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All blog entries tagged with 'music'
Monday 05 October 2009
Musical Monday
A rainy and very busy Monday here... I have a few articles to put up on the site later today, and will do so as soon as I get a moment (should have been up already, actually; sorry 'bout that). In the meantime, I rather randomly took myself to one of North London's finer hostelries yesterday evening (The Lexington) and heard a very fine math rock / post rock band called Instruments doing their thing and doing it very well indeed. I wholeheartedly commend them to the House. They were very tight and remarkably funky for a post rock band. Their MySpace page does not quite do them justice, but it gives you a flavour. Personally, I'm very glad to have found them.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Thursday 01 October 2009
Library Tapes
Slammed here today... Hoping to get Barry's piece about Orwell's 1984 up on the site later this evening. In the meantime, and proof that MySpace isn't entirely rubbish, I offer you Library Tapes.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Tuesday 07 July 2009
More sad songs
Just as a very quick follow-up to my Sad Music post from last week (and thanks to everyone who commented on that -- and, please, keep those comments coming), I note that there is a Virgin ad on the telly at the moment featuring the beautiful Mazzy Star (David Roback and vocalist Hope Sandoval) track Into Dust from 1993's So Tonight That I Might See. Now, that song is a real beauty...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Wednesday 01 July 2009
Sad music
Indulging in listening to sad music is one of life's finer pleasures, I think. From Strauss's Four Last Songs, Schubert's Winterreise, Valentin Silvestrov's Silent Songs (the song based on Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci, sung in Russian, is -- almost literally -- to die for) through to David Sylvian's Let The Happiness In, the better (i.e. most melancholic) moments of This Mortal Coil, The For Carnation or Dakota Suite or parts of Jacaszek's Treny album, miserable music is a vital part of my armoury against the world. I'm always on the look out for me -- and this thread on violinist.com has pointed me to some new sad sounds to indulge in... but if y'all have any favourites please let me know.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, personal
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Tuesday 30 June 2009
Michael Jackson
I'm certainly not the person to write anything insightful on Michael Jackson, but k-punk has stepped up to the plate:
The death of this King - "my brother, the Legendary King Of Pop", as Jermaine Jackson described him in his press conference, as if giving Michael his formal title - recalls not the Diana carcrash, but the sad slump of Elvis from catatonic narcosis into the long good night. Perhaps it was only Elvis who managed to insinuate himself into practically every living human being's body and dreams to the same degree that Jackson did, at the microphysical level of enjoyment as well as at the macro-level of spectacular memeplex. Michael Jackson: a figure so subsumed and consumed by the videodrome that it's scarely possible to think of him as an individual human being at all... because he wasn't of course... becoming videoflesh was the price of immortality, and that meant being dead while still alive, and no-one knew that more than Michael (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, music, philosophy
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Thursday 14 May 2009
Musical interlude
At the weekend, my dogs were "jumped" by a rather enthusiastic Black Russian Terrier (imagine a schnauzer the size of a Great Dane and you're almost there). Sadly, Silus, who was quite a lovely thing actually, was far too much of a beast for the elderly lady who was looking after him. She lost control of Silus as we walked past them and was almost dragged to the ground. Consequently, I had to grab our manic mutt before he did himself, or my dogs, any damage. Rather painfully, Silus pulled my shoulder half out of its socket. At the moment, then, typing, as you can well imagine, is not my favourite activity!
Despite this, I manfully took myself of to the badlands of Salford on Monday night to see the excellent Machinefabriek. This evening brings Jóhann Jóhannsson. I commend both to you for your listening pleasure.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, personal
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Monday 09 February 2009
Culture and its study: Zero Books
A friend of mine argues that the collapse of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline in the UK was because of its own omnipresence. It seems that every broadsheet supplement you pick up now has an article speculating on fandom, consumption, people at play, etc... But, sadly, they’re not written by anyone of the calibre of Raymond Williams.
