Just to demonstrate the holes in my knowledge of the classical repertoire …
I didn’t realize Alfred Schnittke pretty much refashioned Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge for his String Quartet No. 3.
As such, I can’t listen to the Grosse Fuge without my ears filling in all the clustered notes Schnittke "added". Even as a melody in its original form, it’s pretty dissonant.
The winning bidder in the auction for Tower Records is Great American Group, an asset management and liquidation company. All 89 Tower Records stores around the country are, in essence, shutting down. Inventory sales start today.
I’ve already waxed philosophically about the idea of Tower Records shutting down.
Part of me almost wishes I were in Honolulu or New York to see what kind of bargains I could muster. Honolulu stores carried a smattering of J-Pop, and I could barely tear myself away from the classical section when I was in New York City on vacation in 2005.
The retail landscape will be emptier without Tower Records, especially for areas that don’t have a Waterloo or an Amoeba or a Newbury Comics to take its place.
Oct. 11 is National Coming Out Day, and while June may have been Gay Pride Month, I figure I may as well expand on next week’s event by featuring gay artists for the entire month.
I reviewed Sacha Sacket back in June, but it would be helpful to hear an actual piece of music from him.
Napster Japan launched earlier this week, and I would have written about it when I saw the announcement. But I wanted to investigate the service before I wrote about it, and now that I have, there’s nothing to report.
I couldn’t access it.
Unlike iTunes, which is actually cruel enough to let you browse and search a catalog which US customers are barred from purchasing, Napster doesn’t even include a mechanism to switch locales within its interface.
Here’s something interesting — a founder of the indie label Kill Rock Stars is leaving the label to become an A&R executive at Nonesuch.
Slim Moon started Kill Rock Stars in 1991, and the label’s roster includes the likes of Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, The Decemberists and Deerhoof. Kill Rock Stars itself is moving its operations from Olympia, Washington, to New York City, where Nonesuch is also based. Moon’s wife, Portia Sabin, takes over the label’s operations.
Wilco and the Black Keys aside, Nonesuch doesn’t have much in the way of a rock roster. Nonesuch started out as a classical imprint but expanded to an eclectic mix of world, classical and pop. It looks like Nonesuch wants to expand its scope, and it’s positioning Kill Rock Stars to be its indie rock farm.
I like the idea of Wilco, Emmylou Harris, Steve Reich and Audra McDonald being labelmates, but I’m not sure throwing, say, Xiu Xiu and Deerhoof into the mix would maintain that balance. And if such an arrangement be forged, I’d hate to see KRS bands disappear from eMusic.
Whatever happens, it should be interesting.
Nina Hynes is one of those SXSW accidents — you show up not knowing anything about who’s performing and you leave a fan.
Hynes evokes comparrisons to Björk and Harriet Wheeler of the Sundays, and the mix of rock and electronics in her music certainly calls to mind Post-era Guðmundsdóttir.
ArtsJournal.com has been posting links about the Deutsche Oper canceling a production of Idomeneo by Mozart.
The reason? The director of the production stages a scene in which the decapitated heads of all the major religious figures are placed on chairs, including but not limited to Mohammed. Deutsche Oper director Kirsten Harms didn’t want a repeat of the protests that occurred after a Danish newspaper published editorial cartoons depicting Mohammed. So the production was canceled.
Cries of "censorship" followed, with some critics accusing Harms of Kniefall vor Terroristen — "kneeling to terrorists". Even the German chancellor has weighed in.
I call any disc that contains Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 14, 23 and 8 as a "piano student album".
Those three sonatas — the "Moonlight" (No. 14), the "Appassionata" (No. 23) and the "Pathetique" (No. 8) — are standard repertoire for any degree-seeking music major concentrating on piano performance. And more than likely, you’ll find all three pieces offered for budget prices by every major classical label.
I bought the Vladimir Ashkenazy disc because it was on sale.
With that flurry of writing from the last two weeks, I think I’m caught up with everything about which I wanted to write.
So that means I have to go out and find new stuff, or go ahead and write about stuff I’ve been putting off. Till I decide either way, I’ve got a few things occupying my playlist, and I’ll write about them in better detail later.
ACO has formed a band, so says Bounce.com.
Named Golden Pink Arrow, the new unit consists of ACO, producer Taeji Sawai and lostage drummer Tanaka-kun. The trio is set to perform at the "sonor sound tokyo 2006" festival on Oct. 7 and 8. "sonor sound tokyo 2006" is the Japanese offshoot of the electronica music festival "sonor2006" in Barcelona, Spain.
Taeji worked with ACO on her albums irony and mask. According to the band’s MySpace page, ACO and Taeji formed Golden Pink Arrow after recording irony, heading to Berlin to work on new material. Golden Pink Arrow’s MySpace page currently includes a Madonna cover, relabeled "Material Gxxl".
Bounce.com characterizes the band’s sound having "freaky, dirty beats". (The words "grime" and "bile" also work their way into the description.) No releases are yet scheduled.