+ (more piano minimalism, but longer pieces and with accompanying static, drones, strings, various understated electronic effects, and wonderful implementation of field recordings -generally of flowing water, rustling branches, nature etc.)
In Two Minds by John Taylor (honestly this is probably more jazz than classical, but either way Taylor's solo piano works maintain a healthy neoclassical influence)
Bryce Dessner St Carolyn By The Sea / J...ilharmonic
(I imagine a lot of you know Jonny Greenwood does a lot of composing on the side, one of his more notable works being the score for There Will Be Blood, which is performed here alongside original compositions from The National's Bryce Dessner. Probably the most BEAcore classical recording I'm gonna find all year... though as far as indie or rock musicians going classical, this works out far (FAR) better than most)
Anyway, yeah, hope you guys can have fun with any of these really. Happy to rec more if you find yourself particularity enjoying something ๐ฅณ
Last edited by undefined on 03/27/2014 05:00; edited 1 time in total
RockyRaccoonIs it solipsistic in here or is it just me?ModeratorProfile Maryland
Allow me to second how fantastic The Alchemist really is. It's my #10 for the year as of right now. The second track is some of the most impressive vocal arrangements and performances that I've ever heard. It's like it's some kind of insane aria (at times, it reminds me of The Magic Flute) but for multiple voices. It's incredible stuff. _________________ Progressive Rock
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meccalecca
Norman Bates
RockyRaccoon