Mind body spirit publisher O books have a courageous new imprint Zero Books. Novelist Tariq Goddard (author of Homage to a Firing Squad, Dynamo and The Morning Rides Behind Us) has been busy commissioning some excellent, unsung authors to write short books on contemporary culture: educated, informed by – but not in awe of – theory, and genuinely provocative. The first is Wire writer David Stubbs on Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen which I’ll be fascinated to read as I’m sceptical of the middle classes newfound love of contemporary art (my own tastes tend to be the reverse: hate Rothko, love Aufgehoben) and suspect it has more to do with a pleasant afternoon in a white space. Elitist, moi? I digress...
The second is by Owen Hatherley, whose blog sit down man you’re a bloody tragedy is approaching legendary status. Simon Reynolds says the following about his Militant Modernism:
With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism. This slim and shapely, ideas-packed and intensely-felt book is neither a misty-eyed memorial nor a dour inquest, but a verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rediscovering the enchantment of demystification and the sexiness of severity, Hatherley harks forward to modernism's utopian spirit: critical, radically democratic, dedicated to the conscious transformation of everyday life, determined to build a better world.
They’re both out on the 24th April.
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: music, philosophy
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Monday 22 December 2008
Top 100 albums from 2008
A list that -- where I've heard them -- broadly overlaps with my take on the best albums of 2008, can be found online at Boomkat (although, must admit, I was thoroughly underwhelmed, nay bored, by the new Portishead album).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Monday 01 December 2008
Olivier Messiaen centenary
Alex Ross on upcoming Messiaen fun:
With the centenary of Olivier Messiaen drawing nigh, here are some additions to my Messiaen 100 post of some weeks back. First, the DG label is releasing a mammoth, thirty-two-CD Complete Edition of the Maître's works, with authoritative performances by the likes of Olivier Latry, Roger Muraro, Pierre Boulez, Myung-Whun Chung, and Kent Nagano (his great recording of Saint François d'Assise). Also, I earlier neglected to note that the Cleveland Museum of Art is offering a strong cluster of events over the next several weeks... At Southbank in London, the unstoppable Boulez will lead a Messiaen concert on Dec. 10 and a Carter concert on Dec. 11, including something of his own on each night for the sake of variety — or, perhaps, continuity (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, music
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Tuesday 04 November 2008
This Mortal Coil: 16 Days Gathering Dust
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, personal
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Thursday 30 October 2008
In honour of Charles Rosen
In November, the University of Rochester Press will publish Variations on the Canon, a collection of essays by leading musicologists in honour of Charles Rosen’s 80th birthday. The book covers a range of topics from Bach to Modernism... more over on From Beyond the Stave, the Boydell & Brewer music blog.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news, music
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Friday 22 August 2008
Junglist missives
Picked up a copy of Paul D. Miller's (aka DJ Spooky
that Subliminal Kid) edited work Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture which includes artists, DJs and journalists writing about the expansion of possibilities for music in the 21st century, with contributions from
everyone from Steve Reich to Bruce Sterling. A great collection with a CD of avant-garde music.
It also includes a piece by Simon Reynolds on the CCRU – the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a peculiar research centre that began at Warwick
University (before moving into the cyber-ether), started by Nick Land and Sadie Plant, to explore the limits of cyber-culture (crudely, crudely put!). One particular member was, I believe, k-punk but also Steve Goodman (here he is on jungle), who is currently writing what will be an amazing book about 'Sonic Warfare', due out with MIT next year. He is also, as any dubstep nerd out there can tell you, the alter ego of Kode 9 and the label boss of Hyper Dub, the home of Mercury nominee Burial. But I digress! A fascinating piece that seems to suggest that the CCRU was almost some kind of cult…!
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: music
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Wednesday 11 June 2008
Simon Reynolds interview
The latest interview here on ReadySteadyBook is with one of the finest writers we have on the world of contemporary music. I offer you ... Mr. Simon Reynolds.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, rsb
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Tuesday 22 April 2008
Mark E. Smith autobiography
Ben, over at Splinters, alerts me to the fact that Mark E. Smith's autobiography Renegade is due out at the end of the week (you can read an extract at the Guardian.) All bow down!
This Fall book news is as good an excuse as any to bring your attention back to the recently much improved The Fall online website. If you want information and news about Sir Smith (a people's peer if ever there was one!) and the gang, here is your place.
