Henryk Gorecki - Miserere

The last few weeks have shown us life in all its misery. Haiti is but one example. It's enough to cause us to drop to our knees and implore the heavens...

Or just play this 32 minutes of humans' deeply moving plea of just five words.

Gramophone:

Whether or not the obvious clicking we hear throughout the first six minutes of Miserere is the sound of a censer bathing the basses in incense as they embark on their mammoth (32-minute) journey through the five words of text on which the entire work is based, it seems entirely appropriate that it should seem so; for this is an intensely spiritual, imploringly prayerful work in which Gorecki responds with heartfelt passion to the political events of 1981 (a sit-in by members of Rural Solidarity, the violent breakup of which and General Jaruzelsk's subsequent declaration of "a state of war" ultimately led to the democratization of Poland). This is as intellectually demanding and emotionally compelling as anything by Goreckl yet released on disc. Lovers of the Third Symphony will fall under its spell straight away, but it should gain respect from those less easily swayed by the opulent orchestral textures of that work, for here Gorecki is using what is probably his favourite medium, the unaccompanied choir. The voices enter in a series of layered thirds until, at 2600", all ten parts commence an electrifying ascent through the word "Domine" to the work's climax which, with the first statement of "Miserere", suddenly bathes us in a quiet chord of A minor—a moment as devastatingly effective as an orchestra full of banging drums and crashing cymbals.

John Nelson directs a hypnotic performance which wants for nothing in its impact, his choral forces both emotionally committed and technically excellent.

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The Rebirth Brass Band - Hot Venom

Oh snap zombies! I LOOOVE this. I'm back from a mental hiatus and ready to shiver some timbers. Start with this fuchers and get crazee this weekend.

Hot Venom! Is there any other kind?

Rebirth, now with BOUNCE.

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Allmusic.com: The release of Hot VenomHot Venom may turn off some listeners; however, if you can get past that (it's worth it!), it doesn't take away from the overall party groove the Rebirth band delivers. Tracks finds the Rebirth Brass Band adding a definite rap element to the traditional brass band music indigenous to New Orleans. Rebirth is successful in combining the community-based traditional brass bands (which have always been a street art, featuring music that is used for parades, burials, celebrating) and injects the current urban sensibilities of rap and hip-hop, creating a potent brand of hot venom. While brass band purists may find this new direction appalling, it is the next logical step for the younger musicians to keep the form from dying, or, worse, becoming a museum piece. A word of caution: this may be the first brass band album to contain a parental advisory sticker.



HEAR ONE

HEAR TWO

3Ds Fish Tales / Swarthy Songs for Swabs (1990)

Read about 3Ds on Wikipedia!

Hard Work? So, melodies from these records have been haunting me so much lately that I was eventually compelled (nay DRIVEN), down to a dark, damp, dour corner of our basement, to a box in a drawer, in order to retrieve the ancient, cinder-block-sized, externally-powered, USB 1.0 80GBHD (ha! ha! ha-ha-hah!) that I had stashed them away onto eight or so years ago, and then laboriously offload and reformat and upload and try to remember my password so that I could get the fuck back on this here blog and SHARES... ( we do the lordz work).


Well, Worth It! These record have aged (matured) very well over the last two decades. I was ecstatic to find those melodies intact and mesmerizing all over again. Oh, where have all the sharp wiggly guitars gone? (And Oh, "Dreams of Herge," where have you been all these years? Oh right. in the basement). FWIW, these records have way more staying power than your average state-of-the-art digital media storage device.

They had some beautiful record covers.

did they not?

P.S. Thought:

do Pavement owe 3Ds anything?

[hear "Hairs" or "Sing-Song" fer chrissakes!]

There seems to be a rather direct connect to my ears now,

and these Kiwi Kids certainly had it on the Stockton Set by a few years.

(oh whatevs, i suppose it was all in the ferment. just bubbling away...)

someone's doubtless done a dissertation or two by now.

HEAR "Fish Tales" and "Swarthy Songs for Swabs"

Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring (Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra)

Spring is all we have rite now.

