Faust - 71 Minutes (compi rec. 1971-3, double album first released 1988)

Been revisiting this classic compilation of late, containing some of Faust's most invigorating offcuts from their original existence.  The material on 71 Minutes was first released on two single LPs in 1986 and 1988, which at the time was the first album-length unearthing of crucial missing material by the iconoclastic legends (rather like The Velvet Underground's VU and Another View, also released in the 80s).  This double album compiled Munic & Elsewhere and The Last LP together but dropped two tracks, which would later be reissued on BBC Sessions+ (link below).

71 Minutes takes in every angle of the classic, brain-frying Faust sound: lengthy, hypnotic improvisations like Munic/Yesterday (aka Munic A, aka Willie The Pimp, etc), Knochentanz (aka Munic B, Munic/Other) and Chromatic are immediate highlights.  The shorter, dada-influenced pop songs gone insane are represented by Baby, 25 Yellow Doors and an instrumental version of Giggly Smile from Faust IV.  There's also an alternate version of J'ai Mal Aux Dents from The Faust Tapes.  In between, all manner of engrossing little sound experiments flesh out the Faust legend, such as the 'Party' tapes, the gorgeous Das Meer and the elegaic documentary collage of 60s-70s upheaval in Germany that closes the collection.  Utterly essential, boundary-pushing krautrock from the masters.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: BBC Sessions+

Tomasz Stańko Quartet - Suspended Night (2004)

Second album by Stańko's "Polish Quartet" of the 2000s, or, as the three younger musicians became known outside of Stańko's employ, the Marcin Wasilewski Trio.  It was an inspired combination that produced three great albums of spacious exploration, both rooted in classic post-bop jazz and completely up to date, a forward-looking example of the modern ECM aesthetic.

The album's predecessor had no track titles at all - this one at least starts out with a named piece, the lovely opener Song For Sarah, before embarking on the Suspended Variations, just numbered I - X.  The first of these lays out the template in fine mid-tempo form, highlighting each musician in turn, then journeys through sublime group telepathy in uptempo (like II, V, and VIII) and wispy, becalmed modes (III, IV, VII) and more to complete one of Stańko's most rightly celebrated late-period albums.

link

pw: sgtg

Tomasz Stańko at SGTG:
Jazzmessage From Poland
Purple Sun

TWET 

Balladyna
Freelectronic in Montreux
Bluish
Bosonossa And Other Ballads
Matka Joanna 

Wolność W Sierpniu - Freedom In August
Dark Eyes
Wisława
Polin

Michael Jones / David Lanz - Solstice (1985)

Merry Christmas, everyone!  Hope you're having a good one, and getting some time to relax and reflect.

Here's a nice mellow half-hour in the company of two pianists associated with the Narada new age label, in a side-each split LP from 1985.  First up is Michael Jones, turning in a lengthy improvisation around Good King Wenceslas, then turning Carol Of The Bells into an extended snowfall of gentle arpeggios.  David Lanz's side takes in the Greensleeves-variant What Child Is This, then closes the record with his Improvisation On A Theme of Pachelbel's Canon.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted featuring Michael Jones: Amber

The Hilliard Ensemble - Transeamus (2014)

Sticking with vocal music today, but slimming down from full choir to a distinguished quartet.  The Hilliards drew their forty-year career to a sublime close with this album, giving it a fitting title alluding to travelling on.  Conceived as a return to their roots, the album is a programme of English motets and carols from the 15th century, with only four composers known for sure, the rest anonymous.  As expected from this esteemed ensemble, all of these fourteen pieces are deftly performed, starkly beautiful and perfectly captured in the ambience of the St. Gerold monastery in the Alps.  Relax and enjoy an hour of pure timeless bliss.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:

Perotin

The Lamentations Of Jeremiah

Codex Speciálník

The Norwegian Soloists' Choir / Oslo Sinfonietta - As Dreams (2016)

On the album cover above, you can just about make out the full quote from The Tempest that this choral collection takes its name from.  The introduction to the liner notes sets out how these seven pieces are meant to be linked: "they are permeated not only with their own era, but with times that we can imagine lie in front of us."  The five composers chosen are all known for their transformative, spellbinding sound, and make for a bewitching hour of choral music, sometimes accompanied, sometimes acapella.

The two works by Per Nørgård that make up a third of the runtime are my definite favourites here.  His Drømmesange (Dream Songs), with the choir accompanied by steady percussion, is an accessible start to the programme, with its gently lilting, folky melodies; Singe die Gärten, mein Herz is taken from his 3rd Symphony.  From there, there's a good mix of shimmering, atmospheric material (Alfred Janson's Nocturne; Kaija Saariaho's Überzeugung) and more avant-garde ventures into fractured phonemes (Helmut Lachenmann's Consolation II, Iannis Xenakis' Nuits and the closing Nuits, Adieux by Saariaho).  A highly recommended immersion in 20th-21st century choral music.

link

pw: sgtg

Manu Katché - Neighbourhood (2005)

Active since the 80s as a high-profile session musician, French drummer Manu Katché had only released one other solo album prior to this beautifully relaxed ECM session.  He was no freshman to the label, having played with Jan Garbarek throughout the 90s, and it's Garbarek who is the main instrumental voice here, in fine form.  The rest of the lineup was Tomasz Stańko's "Polish Quartet" of the time - minus the drummer, of course.