And as today is Earth Day, I shall mainly be listening to I am Kurious Oranj.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Wednesday 13 February 2008
Susanna speaks!
Susanna -- yes, her of the magical orchestra -- speaks!
I think I have learned that perfection can contain several different parameters and that I can choose how it may influence my work. Perfection and music are not necessarily related, I do not wish for the music to be perfect but to move the listener in some way.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Tuesday 12 February 2008
Mark E Smith reading Lovecraft
Ooh, it seems to be becoming a bit of a music day: Mark E Smith reading Lovecraft (via k-punk; the excellent The Fall online is always worth a visit too).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, music
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Tuesday 12 February 2008
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man: "Profile of the influential and enigmatic Scott Walker, which explores his music from Walker Brothers vocalist to his evolution into a radical soundmaker in the 1980s and 90s."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Thursday 13 December 2007
Paul Griffiths
RSB contributor Paul Griffiths "is one of the University of Rochester Press' favourite authors. His biography of Jean Barraqué, The Sea on Fire, is a scholarly and imaginative triumph, while his collection of occasional pieces and reviews, The Substance of Things Heard, was described as "illuminating, translucent, sagacious" by the TLS. Griffiths is also an accomplished librettist..." and today he writes about recent performances of his collaboration with one of modern music's greatest composers over at the From Beyond the Stave blog.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, music, rsb
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Monday 10 December 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen RIP
Still recovering as I am from my mammoth 'flu attack, I've not been keeping an eye on things as closely as I usually try to do. So, I've only just noticed that German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died, aged of 79, last Friday. Sad news indeed. I was a big fan. (More at NPR.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, music
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Thursday 08 November 2007
The Boydell Music Blog
The excellent Boydell & Brewer, publishers of the wonderful Joseph Conrad: A Life, has decided to enter the blogosphere with a music related blog which will give some background information on the numerous music books that they publish. It is nicely called From Beyond the Stave (d'you see what they did there!?) Still early days, but it will certainly be worth keeping an eye on this.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, music
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Thursday 12 July 2007
Flares
I'm only two years late, but today I am mostly listening to -- and absolutely loving -- Flares by Port-Royal. I'm rubbish at describing music, but this is post-rock in the more painterly, intimate sense of, say, Helios, with the gorgeous, shimmery hazes of, e.g., Boards of Canada, rather then the bombast of Godspeed! or the jazz-tinges of Do Make Say Think. (Can you say post-shoegazing? I really want to!) The effect-laden guitars are quite lovely, but this has plenty of beats and cut-up textures to keep things interesting too. The arrangements blend over the course of tracks that move from swirls of sound to something much cleaner and drum-led. In parts I was reminded of Dif Juz. And it is a good length too -- almost 80 minutes. I've only just discovered this, which is bonkers, as I love most anything on the Resonant label. Anyway, the even better news is that Port-Royal's latest, Afraid to Dance, is out next Monday. Yay!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Friday 06 July 2007
New William Basinski
The latest William Basinski CD has landed -- yay! I'll let the boomkat folk explain why I'm so excited:
Background information is typically scant with this latest release from William Basinski's 2062 label, but what we do know is that it features re-discovered tape loops that have been delicately re-crafted for a recent performance at the Montalvo Arts Center. Clocking in at just under 50 minutes, El Camino Real is another one of those breathtaking aural tapestries that Basinski seems to have such an intuitive feel for - effortlessly piecing together elements that bring to mind everything from Arvo Part through to the Cocteau Twins without ever letting go of his own signature sound. Because the source material for these loops has been de-graded and layered so heavily, it's hard to imagine where they could have come from or how they could have been made - all that we're left with are mesmerising remnants of a ghostly female voice dominating the undulating mix to almost harrowing effect. There's also something about this recording that brings to mind more recent contemporary musical experimentations, and in particular the work of Liz Harris under the Grouper moniker - its the same archetypal shoegaze aesthetic that dominates this extended piece and it has a similarly overwhelming effect on the senses : lulling you into a deep state of drift before reminding you that behind the velvety wall of sound lies an uncertain, complex world. El Camino Real is certainly one of Basinski's most absorbing pieces and, for us at least, offers the most contemporary re-interpretation of his own archive recordings to date. We just can't imagine anyone not being overwhelmed by this music - take a listen and sink in while you can.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Wednesday 25 April 2007
Jandek ... and me
Over at Spurious, Lars is listening to Jandek:
Sometimes I think there's nothing I want to hear except for Jandek and nothing I want to think about except for Jandek. Everything else is pointless, non-essential. I listen to Comets on Fire and Espers and Boris and all that sort of thing. It's good, all good, but not essential. I listen to Mark Kozelek, which is nearly essential, and Bill Callahan and Michael Head - all very good, close to essential, but not quite essential. But you have to be careful with the essential, not to come too close to it. You need distance. You need time and space set aside. Sit down on the sofa. Do nothing else. Listen to nothing. Just Jandek. Just that: Jandek.
