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SXSW, All Roads Lead To Austin (Best of: Show 1) 
This Week's Featured Downloads
Exclusive Advance Release! Tompkins Square presents the third installment of its American Primitive Guitar-series Imaginational Anthem. As usual, the line-up is a mix of current talents and lost treasures, with the mesmerizing works of Richard Crandell and '60s banjo phenom George Stavis, and the contribution by young gun Shawn David McMillen among many other stand-outs including Greg Davis, Steffen Basho-Junghans, R. Keenan Lawler, Mark Fosson, and more.
We are very excited to welcome William Basinski's 2062 label to Other Music's download store. Longtime readers know that all of us at the shop are big fans of the sound sculpturist's work, the acclaimed The Disintegration Loops 1 being one of our very favorites of his many great releases. Essential for fans of ambient, minimalism and music concrete, here's what we wrote when this now-classic record first came out almost six years ago. William Basinski has been operating at the fringe of New York's art-music scene for some time now. He has previously released an album on the Raster-Noton label, and is also apparently responsible for a bit of Antony and the Johnsons music. With this release he'll hopefully become quite a bit more renown. The Disintegration Loops is comprised of elegantly beautiful orchestral tape loops that he had recorded in the mid-'80s and recently rediscovered. However, as the tapes were being transferred to a digital master, the analogue spool began to disintegrate which ended up further enhancing the already spectral quality of the music. These events unfolded concurrently to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Basinski witnessed the Twin Towers' decimation from his home and decided to release this music as an elegy to that moment, and indeed, he succeeded in creating a very fitting pastoral landscape that admirably does not diminish or trivialize that tragic event in any way. The music uncannily transcends time as the loops swell and fray into seeming infinity. This is an undeniably tragic and stunning tribute, and one of the best and most prescient records I've heard all year. -Michael Klausman
We've often reviewed solo piano or piano centric albums here at Other Music, but they've generally tended to be in a minimalist vein and frequently stamped with the influence of composers of quietude, such as Satie or Morton Feldman. However, there is something to be said at times for a maximalist approach as well, and perhaps no other composer in history executed that tendency better than Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988), a man whom I've seen referred to more than once as the "Anti-Feldman". Sorabji, called a "one-man musical apocalypse" by composer and critic Kyle Gann, largely stood outside the current of trends in twentieth-century composition. He was born in Essex, England to a Zoroastrian Parsi father and Spanish mother. Largely self-taught as a composer, he wrote a staggering 11,000 pages of music in his lifetime, most of it for solo piano, and frequently of extraordinary length, with certain pieces taking anywhere from four to eight hours to perform. The twenty-five "Transcendental Studies" included on this CD are but the first quarter in a piece that is a total of seven hours in duration. The virtuosic technical demands called for in his music basically ensured that they weren't to be heard in public or on disc for the majority of Sorabji's lifetime. Being a somewhat eccentric and exacting character, Sorabji ceased to allow the performance of his work from the 1930s until the late 1970s, with the idea being that if it wasn't done right he didn't want it done at all. He lived in the English countryside in near total isolation, plugging away page by page at scores even he could no longer perform, while writing highly erudite, and frequently vituperative, articles for a handful of obscure mid-twentieth century music journals. Luckily for the composer, in the '70s and '80s, a young generation of pianists rediscovered his work and dedicated themselves to the nearly super-human task of playing the unplayable. The twenty-five "Transcendental Studies" performed here by the incredible pianist Fredrik Ullen are possibly the best and most easily digestible introduction to Sorabji's work. Generally clocking in at somewhere between one and three minutes, each piece essentially operates as a microcosm of Sorabji's vast sound world. Much has been made of Sorabji's music being nearly unplayable, of pieces that seem to require ten hands to play, of extraordinarily rapid passages comprised of a thousand notes a minute, of inexplicable juxtapositions and extreme contrapuntal density. Although it is complex, it is far from unlistenable, with virtually none of the academic dryness one associates with Serial composition or various other twentieth century compositional dead ends. Conlon Nancarrow and Cecil Taylor both come to mind as references while listening, but mostly in the way that the interior logic and fluidity of their work isn't all that hard to grasp when your mind becomes open to it. In truth, it's actually not all that difficult to begin the process of absorption of Sorabji's pieces because his music has an ever-present Oriental melodic sense that seems to act as a portal to understanding. It's a difficult music to describe for sure, and I've seen some writers forced to liken it to mushroom trips, arabesques, and magic carpets. But sitting here listening to the infinite patterns and limitless expressive combinations Sorabji conjures while unknown vistas unfold in my mind's eye, it's not hard to see why. -Michael Klausman
