Until I downloaded this album from eMusic, the only Anton Webern piece I’d heard was the Six Bagatelles, which Kronos Quartet recorded on its second recital album Winter Was Hard.
I’ve always liked the Six Bagatelles for its brevity and sparseness. Even in the span of half a minute, which each bagatelle averages, Webern manages to coax extremes out of the music — long, quiet chromatic melodies burst into a clash of tremolo. Exploring the works of Webern became one of those personal checklist items that get bumped in favor of more immediate gratification. (Thank deity for eMusic.)
Webern’s entire catalog of work can fit on six CDs, as composer/conductor Pierre Boulez demonstrated in 2000. Webern’s life was cut short when he was accidentally shot by an American soldier in 1945 — the glow from his cigar spooked the soldier. The Complete Works for String Quartet and String Trio contains 7 works spread over 20 tracks and clocks in at 64 minutes.
TOKIE is no stranger to the marriage of indie rock and jazz improvisation. She played bass with LOSALIOS, the instrumental outfit led by former Blankey Jet City drummer Nakamura Tetsuya. It’s easy to assume there would be overlap between TOKIE’s own band, unkie, and her other gig with LOSALIOS.
Perhaps.
Both bands share the ability to play hard, fast, loud and free, but where LOSALIOS can get expansive — saxophone is a regular component — unkie focuses strictly on its core. The latter’s first album, the Price of Fame, showcases the white hot electricity this trio can produce.
Guitarist Aoki Yutaka keeps surprising with his versatility. As an original member of downy, he crafted thick, hypnotic textures with a tortured sound. downy broke up, and he was drafted into VOLA & THE ORIENTAL MACHINE, where he turned into New Wave guitarist with a lot more distortion and overdrive. With unkie, he turns into a surf twanger channeling the ghosts of Jimi Hendrix and his jazz band bosses.
I’m in the middle of reading The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. Subtitled "Listening to the Twentieth Century", the book threads together the disparate creative movements of classical music in the last century and puts them in a political and socio-economic context. That description sounds academic, but Ross manages to make the story feel incredibly human.
It’s all too easy to abstract Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Steve Reich and Arnold Schoenberg as vessels from which great works pour forth. The last time I really thought about the lives of these composers was when I was trying to remember enough for the midterm and final exams in my music history class some 15 years ago.
The Rest is Noise has been mentioned a lot on a number of arts-themed websites I monitor. Heck, I probably wouldn’t have known about the book otherwise. (Ross also maintains a weblog of the same name.) And as I’m reading it, I think, "Wow, I really ought to let Musicwhore.org readers in on this."
Because I was caught in the momentum of getting all the shows of this season done, I recorded this podcast at 11 p.m. on a Saturday. I didn’t realize how tired I sound till after I was well into editing the show. I could have gone back and rerecorded it, but I didn’t feel like starting from scratch. Also, I let the audio excerpts play a bit longer to make up for the lack of narration.
I’ve been meaning to write about Jews with Horns for a while now, but when it comes to the likes of the Klezmatics, Jayne Cortez or anything outside the purview rock music, it’s better to hear it than to read about it.
I used to tell people I didn’t need an iPod because I didn’t live a life that requires portability. I don’t travel a lot, I don’t mind the CD player in my car and until recently, I didn’t work out. I eventually bought an iPod Nano because I went to visit family in Hawaiʻi, and I needed that portability for 12 hours of travel, one-way.
Since late August, I’ve started working out daily on the treadmill, so I’ve been using my iPod significantly more. I actually look forward to those workouts because I get to do nothing but (walk and) listen to music for half an hour or more. Of course, I’m limited to only heart-pumping kind of music — no Explosions in the Sky or Jean Sibelius, unfortunately — but it has allowed me to unearth stuff I haven’t listened to in a while.
Now I have a new angle by which to evaluate my listening choices — by appropriateness to a workout regimen.
Nov. 21 is a big day for Tokyo Jihen, which releases a new DVD single and a vinyl mini-album, so says Bounce.com. The DVD single, titled "Senkou Shoujo", features a new song with music written by bassist Kameda Seiji and lyrics by Shiina Ringo. The band premiered the song at the start of its latest tour.
The song is part of a DVD release which includes video clips for the singles "OSCA", "Killer Tune", the title track and coupling track "Tokuten Eizou". The song also appears on Goraku (Variety) Zoukangou, a vinyl release containing all tracks from the singles "OSCA" and "Killer Tune".
