Kronos Quartet has teamed up with Boosey & Hawkes to publish sheet music of works commissioned and performed by the group. The first volume of this series is already available at Kronos’ web store and consists of works by Terry Riley, Hamza el Din and Aleksandra Vrebalov. For corroboration, I also found it at Sheet Music Plus. I’m hoping future volumes might include Franghiz Ali-Zade’s Mugam Sayagi, or Café Tacuba’s 12/12.
Also, Jeffrey Ziegler is hot.
A few weeks ago, David Pogue mentioned ways to transfer analog media to digital. (Registration required, or not.) Oddly enough, that article was published right around the time I did my own salvage operation on the Waitresses’ debut album, Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?
Pogue’s methods are all very consumer-friendly and relatively inexpensive. They also require some work. Being lazy and anal, I opted to use some fancy software and equipment to make the process easier.
I think a happy medium can be found between the two. I could have done it without using a USB audio interface and a limiter plug-in with Sony Sound Forge, but Sony CD Architect makes burning to CD so much easier.
CD Architect may be a bit overkill for day-to-day use, but you can create tracks even if your master recording is one big WAV file. No messing with splitting files and multiple exports-imports. Customizing gaps between tracks is also really helpful when they segue into one another.
If you’re going to record to a hard drive cheaply, my recommendation is not to skim on the burn process.
I had such a promising productive spurt at the start of the month, and then … nothing. It’s been a week since my last post, and I don’t know if I’m going to be all that prolific in the coming weeks.
For the past week, I’ve been immersed in QuarkXpress, dusting off my old page design skills from my print newspaper days. I’ve also been researching short-run CD duplication for Eponymous 4, just to see how it all works. I’ve been concentrating so much on that, I haven’t even updated any of the other blogs I write.
Next week, I’ll be flying home for vacation. I have a laptop now, and my brother said the house has wireless. So I might be able to post, but I make no guarantees.
Just to keep the cobwebs from gunking up this corner of the Internets, I’m going to do a braindump of the stuff on my playlist recently.
Take one world-class musician. Have him perform during rush hour at a Washington, D.C. subway station. What would you think happens? Ganked.
I’m confused. Martin Kettle says, "The only dispute about classical recording is whether it is dying or dead." But Brendan I. Koerner reports classical is the only genre to have made gains when every other genre is down. Thankfully, Alex Ross examines the numbers in greater detail.
Shinsou ~Message from the Depth~ is perhaps DJ Krush’s angriest album. Created in the wake of 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War, Shinsou makes its agitation and nervousness known from the start.
But it’s "Alepheuo (Truthspeaking)" that delivers the album’s most explicit criticism of US foreign policy. "Cause we don’t clean up our own shit/And when refused we throw a fit/As we scream I don-wanna-hear-it I don-wanna-hear-it’/Don-wanna-hear-it" sings Angelina Esparza, who makes her debut on the song. She really captures the petulance of the Bush administration with those lines.
"Alepheuo" doesn’t disguise its radio friendliness, and the CD included a video of the song. It’s probably not the most adventurous track on Shinsou, but the lyrics had a message that needed a pop hook to go with them.
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On both Dragon Ash’s "Grateful Days" and DJ Krush’s "Tragicomic", ACO plays the same role — deliver the chorus. Once in a while, she’ll contribute a flourish behind the rappers, but for the most part, she stays out of the way till the focus needs to be on her.
And that was a wise decision on both Krush’s and Dragon Ash’s parts.
ACO’s soulful voice would have drawn too much attention away from the rhymes, making them a distraction. Her presence becomes all that more powerful when she does emerge from the background.
On "Tragicomic", Twigy is the interchangeable part — anyone could fill the role of the rapper. But Krush’s dark backdrop and ACO’s eerie interjections — she looks possessed in the video — are immovable. This song was released as a single in Japan and appears on the compilation Japan for Sale.
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According to last.fm, my friend Ryan and I have a "Very Low" musical compatibility score. Back when we were editors at the University of Hawaiʻi student newspaper, we would also try to "out-exotic" each other when it came to monopolizing the office stereo.
As divergent as our music tastes are, a few things from his music collection seeped into my own. It took me a few years to come around to Björk’s Post, which he would have on all the time. I wouldn’t have really considered Pizzicato Five’s Made in USA without Ryan’s help. But the one album that really struck me was Dead Can Dance’s Spiritchaser.
I would play that disc quite a bit when we were in the office, and when I moved to Austin, I snatched up a used copy of the album the moment I saw one available. It’s the only Dead Can Dance album I own, and I’m told it’s not even their best one. Perhaps I’ll delve more into their work in the future, but for now, I’m content with what I have.
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There are too many gay folk musicians. One listen to the Rainbow World Radio November 2006 Top 40 Show is all it takes to realize that.
James William Hindle is a British queer folkie. Does the world really need another, British or otherwise? If his third album Town Feeling is any indication, the answer is yes.
Two things set Hindle apart — good songwriting and a grizzled voice. Hindle’s music is actually more country than folk, with pedal steel guitars and brushed snares setting the sonic backdrop.
You can picture the clichéd tumbleweeds tossing in the wind on "Birthday Candle", while the finger-picking on "Love You More" and "Sleeping Still" is far more rural than what Garrin Benfield or Dudley Saunders offer. The waltz meter of "Dog and Boy" is pure country, as are the twangy guitars on "Dark is Coming".
Five discs of Steve Reich works for roughly $40 comes out to $8 per disc. That alone is reason enough to get the "specially-priced" boxed set Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective.
Sure, you could squabble over what was included or excluded — no Clapping Music? — but Nonesuch had already released a comprehensive set of Reich recordings in 2005. The composer celebrated his 70th birthday in 2006, and the label compiled Phases to commemorate the occasion. It serves more as an introduction to the composer for new listeners, and for the bargain-minded, it’s a real deal.
I’ve admired Reich for years, and I own some of the recordings included in Phases. But I can’t say I’ve explored his works as thoroughly as I would have liked. This set gave me the opportunity to fill in some gaps.