You know, sometimes you just want a nice long instrumental track with a steady groove and no annoying bits in it. This is the third Bola album I’ve bought and I haven’t a bad thing to say about any of them – other than sometimes it’s a little more perky than most IDM/Ambient. Melodically, it gently borders on Euro-pop fluff every once in a while. But that’s what you want in a CD that isn’t going to bug the hell out of other people within earshot of your stereo. Thank god there’s no dumb-ass techno kick drum making you want to hang yourself from the clothesline with your dead grannies panties. Of the three albums (there are many more out there that I haven’t heard yet) Soup is the pick of the litter. Want something easy and modern to groove to while reading or at work? Gotta love this one.

This morning, I started working on music and before I knew it I was side-tracked and ended up listening to the entire thing. Ok, so my impressions are:

a) Wow, some nice stuff in there.
b) “I thought that was supposed to one of the simple pieces! Holy crap, it’s like a four part fugue!”
c) I’ve never heard anything like it in my life – and I’ve listened to a hell of a lot of music.
d) There’s a lot of strings – some full on, but many of them short bow, pizzicato and spiccato
e) This will be almost impossible to play live (sans laptop) without either 10 musicians on stage or 5 multi-instrumentalists

I’m currently having this big-ass internal debate over whether I will ever play it live. Music labels pretty much expect you to go out and sell the product with concerts. It’s also how working musicians make a living, since CD sales alone won’t pay a mortgage.

Recorded music has always been my first love. I’m not a big concert-goer. Going to the symphony drives me nuts because the dynamics are pathetic. I want everything mic-ed and the loud stuff to blow me out of my chair – they way it does at home and at rock concerts. If Tchaikovsky could’ve heard his 5th Symphony on a kick-ass stereo he would never have conducted it live again.

What live music gains in energy it loses in subtlety. Why would I ever downgrade my own music? Concerts take huge amounts of time and planning and money. All for an inferior product and, more importantly, at the expense of a) your life and b) new compositions.

I think in the end, I will opt for being a composer and producer and not a performer. But we’ll see… As I said, I’m still debating. Performing is a huge amount of fun.

OK, I’m an idiot. Up till now, I’ve been using a giant gifs from random places on the net (like, Stephen Saxon’s Staff Paper Page) to get my staff paper. But now I discover there are Web apps to customize them for you.

Check out:

Music staff paper pdf generator

And if you have your own PDF generator, there’s customizable staff paper

Two of my all-time favorite pieces of piano music are Beethoven’s Opus 110 and 111.

What slays me is the left hand in the Opus 110 third movement fugue, pounding away in some kind of elephantine may-pole dance while the right twitters away above. And what a friggin tease it is! A smidge of the theme here, a smidge there. Ludwig, you could just play that for a full five minute track and I’d be grooving from the first note to the last.

I took piano lessons at one time entirely to play this piece. I had the score, I practically had every note memorized already. But my idiot teacher said I had to learn to play baby pieces first. (Oh… was I pissed.) She was this cranky old blind teacher who, I’m sure, wailed on the knuckles of her infant students with her white cane when they made mistakes. I would have been quiet happy to learn this thing one note at a time until I got it down. (I subsequently left that teacher and started learning on my own.)

Opus 111 is a whole other animal. Like 110, all the magic happens in the second half. But 111 only has two movements. Scads has been written about this sonata. A friend of mine even attained some international fame based on his scholarship of the piece. What appealed to me, as a teenager, hearing it for the first time, was the jazzy interlude in the middle of the second movement, arriving like a molehill of funky in an otherwise sleepy plain. That little chunk of happy “get-down” literally launched Beethoven into the 20th Century for me, alongside boogie and stride and every other kind of modern dotted note piano boppin’.

The version I ripped from vinyl was by Stephen Bishop (now known as Stephen Kovacevich). Who knows if it’s still in circulation, but unlike many, many other staid performances of 111, he fearlessly embraces the groove. If you see it, nab it.

A big handful of tracks on this CD could win this album the award for best trip-hop effort of the decade. Beautifully excecuted. And thank you for giving the pieces space to unfold. Though I’ve listened to it, easy, 300 times, the masterful track 5, Gizeh, completely slays me every time I hear it.

And dude, A-One, first class, double thumbs up, great band name. And thank you for the humor about the name’s origins.

Band’s website

A great many well-known "classical" pieces have caught my imagination over the years. Pieces that are universally recognized as being head and shoulders above the hills of symphonic mediocrity out there. Years ago, I bought everything I could find by Alan Hovhaness, hoping to discover more pieces like the St. Vartan Symphony, only to bring home tons of "final sale" vinyl that I would only play once.