The ten tracks here, all composed by Katché, only raise the temperature a few times - for the most part, Neighbourhood is a wonderful, laid-back immersion in pure group dynamics.  When the album does start to groove, it's with a taut, understated funkiness that makes Katché's deft touch endlessly enjoyable, as on Number One, Lovely Walk, No Rush and the catchy Take Off And Land.  The rest is pure heaven for a rainy afternoon and a beverage of choice.

 

link

pw: sgtg

Tangerine Dream - Stratosfear (1976)

After their two breakthrough studio albums cemented them as Berlin-school pioneers of spacey, gaseous electronic ambience, Tangerine Dream were perhaps keen not to paint themselves into a corner, and began to diversify their sound.  Recording back in Germany for the first time since signing to Virgin, their first version of Stratosfear was produced by Nick Mason, then scrapped in favour of a band production.

The title track, with its guitar arpeggio introduction and more neatly-defined structure, began to point the way forwards to the more electronic-prog hybrid of late 70s TD.  More acoustic guitar was to come in the brief, baroque flavoured side one closer The Big Sleep In Search Of Hades, and 3AM At The Border Of The Marsh From Okefenokee was even more atmospheric, with Froese adding chilly wisps of harmonica.  There's still plenty of Franke sequencing, in this track and in the lengthy closer Invisible Limits.  Stratosfear might be one of the briefest TD albums, but it packs in plenty of creative little twists that make it an intriguing sleeper album in their classic era.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Phaedra (scroll past main post)
Encore

Cyclone
Force Majeure
Tangram
Logos: Live At The Dominion
Hyperborea

Max Richter - Voices (broadcast premiere) & Infra (recorded live, 10 Dec 2020)

Another concert broadcast, this time bang up to date with a special international simulcast last Thursday for Human Rights Day.  Max Richter's new work Voices uses as its narration parts of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and this live recording took place in London's Maida Vale Studios.

First up is a condensed version (only two of the linking "Journey" segments are performed) of Richter's 2010 work Infra, written in memory of the 7/7 attacks on London in 2005.  With just strings, piano and electronics, it's a lovely stark and sombre experience that sets the stage for the main event.

Voices is also condensed, but only in its instrumental forces compared to the album version - all ten parts of the work are performed.  The aforementioned narration is also joined by crowdsourced samples of people reading extracts of the Declaration in different languages, and the instrumentation is again based on strings, solo violin and piano.  This is fleshed out by wordless choral voices and a soprano part (the lengthy Chorale is a definite highlight), and other sampled environmental sounds.  Richter in the preamble discussion notes the influence of Schubert, particularly Winterreisse, but the gentle, accessible mode of expression is recognisably Richter.

After the performance, the broadcast continued with Richter introducing half an hour of music that has inspired him.  I've left this in, as they were all great choices: Bob Dylan, Thomas Tallis, Abdullah Ibrahim (aka Dollar Brand), Kraftwerk and Charles Ives.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: Sleep

James MacMillan - Seven Last Words From The Cross / Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (2019)

Concert recording from February 2019, in which Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan celebrated his 60th birthday conducting two of his major works with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and percussionist Colin Currie, who's made a couple of appearances on these pages before.  As a prelude to his own music, MacMillan chose Arvo Pärt's Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten, with its solemn bell tolls caught up in the swirl of the gorgeous orchestral parts.

Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (1992) is based on a plainchant piece that bears that name, and it's a percussion concerto originally written for another Scottish player, Evelyn Glennie.  Currie here describes his extensive percussion rig and the various voices used throughout the piece, then turns in a storming performance.  The propulsive energy of the work reminded me in places of Steve Martland.  The second half of the concert is given over to MacMillan's epic cantata Seven Last Words From The Cross, commissioned by the BBC in 1994.  In its sections, the work covers the gospel texts tackled by numerous other composers over the centuries - Sofia Gubaidulina is one who's appeared here - and is a stirring, engrossing journey.

link

pw: sgtg

Vangelis - Opera Sauvage (1979)

One of three releases in a busy 1979 for Vangelis, Opera Sauvage was his third soundtrack for French nature documentarian Frédéric Rossif (link to the first, Apocalypse Des Animaux, below).  By this point, the gorgeous, gossamer sheen of Vangelis' palette of synths and electric piano was at its height, and these seven pieces work wonderfully as an album in their own right.

The understated pulse of L'Enfant could be seen as a precursor to Chariots Of Fire, and in fact this album is quite literally a precursor to that more famous soundtrack - director Hugh Hudson started out by using L'Enfant and Hymne as working music, and both pieces remained in Chariots Of Fire, although one in a different form and the other given to a brass band.  On Opera Sauvage, in between those two tracks is the album's longest and my personal highlight, the beautifully meditative Rêve with its slightly bluesy/jazzy electric piano lead.