Me? I'm listening to Jim Fox's beautiful the city the wind swept away (Cold Blue Music). Oh, and the latest Do Make Say Think album which is pretty special too.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Wednesday 18 April 2007
Glass notes
You can read "Daily Updates of latest news for the Philip Glass Community" (Philip Glass community?) at Glass Notes (via Robert Gable's excellent aworks).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, music
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Thursday 22 March 2007
Paul Griffiths in Handcuffs
The excellent writer and music critic (and RSB contributor) Paul Griffiths (whose The Substance of Things Heard I heartily, nay vigorously, recommend) is featured in the latest Golden Handcuffs Review. The issue features two chapters from Paul's latest novel let me tell you (the full work is out next year with Reality Street Editions). As Steve noted, Paul explains that the novel is "a narrative in which the Ophelia of Shakespeare's Hamlet tells her story in her own words – literally, in that she is restricted to the 481 different words she speaks in the play (including both quartos as well as the First Folio text). Where other characters from the play speak, they are similarly confined to the words Shakespeare gave them."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, music
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Wednesday 21 February 2007
T.S. Eliot remix MP3s
T.S. Eliot remix MP3s (via disquiet). No. Really:
A 30-minute segment of a piece that Janek Schaefer performed one month ago, on January 20, as part of the Sound:Space sonic arts symposium in England, has been uploaded as the latest entry in the Gene Pool Podcast series of the Digital Media Centre. It achieves its meta state through simple means. A man's voice is heard so that each phrase is spoken first into one ear, then the other, and perhaps a third. That the man is saying things like "present in time future" and "what might have been is an abstraction" and, ultimately, "footfalls echo in the memory" gives the repetitions additional meaning. The poem, of course, is T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton." In time, an additional element is introduced, chiming background synthesis that nestles the stanzas (MP3).
For a more raw take on this layering, download the version on Schaefer's audioh.com website (MP3). In that edit, which is just over three minutes, nothing is heard but the voice, playing out thanks to three separate tone arms on his single, ingenious Tri-Phonic Turntable. More info at sound-space.info and digitalmediacentre.org. Full text of Eliot's poem, if you weren't encouraged to memorize it during school, at tristan.icom43.net.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, poetry
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Tuesday 13 February 2007
Tom McCarthy top ten
Our pal, Tom McCarthy, has a "music-related" list over at Dusted Magazine. He suggests that My Bloody Valentine's Loveless is "the best album ever? Maybe." And he's probably right. Tom's novel Remainder is just out in the States.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, music
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Friday 26 January 2007
New from Cold Blue Music
A couple of noteworthy new releases from the peerless Cold Blue Music:
Michael Fahres's The Tubes: "weaves together the breath-like sounds of the Atlantic Ocean as it strikes tubular volcanic rock formations on the Island of El Hierro (the westermost of the Canary Islands) with the breathy tones of Jon Hassell's trumpet and Mark Atkin's didgeridoo, creating a starkly beautiful study of breath patterns and the sounds of air in tubes".