Hovhaness is an American composer, born of a Scottish mother and an Armenian father. Both influences are blatant in his work. But the mixing of Armenian modes and lilting Scottish rhythms in the dark brain of this guy makes this Symphony No.9 sound more like a soundtrack for an Eastern European version of Lord of the Rings than anything else. The piece is hugely cinematic. The guy loves to switch tonal gears mid-sentence, so to speak. But the lushness and darkness of his strings just kill me. The only thing I can compare it to is maybe Scriabin’s Poem of Fire or Carl Nielsen’s 4th Symphony. This is definitely a journey piece, the kind of thing that demands you listen to it exclusively, and let it carry you into it’s own cryptic world.

There’s a guy gave a review on Amazon.com that pretty much sums up the attraction of this piece:

"I listen to this spectacular symphony EVERY night… I mean EVERY night…"

Here’s a vid of part of his 2nd Symphony, to give you a taste.

There are ambient artists and there are ambient artists. Robert Rich has been doing it for decades and he does it better than anyone else. And to me, this is his best album (that I’ve heard). I’m a sucker for great percussion, thoughtful percussion, where each hit means something as weighty as each note from a melodic instrument – say, any of the four notes in the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. And with the Seven Veils, that’s what you get – along with a bevy of other acoustic and electronic instruments and, bonus, this gorgeously intense electric guitar.

"With Seven Veils, Robert Rich set out to create an “ecstatic” work; many of his fans will be in the same state as well." -AmbiEntrance interview

He may have set out to create an ecstatic work, but let me assure you, he arrived at his destination, and we’re the "richer" for it.

Robert Rich website

Interview about the Seven Veils

Preview samples from Seven Veils

If you’ve never heard of this guy, run out and buy his music. This album came out in 1969 and I bought it around 1973. I won’t go into Moondog’s bizarre history (check Wikipedia for that). I’m much more interested in him as a composer and musician. The guy brought something intensely unique to the late 20th music scene.

You could characterize it as psychedelic orchestral folk. I prefer to think of it as Viking campfire music meets Charlie Parker meets Carl Orff. The overarching tone of every Moondog piece is a sense of whimsy. In particular, rhythmic whimsy. Quote, "I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time." He even had a name for it. He called it "snake time". It as the sound of the subway, of traffic, of erratic bird chirps. If he was a scientist he would have called it fractal time, and if he was Miles Davis, who knows what he would have called it.

Considering he was a blind street musician, I’ve always found his whimsy incredibly inspiring. I’ve always loved complex music. And fearless music, where the barriers between genres are ignored. Moondog epitomizes both for me. Unlike most artists who love a continuous, complex percussion beat, he knows how to rock an orchestra. At the same time, he is not afraid of simplicity – even to the point of naivete – which, I’m sure, hurt his credibility as a serious artist.

Personally, I couldn’t give a shit. I’ve had as much pleasure from listening to Moondog as from any half dozen Baroque pieces and certainly more than any David Munrow Gothic boxed set (which I’ve played to death).

The second album I bought by Moondog was his rounds, recorded with, I believe, his wife and daughters singing. There’s like, twenty-odd one and two minute tracks on this thing, and though it gets a bit much after number 15, there’s a lot to love there. Joyful? My god… it doesn’t get any more joyful than this.

Anyway, when I grow up, I want to be Moondog. White beard, Viking helmet, non-4/4 percussion and all.

Slideshow vid with music

Static vid with music

p.s. These two bits of music are barely indicative of Moondog’s range. Just go buy the music, you’ll thank me later.

Juxta Phona & Offthesky, !Escape Kit!

Ok, how cool is the name Offthesky? I have a solo album by him called, Gently Down the Stream. It’s a whole other ball of wax from this one. Much more pure electronic ambient. Whereas !Escape Kit! is percussive ambient. The whole CD is pretty analog/organic. It’d be great music to read by or just chill to. Me, I do most of my music listening at work, so this kind of album is perfect for me.

http://www.myspace.com/offthesky

http://www.offthesky.com

In 1998, a year before Simon Posford created Hallucinogen (and four years before Ott stood on the shoulders of the giant and turned it into Hallucinogen in Dub), Mr. Posford did a lovely collaborative venture with Youth and Soul James called Celtic Cross. With the Celtic craze still raging (culminating in the insanely great Afro-Celt Sound System), I get where Simon was coming from with this piece. I’ve always been a big fan of rock acoustic guitars. I got my musical eye teeth listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Neil Young solo, Led Zeppelin, Peter Hammill. Why not incorporate the acoustic guitar into trip hop? And dang… there are certain parts that just scream early Pink Floyd to me. Beautiful.

Anyway, I haven’t read much about this album anywhere, so I thought I’d give it a plug – for all those IDM/Psy lovers out there. The first track is just killer. The rest, much more chill than the first track gives promise of. Still, very much worth the price of admission.