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Allmusic.com: Igor Stravinsky was one of music's truly epochal innovators; no other composer of the twentieth century exerted such a pervasive influence or dominated his art in the way that Stravinsky did during his five-decade musical career. Aside from purely technical considerations such as rhythm and harmony, the most important hallmark of Stravinsky's style is, indeed, its changing face. Emerging from the spirit of late Russian nationalism and ending his career with a thorny, individual language steeped in twelve-tone principles, Stravinsky assumed a number of aesthetic guises throughout the course of his development while always retaining a distinctive, essential identity.

Although he was the son of one of the Mariinsky Theater's principal basses and a talented amateur pianist, Stravinsky had no more musical training than that of any other Russian upper-class child. He entered law school, but also began private composition and orchestration studies with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. By 1909, the orchestral works Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks had impressed Sergei Diaghilev enough for him to ask Stravinsky to orchestrate, and subsequently compose, ballets for his company. Stravinsky's triad of early ballets -- The Firebird (1909-1910), Petrushka (1910-1911), and most importantly, The Rite of Spring (1911-1913) -- did more to establish his reputation than any of his other works; indeed, the riot which followed the premiere of The Rite is one of the most notorious events in music history.


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Luc Ferrari - Interrupteur + Tautologos 3

Very excited to get my hands on a copy of this. You should be too, fool!

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Allmusic.com: Composer Luc Ferrari's two works "Interrupteur (For 10 Instruments)" and "Tautologos 3 (For 11 Instruments)" were first recorded by EMI in 1970 and have never before been issued in the United States. The significance of these two works from Ferrari's wildly diverse catalogue is that they are both departures from his animated and active music of the '50s and '60s. "Interrupteur" is an orchestral stasis point that begins to move. In the stillness created by the strings, time becomes one long block that creates the opportunity for various timbres and textures to rub against it, creating muted colors and shades. The events that occur inside the written score are chance actions (flurries of woodwinds or brass, a shriek from an errant viola, etc.) and cannot help but to move against that which is already unmoving and therefore deconstruct it gradually and methodically but without the purpose of transforming stasis into anything else but another form. "Tautologos 3" is a score that is cyclic in nature and uses a limited scale of notational devices. Utilizing standard orchestral instrumentation and the electric guitar, and magnetic tape, it is a work that is as hypnotic as it is maddening. The musical "cycles" or themes are short in measure and are played over and again in a patter than moves forward and backward but remains in some way familiar to the listener. During the editing and mixing process, Ferrari manipulated and spliced tape to create other cycles to overlay over the original compositions to that some span of time (as in minutes) would become familiar against a backdrop of something less movement oriented but nonetheless changing as it interacts with the previous cycles (as in weeks). The result is a piecemeal score that drifts and drones its way into the listener's consciousness and changes right at the point where familiarity is established. Both works took Ferrari's fans by surprise, but they followed him anyway, because, true to form, his restlessness took him to further points of abstraction before the end of 1971.


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Able Tasmans - Hey Spinner!

A dreamy definitive example of that New Zealand sound commodity. Lighter and more psyche than what you may expect, making it a nice easy endeavor. Would fit in well with that Paisley Underground feel. Very melodic and very layered with just enough reverb to take the edge off. Feel a little Love here too.

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Allmusic: On this mini-album this obscure New Zealand group delivers some of their best upbeat Byrds-esque guitar pop on record. Of the five albums they produced in the late '80s/early '90s, the signature of their sound is the keyboard-driven melody, subtle acoustic arrangements, and propulsive rhythm section. The sound is quite close to a more folk-sounding Stereolab, with vocal harmonies from the Brian Wilson songbook.


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Arnold Dreyblatt - Animal Magnetism

Resolutions are for the weak. If you must, if you admit your weakness, at least resolve to listen to a wide variety of good music, such as...

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Allmusic: Arnold Dreyblatt's 1995 Tzadik release, Animal Magnetism, includes many juxtaposed sections of repeating, skip-like structures that come off in a simple, lovely way. It is entirely likable with a lilting, pots-and-pans schizophrenia that insists we hear what normally doesn't work, what normally isn't called art. Embedded with quirk-pop elements, the pieces resemble deconstructed dance tunes reflected in a room full of mirrors. Slightly carnival moments, tweaked ska counter rhythms, percussive foregrounds overlying slide effects backgrounds, barely-contained marching band funk -- all these are part of Dreyblatt's musical world.


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