Ten Albums

Well, I've decided to unshelf and dust off this blog during the corona virus lockdown, though with somewhat of a different focus. Obviously I'm not going to be attending many concerts to review: but while I'm stuck at home I have time to go through my entire collection of CD's, cassettes, and vinyl albums and give them all a fresh listen. I'm going to give mini-reviews for ten each time I post something here. As always, comments are welcome, and of course I'll post other topics about music (and art) as they come up.

As Is (Christine Abdelnour, Bonnie Jones, Andrea Neumann)
Shadows and hints from the border between silence, music, and noise. Once can almost grasp the first piece as a musical composition, but later even the form of the sounds is subverted into the ether. Ambience and cacophony are freely mixed, and in the end we wonder if there is a difference.

Aster (Aster Aweke)
The band is 1960’s R&B with a lot of brass – but those vocals (sung in Amharic) are something else entirely. Ms. Aweke’s singing has all of the melodic “turns” and expressivity of that style – but the quality is different in an indefinable way. There are also those two pieces of “chamber music” (songs accompanied by a single instrument): both of these are completely unexpected as she winds through improvisations on what are more akin to ragas (or “the blues”) than to “songs” or “musical numbers”. Another thing: it would appear that listeners to “popular” music in some countries have longer attention spans than in the US.

Lexical Music (Charles Amirkhanian)
The choice is yours: rhythm rendered as nonsense or nonsense rendered as rhythm. Either way it’s both hilarious and profoundly serious at the same time.

Messe des Jesuites de Pekin (Joseph-Marie Amiot, performed by XVIII-21, Ensemble Meihua Fleur de Prunus, Choeur du Centre Catholique Chinois de Paris, and Musique des Lumières)
Beautiful resonances mark this 18th-century fusion, though fusion is never actually achieved. The two styles (Chinese and European) stand out in sharp contrast to one another; they alternate but never intertwine. Both are rendered beautifully and with nuanced singing and playing (the music for communion is particularly striking, with its apparently anguished outcries resolving into peace) but in the end this seems to be a patchwork. One wonders if that would still be the case if the records of this rare music were more complete.

Nice Guys (Art Ensemble of Chicago)
A tour of “free” jazz through roots reggae turning impressionist, atonal walking blues, mad klaxons, an alien gongscape, African drumming, hints of “mainstream” jazz, pointillism over silence, something approaching rock and roll, and finally, an ecstatic trumpet and sax kaleidoscope. Fun!

Sequencia (Susan Alexjander)
Vibrations of a hypothetical DNA molecule suspended in space, rendered as pretty music with shimmering microtones and fragments of many styles. The tuning is derived from the structure of the molecule itself, though this is not audible in the listening; the sound of this occupies the mostly blank space between free jazz and ambient music.

Set of Five (Abel Steinberg Winant Trio)
Violin, piano and percussion: beautiful echoes from the beginning or our era, and from the middle of all eras.

Strange and Sacred Noise (John Luther Adams)
Vast sound booms out into the still Arctic air; a thunderously subtle instability of rhythm in a steady state of timbre. The sounds of nature expressed as abstract volumes.

To Venus and Back (Tori Amos)
None of these numerous songs are particularly interesting from a compositional viewpoint (though they’re not really uninteresting either) and the lyrics intentionally aren’t clearly audible – so at first it appears that there’s not that much to be said about this album. However, her voice is versatile and often beautiful, the band makes some interesting walls of sound on the second (live) CD, and some of the piano parts are oddly reminiscent of Hovhaness’ jhala-inspired piano stylings. Those things alone make it worth a listen.

Wings over Water (Stefan Micus)
A souvenir from the 1980’s when “New Age Music” was something other than just generic prettiness. Tuned flower pots create a gamelan of the imagination; zithers and the sarangi (the latter played as a percussion instrument!) form resonant accompaniments to the filigrees and arabesques of the Egyptian flute, and the voice – singing in an unknown language that “has no known meaning, therefore…” Beautiful stuff, and to me at least it’s still the same after many years.

So that's it for the music, for now. For another type of discussion altogether, check out the new sister blog of this one (it's about books, words, and random stuff about linguistics) and my new website about my books (yes, there's a book of this blog!).