Charlemagne Palestine's A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies for Maybeck: "a piece for two pianos played simultaneously in a tremolo style that Palestine calls "strumming," a technique that has defined his piano music since the late '60s. It spins out its sonic tapestry in surges and ebbs, and dense sonorities with hypnotically dancing overtones grow from its few opening pitches. This live recording from the Maybeck recital hall also contains Palestine's short comments about his life in California in the '70s and, accompanied by a rubbed brandy snifter, his singing of a few very short "ritual" songs in his unique falsetto vocal style".
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Tuesday 02 January 2007
Top albums of 2006
I've not really managed to figure out which my favourite (non-classical) albums of last year were as yet. Really, you know, I'm still quite tired! The Wire's Rewind 2006 (list not online annoyingly) often chimes with my own listening, as does Boomkat's chart, and the PitchforkTop 50 Albums of 2006 isn't a bad list either. I'm thinking, in no particular order whatsoever, that The Gentleman Losers' eponymous effort, Johann Johannsson's IBM 1401, Users Manual, Helios' Eingya, William Basinski's The Garden of Brokeness, Xela's The Dead Sea, Loscil's Plume and Library Tapes' feelings for something lost all deserve a mention and each were very fine in their own way. And I'm also thinking that this needs a lot more thought!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, personal
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Wednesday 13 December 2006
Keith Fullerton Whitman
Robert Gable's excellent blog aworks :: "new" american classical music -- "why listening to this music is interesting, important, and maybe even fun" -- reminds me about the music of Keith Fullerton Whitman (which is, in itself, a good enough excuse to bring Robert's blog to your kind attention) whom I discoved a couple of years ago and have unfathomably neglected since:
I know next to nothing about Keith Fullerton Whitman but I am starting to think he is the long lost son of Terry Riley, in his pure keyboard pieces anyway, starting with Stereo Music for Farfisa Compact Duo Deluxe, Drum Kit.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Friday 08 December 2006
Marcus Fjellstöm
As I'm thinking musical thoughts, I should probably let you know that Marcus Fjellstöm's second full-length recording, following the sublime Exercises in Estrangement, is just out. Entitled Gebrauchsmusik, his record label Lampse pimp the new recording thusly:
Taking influence from John Cage, Morton Feldman and David Lynch’s right hand man Angelo Badalamenti, Fjellström has developed a style which manages to transcend the current classical/electronic explosion. It is clear from the offset that the young musician has a deep understanding of what has come before as he blends elements of musique concrete, avant-classical and early electronic experimentations into his compositions.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Friday 08 December 2006
William Basinski
Very busy here, as you'd expect. So please don't expect too much posting from me over the next week or so. Today is my Dad's 60th birthday -- happy birthday Dad. On Monday, it is my Gran's funeral. Ironically, I'm working on a large essay about death and literature (due to appear in a Time Out guide to books sometime next year). And I'm listening to the wonderful work of William Basinski: melancholy tape loops of minor piano chords. Sad, of course, but very affecting and quite lovely.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music, personal
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Wednesday 27 September 2006
New Tom Waits CD
Ooh goody: "Tom Waits will release a CD called Orphans, due out for 21 November. The three CD's called Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards will contain coversongs and material made for film and theaterproductions, 'rough and tender tunes', according to Waits." (Via Musique Machine.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Friday 08 September 2006
Memories are made of this
Hahaha! I remember this:
I'm a bit of a connoiseur of "difficult" music. We had a record player in the sixth form common room, and whoever bought records in, got to play them on it. There was a challenge to play something so annoying that everyone would leave. Most of the sixth form were incredibly dull and would occasionally treat us to a Phil Collins or Meat Loaf album, which was reason enough, I think to impose on them something a little more out there. Psychic TV's The Full Pack - ten minutes of wolves howling was my masterpiece - though I think the most unlistenable thing we ever heard there was the first Alien Sex Fiend album; approach with care. Reading in this month's Mojo about An Electric Storm by White Noise from 1969, I had to get it, particularly with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Delia Derbyshire involved. I must admit I was half expecting some unlistenable hippy shit, but it's actually great - first track sounds like Stereolab! So, not that unlistenable after all.