This long-running Japanese psychedelic band is one of the few who really can live up to such a simple and over-used tag as "psychedelic." They are not psych-rock, or pop-psych, or any other derivation that really means "lots of guitar solos" or something similar; Ghost's music is a free-flowing, often mind-altering living organism that can transport the listener from the moment you drop the needle. But as with most bands of this ilk, as great as their albums may be, there is little doubt that the live experience can move on a whole different level, as there is something almost cosmic that happens when this band performs. Their live shows can take on many different forms, and even when they're performing well-known songs from their albums they tend to improvise and rethink old ideas on a nightly basis. The group's excellent live Temple Stone album from 1997 took a certain type of theoretical approach as its leaping-off point, collecting the best of a series of concerts the band performed at temples and other sacred spaces throughout Japan, reinterpreting songs from their catalog, taking the tracks to dramatically different places. This live opus, Overture: Live In Nippon Yusen Soko 2006, has a far different premise, however: Set up in an aging stone warehouse on the Yokohama Bay, Ghost embarked on an hour-long journey of pure free improvisation. With guitar, voice, saxophone, flute, piano, percussion, voice, tape loops, and contrabass, slowly evolving moods echo around this cavernous space as the group lets the music dictate their direction, playing the silence as much as they do their instruments, and the results, even coming off the cool confines of a hard plastic disc, are intoxicating. -Karen Soskin
At long last, here's the first issue of some truly haunted, affected soundtrack work. It comes courtesy of Marc Wilkinson, a British film score composer and musician best known for Lindsay Anderson's If..., and several Hammer horror/"Quatermass" projects for television and the big screen. His music for the 1971 Tigon production of Blood on Satan's Claw plays an integral part in that film's bewitching, lurid tale of demonic seduction and murder among the teenagers of a remote British village. The film itself is one shade removed from the cover of Black Sabbath's first album come to life, accented by a fragile, menacing score, based around a descending chord progression known as "the Devil's Interval." Electronic swoops and a folk-goth menace throughout make for a pronounced, tantalizing piece of work which holds its own against the majesty of Lubos Fiser's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. -Doug Mosurock
If respect and influence were monetary currency, the D.I.T.C. (Diggin in the Crates) crew would be wealthier than Jay-Z. I don't even know if that analogy made any sense at all but I think you get my point, right? The collective of Fat Joe, Diamond D, Showbiz, A.G., Buckwild, O.C, and the late Big L and Pun have consistently been putting out classic, underground, true-school hip-hop since the early '90s. Only Pete Rock and Gang Starr can rival them for quality, output and respect over the same time period. This album collects some of the harder-to-find indie releases that the crew has released over the last 10 years. Highlights are a plenty, but the lesser known D.I.T.C. affiliates -- including a teenaged Remy Ma and Big Pun protege Milano, as well as a rare track from Brand Nubian -- set this one apart from other collections they've put out over the years. In short, a banger from start to finish and a reminder to one's self why you loved hip-hop so much in the first place. It sounds timeless to me, and any fan of new-school, true-school scholars like 9th Wonder, Dilla and Madlib who isn't familiar with the D.I.T.C. should consider this required listening! -Duane Harriott
An album compiling three early Luomo (a/k/a Vladislav Delay) 12"s (for a total of 6 tracks and 76 minutes), Vocalcity spikes and sputters, with lots of skipping -- not skipping CDs, but hop-skipping rhythms. Delay's pretty, dancefloor French-style disco/house even has whispery, sultry R&B vocals most of the way through. A populist record with an underground, distorted sound that unfolds around the edges and in deep dub tones, the beats sometimes wash out to ambience and murmur, like water on ink. Think Moodyman, Basement Jaxx -- deep house that snags the listener on multiple levels: head to heart to feet. -Robin Edgerton |
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