What are you listening to and WHY might anyone be interested? (Vol. XIII)

great box set on Alpha...well recorded, well played!

.....First up on this Monday morning.......

Loreena McKennitt - The Visit

From the Liner Notes: I have long considered the creative impulse to be a visit - a thing of grace, perhaps not commanded or owned so much as awaited, prepared for. A thing also of mystery. This recording endeavours to explore some of that mysery. - LM

.....as I head off to work this morning I will hope for a visit.

Fingers Off - Various Artists

I got this LP from Main Steet Management who managed the Stranglers who feature on this LP. There are many classics tracks and artists. The sound is amazing after being cleaned and all the recent tweaks to the system, not least the SL speaker cable. 

I didn't really get on with some of the more exotic genres after the 80s. It could have been that with a young family there wasn't the time!

Phil

Filipe posted:

Fingers Off - Various Artists

I got this LP from Main Steet Management who managed the Stranglers who feature on this LP. There are many classics tracks and artists. The sound is amazing after being cleaned and all the recent tweaks to the system, not least the SL speaker cable. 

I didn't really get on with some of the more exotic genres after the 80s. It could have been that with a young family there wasn't the time!

Phil

Which/who were your favourites?

Kraftwerk, Computer-World, on Japanese vinyl. Fancied a bit of 'Werk (from an era when they were good).

Shelby Lynne. Just a Little Lovin

UK first press vinyl. Because one never needs a reason to play some Bobbie, especially if it's her final masterpiece.

Omer Klein - Fearless Friday

Another good example of a good modern jazz piano trio.

Andras Schiff - Goldberg variations.

I have many versions of the Goldberg variations. I don't have one which I consider being the best of all. I don't think that is possible with this work. However this version of Andras Schiff is certainly very good imo. I like the tempi that he uses as how he plays the oraments. Being an ECM recording, you can assume that the sound is very good. Which it is.

From Allmusic.

Who needs another recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations? After all, there have been so many great recordings of the work already -- Landowska, Kempff, Gould, Pinnock, and Leonhardt, to name a few -- that surely no one needs another recording of the Goldberg. Actually, everyone needs another recording of the Goldbergs provided that it's a recording of a great performance. There's too much in the Goldberg -- too much brilliance, too much sorrow, too much humor, too much spirituality -- for any one performance, even the best performance, to contain all of it. So long as the performance honors the work's honesty, integrity, and virtuosity, there's always room for another Goldberg on the shelf. This 2001 recording by Andras Schiff belongs on any shelf of great Goldbergs. Schiff has everything it takes -- the virtuosity; the integrity; and most importantly, the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual honesty -- to turn in a great Goldberg. Indeed, Schiff has already done so in his 1982 Decca recording of the work, a lucid and pellucid performance of tremendous beauty and depth. But as good as the 1982 recording was, the 2001 recording is better. It preserves the great qualities of the earlier recording and adds greater depths, and what's even better, higher heights. Schiff seems to have gone further into the work and returned with greater insights and even greater beauty of tone. Part of this is due to ECM's stunningly clear and immediate recording, but more of it is due to Schiff's maturity as a performer. In 1982, he was not yet 30, and for all his brilliance as a pianist, he was still too young for the Goldberg. But at almost 50, Schiff has grown in wisdom and his performance now rivals the greatest performances of the past.

Revier Telderman Trio - Live, I saw them on North Sea Jazz. Last Saturday...

Great album, live was even more special - but you get it also by listening to this cd...

A + 3 | WAV

(2014)

Ravenna by Moon Duo

This live set does an incredible job of capturing the emerging sound of moon duo as a 3-piece during a tour that “was defined by sweltering heat”. Though the band had always toured as a duo, before heading to Europe in the summer of 2013, Yamada and Johnson decided to change things up and for the first time ever by adding a drummer. Despite shows every night during the most brutal stretch of summer, Yamada, Johnson and Jeffrey soon realised moon duo as a three-piece was gelling through the hot and hazy weather, and having a drummer in the mix added a dynamism and flexibility they had never experienced before on stage. They decided to document this new incarnation of the band and asked engineer Mattia Coletti to record the Italian leg of the tour. “Ravenna was memorable for a number of reasons, the most prominent being the really very intense heat, and the setting — Hanabi has an outdoor stage on the beach, the Adriatic sea only meters away,” Yamada explains. “the show that night, and the recording of it, sort of encapsulates everything that was happening at the time – the heat wave, the journey, and the shift in the energy and composition of the band.”

Classic Blue Note.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpCh8JueRKU

A + 3 | WAV

(2011)

Another one from Moon Duo is required and Mazes will do the trick nicely 

Review

Engulfing your listener in sound has often been likened to a wall of noise, but in Moon Duo's case it's more like a dome of sine waves, an aural planetarium. You can pick out constellations which sometimes form images of familiar things. But you sense that the guitarist of bellowing psychedelic band Wooden Shjips, Ripley Johnson, and his synth-playing partner Sanae Yamada are simply employing drones and minimal musicality to maximum effect, whether it imitates, evokes or accidentally stumbles upon anything else in rock history or not.

Their first two EPs, Killing Time from 2009 and Escape from 2010, were distinctly heady works which sounded more menacing and strung-out than their debut album, Mazes, does. Here Ripley plunders his own past works, oscillating force-fields plastered across organ-synth lines, relentless fuzz guitar and metronomic drum machines. Ripley's echoed, drawled vocals are almost inconsequential, noticeable most when they're no longer there.

The title-track's main riff, a relatively snappy, garage rock nod, smacks (weirdly) of The Futureheads' Favours For Favours if played by a 12-bar blues band, a total accident coming from hammering at an instrument so well utilised for decades. Here the oppressive weight of sound is dissipated and distributed throughout the song with elegant blues solos wreathed in phasers. When You Cut's keyboard vamp is vaguely reminiscent of Oneida's History's Greatest Navigators – never a bad thing – while Ripley grinds his molten tone underneath, a growling generator to drive the song into shimmering oases.

Though the construction is as simple and repetitive as anything by Ripley's other projects throughout, it's on Mazes that a relative lightness of touch – the chords not quite as forceful, the melodies not quite as embedded in the vortex – helps to make more of the playful side of drone rock. When the harshness is removed (and though we lose some of the incidental and fascinating harmonics and noises), there's enough of both sides of the band to print starlit patterns of sound upon your ears.

It's probably fair to say that the unexpected jauntiness at times, and the constant repetition, will not appeal to those who gravitate towards melodic hooks and on-a-dime time changes; each track is one massive hook with dynamics simply tossed aside in favour of volume and steadfastness. Each song remains a steady, stellar journey to the next piercing solo until the noise removes itself after a surprisingly brief 50 minutes and suddenly there's a big gaping black hole where Moon Duo were. All that remains is to re-listen.

-- Brad Barrett

1999 - CD ( rip) ... 

Icelandic(ish)  summer night music...

Old Virgin vinyl

Why? It represents the inside of my head at the moment.

steve

PS Apologies for cr*p Amazon pic

Bert has mentioned seeing a few of these guys at the North Sea Jazz Festival. So I thought I'd have the South East Hampshire Jazz Festival in my house.

Steps Ahead  -  "Steps Ahead"  (1983)  Michael Brecker-sax, Eddie Gomez-bass, Eliane Elias-piano, Mike Mainieri-vibes, Peter Erskine-drums

Tortoise & Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Brave And The Bold

An album of cover versions. I really didn't get on with this when it first came out but it has grown on me like a... growth.

On CD:-

Hawkwind - Doremi Fasol Latido

On CD:-

Blackfield - V