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Paul Lewis: A Gorgeous Gallop Into the Infinite

Justin Davidson — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:06:04 +0000

At a recent late-night recital, Paul Lewis sat a piano in a penthouse party space and played one of Schubert’s last works, the Sonata in A, D. 959, as if he were consoling everyone in the room over the composer’s early death. At such close quarters, the audience, seated at candlelit café tables, could hear the Steinway’s feline purr and the pianist’s grunts. They could make out the shadows that dappled each glowing note. In larger concert halls, daubs of color merge, and flecks of grit get buffed away. But on recording, despite the artificial perfection of the studio process, Lewis can emulate the unforced intimacy of a private chamber.

Playing the piano is a highly unnatural activity. Musicians torment their tendons and train their fingers to drum on thin slabs of wood, whitened and polished to resemble elephant tusk, which then trigger complicated hammers that thud against wires stretched so taut that they would splinter their casing of bent wood if they were not held in place by a powerful steel frame. The desired result of all this calibrated pressure and elaborate percussion is a fluid, songlike and spontaneous outpouring of the human soul. Anyone who planned such a cumbersome, inefficient process from scratch would seem like a crank. How could it compete with simpler ways of producing music, like humming, thumping an animal skin, or blowing into a tube?

But just listen to Paul Lewis playing Beethoven or Schubert, and suddenly the piano seems like the most direct of instruments. Beethoven’s penultimate sonata, No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110, opens with a tune so tender it could practically be a lullaby, and that is how he shapes it. Without preciousness or melodrama, and with a downy pianissimo, he beguiles the ear into thinking that this is the only way the passage could possibly go. It’s not: Daniel Barenboim, for instance, pauses theatrically after the first A flat major chord, and then goes on to cram so many tempo adjustments, emphases, and expressive hesitations into a few measures that the theme comes out sounding jittery and hung over.

Expression is a gnarled topic in music. Do performers channel their own feelings through their fingers or reenact the emotions of long-dead scribblers who encoded them on the five-line staff? Or do the best somehow manipulate listeners’ emotions by administering the right dose of rubato? How can a performance sound spontaneous when the player knows every millisecond from memory and plays the piece every other night over the course of a month-long tour? And yet somehow, all these shades of volatility, premeditation, decoding, and technique mingle to produce music of imponderable beauty. It’s a kind of alchemy that only a few musicians can execute, almost none as completely as Lewis.

Concert seasons are dominated by a generation of hyper-analytic pianists with diamond-cut technique and a fervent attention to detail. But Lewis doesn’t simulate passion or call attention to his intelligence; he makes the music sound as if it were as thoughtlessly beautiful as a stream flowing over a stone. There’s nothing thoughtless about it, of course. Lewis has studied with Alfred Brendel, but he reminds me more of Artur Schnabel in the straightforward and natural way that he utters a musical phrase. His career has grown at a measured pace, and his repertoire has expanded more slowly still. He rarely touches new music, has a cool relationship with Chopin, and hasn’t been spotted near a Russian score in years. But his complete set of Beethoven sonatas and his survey of Schubert’s late music have made him a specialist in profundity.

Schubert was only 32 when he died, and the last sonatas should by rights have been the opening to decades of unknown marvels, so there’s really no such thing as “late Schubert.” Yet Lewis plays the final sonatas as the observations of a man enriched by a long lifetime’s worth of memories. By turns regretful, vibrant, angry and serene, these pieces seem to speak of death by distilling life to a musical essence. Desperate melancholy is not in fashion these days, but Lewis doesn’t care. He listens to Schubert’s confession and then makes it so utterly his own that it’s hard to listen to the B-flat sonata, D/ 960 without experiencing a stupefying sense of loss. The emotions that Lewis finds in these scores are not always pretty. He gives the final movement of the C-minor sonata (No. 19, D. 958), for example, a snarling, diabolical lilt: It’s a tarantella of the doomed, a gorgeous gallop into the infinite.

Seraphic Fire, Ave Maria: Gregorian Chant

Steve Holtje — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 18:14:14 +0000

Comparing styles from many countries and centuries in a thematically unified repertoire

The Florida-based vocal ensemble Seraphic Fire has long been noted for its programming, and Ave Marial is its greatest achievement yet. The Ave Maria title accurately reflects the album’s devotion to music about the Virgin Mary, but the Gregorian Chant subtitle requires further elucidation: Of the 18 tracks here, eight are not chant (seven polyphonic works, one chordal piece) and at least three of the chants (two Ambrosian, one Iberian) are definitely outside the slippery category of “Gregorian.” Even within that category, we get a broadly defined array.

This is a good thing: Listeners get to compare styles from four countries across at least eight centuries in a thematically unified repertoire. Director Patrick Dupré Quigley adds further variety by switching up men’s or women’s voices in the chant, and by usually alternating chant and polyphony. Despite the variety, the program coheres quite well to 21st-century ears. The centerpiece of the program, of course, is des Prez’s Ave Maria, with its appropriately serene yet majestic beauty. Seraphic Fire’s smoothly blended sound is apt for this music, making it pleasurable even for non-aficionados.