I'm not really aware of the content of Rossif's TV series Opera Sauvage, but it may well have been partly avian-themed given the bookends on side two here.  Mouettes (gulls) is a brief synth piece and the multi-section Flamants Roses (flamingos) features Jon Anderson on harp, setting up the full-on collaboration to come.  In between these two pieces are Chromatique, which gives more interesting instrumental variety in its guitar textures, and the suitably evocative Irlande.  One of Vangelis' most accessible records of his classic era, and I reckon one of the very best.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
L'apocalypse Des Animaux

Antarctica
Soil Festivities
Invisible Connections

Harold Budd 1936-2020

 

R.I.P. Harold Budd, 24 May 1936 - 8 December 2020

 

Harold Budd, ambient/modern classical musician and composer, has died at the age of 84 after decades of creating some of the world's most sublime music.

Posts at SGTG:

The Oak Of The Golden Dreams

The Plateaux Of Mirror

The Pearl

Music For Three Pianos

 

And here's another I never got around to posting before: The Serpent In Quicksilver/Abandoned Cities.  Usual password, sgtg.  It's a compilation of a typically gorgeous, languid EP and an LP of two darker ambient ventures.  Thanks Harold for so much wonderful music.

Arild Andersen - Clouds In My Head (1975)

Sticking with ECM for the moment, but heading back into the 70s for another legendary bassist, here's the debut album as leader by the always prolific Arild Andersen, in an all-Norse quartet.  Starting off with the bright swing of 305 W 8th Street (singer Shiela Jordan's NYC address where Andersen once stayed), the intricate, melodic bassline that takes flight makes it unmistakeable whose album this is right from the off.

From there on, there's gentle, reflective material like Last Song (placed second, natch) and the gorgeous Song For A Sad Day (Knut Riisnæs taking a leaf from Garbarek's book, perhaps even more so in the title track).  The mellowness is interspersed with more uptempo tracks like Outhouse, which brings to mind The Windup from Belonging in its tightly-wound theme, the pensive Cycles, and the closing blast of The Sword Beneath His Wings, which was featured in Anderson's firey Molde set of 1981 (link below).  Jon Balke is a perfect, sympathetic pianist throughout, and Andersen's compositional and playing talents make this a lovely record to return to over and over.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Shimri

Green Shading Into Blue
Molde Concert
and featuring Arild Andersen:
Afric Pepperbird
Triptykon
Popofoni
In Line
Bluish

Achirana

Aaron Parks - Arborescence (2013)

Mentioned this album when recounting the chance meeting of Aaron Parks and Yeahwon Shin that led to Lua Ya, so about time I posted it.  Arborescence was the second appearance on ECM (Lua Ya came out a few months before it) for Parks, born 1983 in Seattle, and his first album of solo piano.  It's an impressionistic, highly evocative set of improvisation-composition pianism, that almost seems to unfold like a forest-reverie concept album.  The album title feeds down into the track titles that start with Asleep In The Forest, Towards Awakening and so on, with later tracks named Squirrels, Branches and River Ways.

Parks' style occasionally bringing Keith Jarrett to mind in the way that some of the initially hesitant sounding tracks unfold, and spin off from jazz, blues and Satie-era classical music.  Arborescence is a gorgeous collection of pieces that are endlessly enjoyable, and mostly mellow and reflective.  The most the temperature gets raised is in the rolling arpeggios of In Pursuit, and in the brief, jittery movements of Squirrels.  Beautiful stuff.

link

pw: sgtg

Geoff Sample - Bird Songs & Calls (2010)

Bought this little book and accompanying triple-CD set from a closedown sale in a popup bookstore a few years back, and didn't give it much attention until recently when I felt like listening to something a bit different.  Ripped the discs - 229 tracks over three and a half hours, that's got to be a record for this blog! - and gave it a listen; then decided it was definitely worth sharing.

Geoff Sample is an English naturalist/ornithologist/sound recordist who's been releasing CDs of birdsong going back to the 90s, and also pops up on BBC radio programmes now and then with some of his recordings.  Here, he narrates the songs and calls of British birds grouped into their habitats, spending about ten to fifteen minutes in each section: House & Garden, Farmland, Hedges & Scrub and so on, all the way through to Rocky Coast.  The third CD is different - it's a guide to recognising bird song, from the simplest to the more complicated.  The book cross-references the CD tracks with brief descriptions of each bird, its migratory patterns, when best to find it etc.

The two main CDs are a really enjoyable listen - the various bird sounds, coupled with Sample's unobtrusive narration in the pleasant burr of his Northumbrian accent, actually make the first disc in particular a quite relaxing experience.  The second CD maybe not so much - some of these feathered performers are loud!  Nevertheless the whole thing is a very well put together, great-sounding immersion in birdsong.

Disc 1 link

Disc 2 link

Disc 3 link

pw: sgtg