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

Kemal Cem Yilmaz: Bach - Goldberg variations

Checking out the Goldberg variantions by a (for me) unknown artist.

Looks like a pop album, let's see..

Bert Schurink posted:

Looks like a pop album, let's see..

 

Not recommended for people who are looking for a typical album of him...

I would say not as good as the albums before, but let me give it a couple of spins before a final verdict...

Quite interesting album, especially in the lyrical pieces...

Enghave barok - Bach cantatas 68, 196 and BMW234

Röyksopp - Melody A.M.

Still compelling, after all this time.

The Blue Nile - High

Why? See Röyksopp, above.

ToddHarris posted:

one of my favorite jazz releases from the past few years...

Great record.

More Sonny…

High quality album, put it in my download list...

Interesting to listen via Tidal, will I download - most probably not....

Saw the review - listened and decided to download

Maria Joao Pires & Antonio Meneses - The Wigmore Hall recital

From allmusic.com

This album was recorded live at London's Wigmore Hall in January 2012, and it would be interesting to know whether its release was planned ahead of time or motivated by ongoing affection for the performances. Brazilian cellist Antonio Meneses and Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires have often played as a duo, and the easy conversational quality they have achieved is fully evident here. But the beauty goes beyond the usual chamber music competences. Meneses is rightly renowned for his rich tone, which remains undamaged even in the upper reaches of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, a work written for a defunct six-stringed instrument somewhere between cello and guitar; it lies a bit high for the cello, but Meneses is untroubled by that. The real star of the show, though, may be Pires, who contributes some deeply mysterious Brahms Intermezzi and calibrates her role with astonishing precision in the duo works, emerging into full duet partnership in the final Brahms Cello Sonata in E minor, Op. 38. Beautiful and more, with a dark, melancholy strain unifying the whole, this is chamber music reminiscent of the golden age. Deutsche Grammophon's engineering team also deserves notice for the startling live presence, undiminished by intrusions of noise.

Marilyn Mansin-Heaven Upside Down

i haven't listened to MM in a long while. That said this album is damn good so far. 

Varied jazz album...

Tasting the two available songs of f the new album, sounds like he continues where he has stopped with his earlier music, like it...

Now listening again but from Melco in high res, another dimension...., nice...so in 24/192 and not like the picture suggests

Now Playing......

Justin Adams - Desert Road

Ending the day with Jon Bake's SIWAN with its Spanish/Middle Eastern influence and starting the day with Justin Adams and his North/Western African influences on Desert Road. A fun and enjoyable album, worth the time to give a listen.

Review from Allmusic.com: Justin Adams has a fascination with the space of the desert, and on his solo debut, he recreates the feel, openness, and rhythms of the Western Sahara, where it bleeds into Mali, Morocco, and Mauritania. A proponent of the less-is-more school of playing, he inhabits a place where North African, West African, and blues music intertwine and notes bend, hang, and ultimately mix with a late 20th century recording studio, where samples and beats co-exist. The percussion, from longtime collaborator Salah Dawson Miller, fleshes out the bones. Although Adams is very much a player's player, he lets the rawness of style show through, never flashy, always to the point, whether plucking lead lines or fingerpicking, letting his left hand dictate the melodies and rhythms. The overall effect is soothingly hypnotic, as mesmerizing as shifting waves of desert sand. It's beautiful, often eerily bluesy (a nod to Blind Willie Johnson, one of his idols), and evokes the mystery of one of the earth's last great places. A tiny masterpiece.

played on a replica of an 1809 fortepiano...

The wilderness of Manitoba - Between Colours

Very nice folk / rock music from a Canadian band.

Bert Schurink posted:

Long and very rich. Orchester also sound a bit distinct - but piano playing great.....all Chopin you want...

Now Playing.......

Valerie June - The Order Of Time

Going with a mention from ERICH and taking Valerie's 'The Order Of Time' out for a spin.  She does have one beautiful voice on the first track, great set-up for the rest of the album.

Here is a review from NPR: 

"As of this writing, I am sixty-one years old in chronology," the novelist Madeleine L'Engle once mused. "But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and... and... and..."

It's not entirely surprising that the author of the beloved YA fantasy A Wrinkle in Time would have had such imaginative notions of how past and present fold into each other: "If we lose any part of ourselves," she concluded, "we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away."

But it's not easy to live out that awareness. Valerie June recognizes that treating time as an immutable constant that can also be toyed with, made to telescope, eddy or unfurl in one's mind, requires a certain willfulness. She puts that esoteric wisdom to captivating use on her new album, The Order of Time, the long-awaited follow up to Pushin' Against a Stone, which introduced her singularly expansive vision of roots music to audiences across Europe and the U.S.

As a small-town Tennessee kid, she made a study of varied voices in the Church of Christ congregations her family attended, planting herself in the pew next to singers male and female, young and old, black and white – those who pushed the notes of the old a capella hymns from their nasal cavities, from the backs of their throats or from deep in their chests. By now, June's developed an inviting, inscrutable drawl that seems to encapsulate all of those possibilities, youth and agedness and everything between; on some tracks, her singing family members, and her friend Norah Jones, serve as kindred spirits. June glides between cool resilience and needling in the southern soul number "Love You Once Made." In "If And," she resists the pull of the droning horns and harmonium, before allowing herself to yield to their pulsating pattern. In "Long Lonely Road," her phrasing is as assiduous as it is easeful, serenely persevering through the protracted, humid curlicues of her hill country blues-influenced melody. 

Each of those songs, written by June alone, are suffused with nostalgia or idealism that's also strikingly grounded. She gives emotional weight to the work that goes into sustaining and stabilizing domestic lives. Nowhere is that clearer than the murmured second verse of "Long and Lonely Road": "Pops earned his bread in dust / but his hard working hands fed us / Sun up to sun sink down / His body worked to the ground / Folks thought we had it made / 'cause we always kept a face / Meanwhile there's bills to pay / and the stack growing everyday."

For June, labor, longing and reverie exist side by side. "Astral Plane," whose lyrics were originally intended for Massive Attack, is a vision of turning inward to find transcendence, while "Front Door" is a melancholy meditation on the way that an entrance to intimacy can become an escape from it. Producer Matt Marinelli embellished those tracks and others with ambient flourishes that had previously only existed in June's head – cursive string passages and drifting, pearlescent mists of pedal steel, electric guitar, organ and xylophone. The result is a marvel of mindfulness. Rambling yet precise, regal yet downhome, earthy yet mystical, June's musical imagination is a world to get lost in.

Jasper Somsen Trio - A new episode in life pt.II

First run.