Conrad Tao and Timo Andres: The Past is Prologue

Justin Davidson — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 20:54:23 +0000

Some young composers have had enough of the future; it’s finally time for the past. Impatient with avant-gardes, clean slates, or radical reinventions, they sift lovingly through their influences, trying them on rather than laboring to shed them. The phenomenal teenaged pianist-composer Conrad Tao has titled his first full CD Voyages, but it’s really about building a habitat out of scraps he’s picked up here and there. He programs his own delicate aphorisms alongside those of Rachmaninoff and Ravel, and even though a century separates them, they sound plucked from the same basket. Timothy Andres’s gurus are Brian Eno and Mozart, and he is not content simply to evoke their styles; on his latest album, Home Stretch, he rewrites their music just enough to make it his own.

The mixture of humble tribute and hubristic theft has a fine pedigree in music. Most composers start out by imitating their elders, and some make a fetish of recycling. Stravinsky, whose spirit animates Home Stretch, took apart and recomposed 18th century Italian dances, ragtime pieces, Russian folk songs, and the dazzling orchestration of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Andres disassembles Stravinsky. The album’s title track, a 20-minute concerto written for the pianist David Kaplan and the Metropolis Ensemble, opens with a Rite-like haze of high winds and moves towards an orgy of broken ostinatos. Rhythmic motives get blasted into crystalline shards, rearranged around irregular rests. A steady tic-tock hiccups and picks up a different pulse. The dancing piano suddenly changes course. Andres is a fine pianist, and the part has the fluid agility of a composer who writes with all 10 fingers.

The album’s keystone is an even more Stravinskian project: an idiosyncratic rewrite of Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto. Mozart barely sketched in the piano’s left hand, figuring he could fill it in on the spot; Andres has used the blank areas as an opening for his imagination. The original is always recognizable, but the piano leads it through a series of fun-house distortions, so that at times it sounds as if it were gurgling underwater, at others it goes rampaging wildly through keys and zones of dissonance, reappearing a few minutes later in deadpan sync with the original. Andres has one talent that eludes most high-minded composers: a sense of humor. There are passages in the concerto that remind me of the mirror scene in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, where Chico plays the role of Groucho’s not-always-obedient reflection. But Andres is offering more than a gag. During the cadenzas, especially in the final movement, his music drifts into new terrain, a contemplative essay in big, gonging chords. At that moment, I wish that Andres had kicked away the scaffolding of Mozart and just kept pulling at the thread of his own invention.

Conrad Tao constructs his self-portrait of the artist as a young man by making the once-obvious point that the relationship between playing and composing is indissoluble. The emerging virtuoso makes his entrance with an anti-virtuosic piece, Meredith Monk’s serenely minimalistic “Railroad (Travel Song),” which pistons along unhurriedly like a local train through countryside. Then comes a pensive selection of Rachmaninoff preludes, each a magical daub of color. The playing induces shivers. The C minor prelude (Op. 23, No. 7) gushes out in quiet cataracts, lyrical and shimmering, a tour de force of delicacy and power. The fast and fiendish “Scarbo” movement from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit is a more obvious way for a prodigy to plant his banner, but Tao spins it into gossamer, all nocturnal flutterings and murmurs.

What Tao the composer inherits from his musical forebears is both a stylistic toolkit and the desire to translate dreams into vivid miniatures. Each of his four Vestiges expands some fleeting impression into momentary musical obsession. “Upon ripping perforated pages” translates the controlled tearing sound into a spasm of elegant violence, which in turn evolves into a high-speed etude. The more ambitious “Iridescence,” for piano and iPad, combines Monk-ish repeated patterns with aquatic electronic burbles. The piece deliberately treads water, hovering amid beautiful sonorities with nowhere special to go.

Interview: Julia Holter

Seth Colter Walls — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 19:05:56 +0000

Julia Holter may have gone to school to study formal composition, but she vaulted to prominence on the strength of albums like Tragedy and Ekstasis, which balanced pop pulses and harmonies with harder-to-define explorations, ones that felt more distinguished than the experiments of other home-recording phenoms.

On her new album, Loud City Song, Holter also worked in professional studios, and occasionally with a full complement of session musicians on hand to play her own arrangements. While on a ginger-beer break from a recent sound-check, she spoke with eMusic’s Seth Colter Walls about blending home and studio recording practices, as well as her influences, which range from Joni Mitchell to the post-minimalist opera composer Robert Ashley.

How did recording in a “proper” studio setting, with a full backing ensemble, challenge you or change the process?

Recording was actually really great; it wasn’t uncomfortable. A lot of the vocals I recorded in Cole’s [the producer's] studio at home — which was a more comfortable space than like a professional studio. We recorded the instruments in the studio but also recorded a bunch of stuff at home. Also, I spent a year and a half before that writing and recording demos of all the songs. I could try things out. I didn’t have to worry about the demos being perfect, like in the past where the demos were the final recording. So it was really liberating and fun — it was so much more playful, actually. So I guess the best of both worlds!

