Tag: music

Considering my classical history

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I am sitting in a room listening to piano music. It is the music of Charles-Valentin Alkan, a man who – perhaps with a nod to musical history hyperbole – apparently died trapped beneath a bookcase. He was an older man, so I assume an bookcase hitting you would be a terrible thing. I wouldn’t like to be hit with a bookcase now, I guess, and I’m a lot younger than seventysomething.

It’s a musical death that has parallels with Jean-Baptiste Lully. I don’t mean that they died from the same thing – I mean more that their deaths are funny. I mean, who dies from gangrene resulting from a forceful beating of time? (So forceful that his staff pierced his shoe,and his foot, delivering an infection that would end him, because he decided he wouldn’t have an amputation because it would hinder his ability to dance. Being dead does too, guy.) It’s such a laughable death – laughable until it happens to you, I imagine – that when in Paris with my then-partner, we made an effort to snap a photo with his likeness in the Opéra Garnier. Continue reading “Considering my classical history” →

Open Frame: some thoughts

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Last night I trekked over to Carriageworks to catch Open Frame, part of ambient/experimental label Room40’s 15th birthday celebrations. Earlier in the day I’d been replaying a little Half-Life 2 and walking from the car park to the venue I was reminded exactly how much the place looks like Ravenholm. You know, where we don’t go any more, largely because of terrifying headcrabs.

Headcrabs or socialites? Which is worse?
Carriageworks or Ravenholm? I wonder.

Anyway, I had to dodge a number of blinged-up people heading to a Crown do two bays over – I’m not certain there’s been that many spike heels there in a while – but finally found myself in a large room full of like-minded (and statistically speaking, most likely bearded) sound enthusiasts. A screen was set up in the front of the room, and a variety of chairs and benches were already pretty filled, so it was a great turnout. I found a seat, clutching the one-eye-coloured glasses I’d been given at the door. A bunch of speakers stood around the room – I later discovered this was an eight-channel setup.

Room40‘s Lawrence English opened with a brief chat about the evening, his hat rendering him distinctly much more vengeful preacher than his recorded work would have you believe. Continue reading “Open Frame: some thoughts” →

2014 consumption: a look at some stuff I liked

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It’s a new year, and for me that’s as good a time as any to look at what I did last year. More specifically, to look at my consumption of books, music, games and stuff over the past year. I’m not certain it’s interesting to anyone other than myself, but given that I’m a stats nerd – odd for someone who was definitively crap at them during my university years – and because I’m into recording stuff. What I’ve listened to. What I’ve read. What movies I’ve seen. Et cetera. Some of the data’s incomplete but it’s a reasonable portrait I suppose. This’ll be a long one.

Music
I record most of my listening on last.fm, as I have done for years now. For ten years, this year. Basically, any time I play something on my computer – which, at work, is where I listen to most of my music anyway – or now, on my iPhone, it’ll send a record of it to my profile. I try to record the stuff I listen to at home – usually with this thing – but far less reliably. Given it’s been running for the longest of any recording I’ve done, there’ll be more data here to work from.

It’s a useful source of information – the sidebar listing what I’m listening to comes from last.fm data – and provides enough statistics to keep me happy. For example, the counter on my profile tells me that since 2005, I’ve listened to 132,000 tracks, more or less.

But how did I fare last year? Well, here’s a graphical representation of my top artists for 2014:

Some things don't change.

As to how those listens were distributed, there’s this helpful chart – which you’ll have to click to read, undoubtedly.

Continue reading “2014 consumption: a look at some stuff I liked” →

New Zeitkratzer review

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My review of a live disc of Zeitkratzer performances of Whitehouse songs has gone live (a little while ago, now) over at Cyclic Defrost. Here’s a sample.

Zeitkratzer are a great ensemble. Their acoustic mastery is undeniable, and the sounds they recreate without access to a bunch of broken boxes and fucked electronics are spot-on. But somehow the execution of the task seems almost redundant: there’s as much enjoyment to be had by the idea of a bunch of traditional instruments covering Whitehouse as there is from having the end result in your hand.

You can read the whole review here, if you like.

New Oren Ambarchi review

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My review of Quixotism, Oren Ambarchi’s new album on Editions Mego, is now live at Cyclic Defrost.

(Spoiler: it’s really good. )

Here’s a sample:

There’s a cold feeling to some of the composition – ‘Part 2′ touches on the ground Gavin Bryars walks upon – but it’s leavened with the joyous humanity of ‘Part 5′. Organ notes, muted guitar picking and tabla are joined with swooning strings in an elegiac celebration. It’s humanity writ large, and gives the piece narrative – this burst of sad joy seems to tell the story of a machine gaining sentience, a soul, before relapsing.

You can read the rest of the review here.

New Howard Stelzer review

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My review of Howard Stelzer’s Brayton Point album has gone live at Cyclic Defrost. Here’s a sample.

The album consists of manipulations of field recordings taken from around the Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset, Massachusetts. The station is to be decommissioned in 2017, so Stelzer’s recording acts as a kind of memorial to the site; a document which initially captures working sounds of the area before transforming into a thrumming, windy meditation on the limitless potentials of power. The industrial grime of the power station is strongly present, though it’s not in the jackhammer way which one would associate with an Eraserhead ethic.

You can read the rest here. 

New Bruno Sanfilippo review

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Another of my reviews for Cyclic Defrost has gone life. This time, it’s a look at Bruno Sanfilippo’s ClarOscuro album.

The music is uniformly quiet in a way you’ll be familiar with if you’ve heard Nyman’s The Pianosoundtrack (‘Absentia’), or perhaps the piano works of Gavin Bryars (‘Luciana’), Yann Tiersen (the titular opener) or (in her quieter moments) Elena Kats-Chernin. It’s lyrical and there’s alot of sustained notes, stretching into decay. There’s touches of the rainy-afternoon Erik Satie or Claude Debussy about the work, but I feel that’s just in terms of emotional association rather than in terms of execution: the sound of the piano played this way makes the listener feel this way, almost regardless of the content. It could be library music.

You may read the rest of the review here.

The buildings tumbled in on themselves

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A brief post, as I’m neck-deep in deadline at present. Today’s post is what I’m currently listening to – Godspeed You Black Emperor’s F#A#∞ album. And, as happens whenever I listen after not hearing it for a long while, I’m amazed anew at how good it is. Continue reading “The buildings tumbled in on themselves” →