The above from The Art of Fiction blog yesterday. Dude wants to try to have converted the world to Whitehouse!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Thursday 07 September 2006
Today in Manchester
Very short notice I know, but today, between 1-2pm, in the Committee Room, 2nd Floor, Manchester Central Library (in partnership with Bloodaxe) there is a free poetry reading featuring Clare Shaw and Jackie Kay.
I won't be at the poetry, but tonight I will be over at Manchester's Common bar, attending the midweek Licktronica event, where the superb Helios will be playing live. Helios's new CD Eingya is gorgeous, wonderful, fabulous ... As is just about everything else on the peerless Type label.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, manchester, music, poetry
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Thursday 06 July 2006
Ligeti on UbuWeb
Some new Ligeti goodies on UbuWeb:
György Ligeti: Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes (AVI): Video from an ARTE (France) broadcast of Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes. Since its world premiere in the Netherlands in 1963, Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes has been very rarely performed in public. The complicated scenographic staging, the detailed preparation by hand, the need for around ten technicians to activate more or less simultaneously the 100 metronomes, makes the demand for performances limited. Also, György Ligeti: Portrait, A Documentary by Michel Follin (1993). The Hungarian composer György Ligeti's biography typifies the displaced cosmopolitan, truly at home only in the international community of music. Appropriately enough, this revealing film portrait of his life and music has a train journey as its central metaphor, with Ligeti gazing through the window onto the changing middle-European landscape. His music - innovative, complex, brilliantly eclectic - accompanies his reflections and memories. (French, no subtitles).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Wednesday 14 June 2006
Polyphony sucks
Nice piece on RSB favourite Morton Feldman over at The New Yorker:
Wilfrid Mellers, in his book Music in a New Found Land, eloquently summed up Feldman’s early style: “Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear.” In other words, we are in the region of Wallace Stevens’s “American Sublime,” of the “empty spirit / In vacant space.”
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Monday 12 June 2006
Gyorgy Ligeti RIP
Sad news: the composer Gyorgy Ligeti is dead. Born in 1923, to Hungarian Jewish parents, in the predominantly ethnic Hungarian part of Romania's Transylvania region, his father and brother both died in concentration camps in World War II. Ligeti fled to Austria in 1956 after the Hungarian uprising and, in 1967, became an Austrian citizen. Along with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez, Ligeti helped revolutionise postwar music. An excerpt from his 1966 work Lux Aeterna was used on the bestselling soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey. Kubrick returned to Ligeti in 1999 using the composer's Musica Ricercata II as the theme for Eyes Wide Shut.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Tuesday 21 March 2006
György Kurtág
It may have passed your notice - it certainly passed mine - that a month ago (February 19th) was György Kurtág's 80th birthday. About 20 years ago, Kurtág, one of the leading European composers of our time, but hardly a household name here in the UK, wrote his largest work. Kafka-Fragmente is "a vast, 60-minute cycle of 40 separate movements amounting to a collage of Kafka's novels, letters and diaries set as the subtlest, most expressive duets for soprano and violin" (according to last Sunday's Observer). Performed by Juliane Banse and violinist Andras Keller, the work's four sections are a powerful testament to a great composer. If you like Shostakovich, give Kurtág a go.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: music
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Thursday 26 January 2006
Suilven Recordings
"Suilven Recordings is quickly turning into one of the greatest sources for unconventional and totally unique music", so says Mouvement Nouveau ("the newest and most dynamic monthly online publication on classical and experimental music"). Daniel Patrick Quinn, Suilven Recordings supremo, says, "Me and the live band The Rough Ensemble are embarking on a debut UK tour next month, parading militarily south to the capital in two VWs and finishing up on the south coast. The Suilven Empire has so far confirmed the following dates:
- Edinburgh Henry’s Cellar Bar Monday 13th Feb
- Nottingham Maze (Forest Tavern) Tuesday 14th Feb
- Manchester (venue TBC) Wednesday 15th Feb
- Cambridge Man On The Moon Thursday 16th Feb
- London Betsey Trotwood Friday 17th Feb
- Brighton The Fortune Of War Sunday 19th Feb
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, music
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