My family got sick to death of my playing U2’s The Joshua Tree over and over on the stereo, and it’s hard to believe that was 20 years ago. Billboard reports the album is getting a deluxe reissue treatment, with a remastered version appearing in four different formats: single CD, a 2-CD set, a 2-CD set with a DVD and a double vinyl album.
I love the b-sides from that album, which were released two at a time per single. The a-side was 45 rpm, the b-side 33 1/3, and over the course of three singles, the extra tracks totaled to six. (Four singles were released from the album, but "In God’s Country" contained album tracks on the b-side.)
For the sake of portability, I dubbed the album onto a 90-minute cassette tape — so state of the art! — and used the b-sides to fill out the rest of the space. The extra tracks make for a nice extended complement to the album itself, and in some ways, they’re more interesting.
The Joshua Tree was a dark album, but the b-sides were even darker. "Walk on the Water" and "Deep in the Heart" feel as black as the album cover art of the period. "Luminous Times" starts off deceptively slow and seethes to a dramatic end. "Spanish Eyes" and "Silver and Gold" provided the hooks, and they could have fit well on the album. But If they were, the tone would have gotten none more black.
And no, I was not a fan of the re-recorded version of "The Sweetest Thing" on The Best of U2, 1980-1990. It was sapped of all the bittersweet heart that went into the original.
Still, it’ll be nice to have these songs in one package, especially if they’re remastered.
The next few podcasts aren’t very good, at least in my opinion. I rushed through the writing and recording of them, producing all of them in one weekend. It kind of shows. This particular show is actually the shortest of the season, and I don’t really go into as much detail as the other shows.
In Tua Nua was popular in Europe, and the band was on the periphery of a big break. U2 signed In Tua Nua to its Mother label in the late ’80s. The band gave Sinéad O’Connor a shot by letting her write lyrics to their songs. Violinist Steve Wickham left the band to join the Waterboys. But the band broke up before any of those connections could turn into real opportunities.
It was pure chance I heard this band.
Some notes:
In Tua Nua’s albums have been out of print for a long time, but last year, both The Long Acre and its predecessor, Vaudeville, were reissued on iTunes. Recently, the band’s unreleased 1989 album, When Night Came Down on Sunset, was also released on iTunes.
I include “Seven into the Sea” on this podcast, even though that track is actually on Vaudeville. On the US release of The Long Acre, “Seven Into the Sea” replaced one of the tracks from the European release.
Ivri Lider is the biggest pop star in Israel, and when he came out of the closet in 2002, his popularity grew. His albums haven’t been released on CD in the US, but they are available as digital downloads on iTunes, eMusic and Amazon. Out magazine profiled Lider a while back, and I was intrigued by the idea of gay man being the top pop singer in a country smack dab in the middle of all that religious and political unrest.
But pop music overseas doesn’t have an immediate parallel with American pop music. Lider is not Israel’s answer to Kanye West. He’s not a funk soul brother trapped in a Jewish body. (That’s Ari Gold’s job, and he does that well enough for everyone.) Lider’s smooth but slightly burnished croon is usually set atop what radio executives might call "adult alternative rock". It’s rooted as much in the club music of Europe as it is in the alt-rock lite of America.
And yeah — he’s teh hawt.
So I spent a good portion of my eMusic quota over the span of four months to acquire his four albums. I’ve listened to them, and while he doesn’t really knock Utada Hikaru and Shiina Ringo off of the regular rotation, he’s not so nondescript as to be mediocre. That’s not to say his discography is unassailable either.
Just the notion of an album of George Crumb orchestral works drew me to this recording. Crumb’s pieces seem so exclusively suited for small ensembles, it’s difficult to imagine the heavy mass of an orchestra occupying the sparse nooks and crannies of his scores. I can just picture the concert hall swallowing up his pieces’ signature textures.
It’s not surprising to discover Crumb has so far only written five pieces for orchestra, two of which were recorded by the Louisville Orchestra. Although Crumb employs the entire orchestra for the Varizioni, his economic orchestration still makes the piece feel largely like chamber music.
He makes few odd demands on the orchestra, and the piece, with its 12-tone theme, feels relatively conventional. That’s not to say the discordant bursts of strings and brass are at all tonal — this score is thoroughly modern. Compared to Black Angels or Ancient Voices for Children, Varizioni sounds like, well, music. (For readers unfamiliar with Crumb’s work, the background music for the TV show Lost is essentially Crumb made palatable for prime time.)
Still, Crumb manages to give the orchestra a workout, and the piece can be as thrilling as it is intense.