Previous projects of yours have had literary inspirations, including Greek tragedy. The influence this time is derived from the Colette novella Gigi.

Well, Collette’s text was an influence, for sure, but it was maybe even more the film that came out of the text — the musical that a lot of people know. I grew up watching that musical, and I’m not normally much of a “musicals” person. I just grew up with that particular one. It didn’t occur to me at first to make a record inspired by Gigi. It’s one of those things that you grow up with that you don’t think of making art out of — because it’s just something personal, really. I guess in the end the only things I really can use are the things that I really love or the things that I respond to the most — and I just have to be honest with myself.

You’ve also mentioned Joni Mitchell as an influence on the record. I was thinking of The Hissing of Summer Lawns a bit on “In the Green Wild.”

Yeah, there’s this one song on The Hissing of Summer Lawns called “The Jungle Line” that musically inspired “In the Green Wild.” It’s amazing just for a simple reason: It’s very percussive and cool. She’s another one of those people that I listened to at a very formative age so much — and I don’t listen to as much now — but I have just in my bones or something.

I’ve also heard you mention affection for the American “maverick” composer Robert Ashley. What about him inspires you?

I don’t know how much I am influenced by him, but I’m definitely very inspired by him. I don’t know how much you can tell of that by listening to my music. But [someone else] told me the other day my music reminded them of Robert Ashley, which I thought was interesting.

I really love his “Automatic Writing” piece. I think it’s one of my favorite things ever: just hearing these utterances and not being sure what they mean or what they’re saying — they’re mysterious, they create a mood. You don’t often see music or art dealing with the psychology of utterances that you can’t understand, and that piece just lives in the world, explores it for like twelve minutes. That’s a cinema of sound.

Do you feel like people have a good grip on “your sound” or your project? And does that change as you move from venue to venue — or even from country to country?

I don’t feel like anyone has a good idea of how to describe what I’m doing — which is good news, I think. Because I definitely change what I do a lot. For me, my records are all very different. It’s probably clearer to other people what makes my songs similar than it is to me actually.

So I’ve chosen to keep just my regular my normal name, my birth name, and not make a project name because of this — to maintain independence form some kind of a project that has a specific goal. I started off making music as a composer in school and in a way I still think of myself as a composer who is behind the scenes, building things. As opposed to, like, a performer, or someone who is doing a specific thing and they have this name that people know them as.

Listening to the instrumental passages on Loud City Song made me wonder if you could ever see yourself returning to those conservatory roots, and making an instrumental album of compositions.

Well I have in the past, but for some reason recently I’ve just wanted to make music with singing. But I don’t necessarily know that I always will!

Free eMusic Samplers

eMusic Editorial Staff — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 18:00:35 +0000

It’s easy to get stuck in a musical rut. The amount of new music that’s released, at this point, on a daily basis can feel overwhelming, and the deluge can cause you to run panicked to old favorites instead of looking for something new. That’s where we come in. We’ve assembled this page of samplers — all of them free — as a way to help you find your next favorite band without burning through your precious balance or making you spend hour after hour digging through the stacks. Just grab a bunch, load them on to your music player of choice, and let the discovery begin.

The Dowland Project, Night Sessions

John Schaefer — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 20:36:58 +0000

An album that reveals more of itself with each listen

The Dowland Project features the voice of John Potter, former member of the renowned Hilliard Ensemble and one of England’s most thoughtful and expressive singers of both early music and considerably more modern fare. As the name indicates, The Dowland Project began as a way to reinterpret some of the timeless songs of the Elizabethan composer John Dowland, and included contributions from Stephen Stubbs on lute and baroque guitar, Maya Homburger on baroque violin and then, in a gently subversive and totally effective touch, the modern bass of Barry Guy and the sax/clarinet player and composer John Surman. But each succeeding album has expanded the group’s range, backward to medieval music and forward to pieces created by the musicians themselves. These latter works are what make Night Sessions different from earlier Dowland Project records: About half of the album consists of medieval songs, but the other half features works improvised very late at night in the same church where the ensemble has made most of its recordings. The pieces flow together beautifully, linked by a sonic environment and a noir-ish approach that often makes it difficult to guess (without peeking at the liner notes) which are the old works and which the new. Potter had some medieval poems with him during the session, so the newly-created songs do have a direct connection to the older ones.

For those not inclined to speculation, “Can vei la lauzeta mover” is a troubadour song, by the enduring Bernard de Ventadorn; another of the most striking tracks is “Fumeux fume,” a very tricky, contemporary-sounding work that is in fact from Solage, one of the wild 14th-century composers who made the French and Burgundian courts a haven for the avant-garde. On the other hand, “I Sing of a Maiden,” which sounds like it could be centuries old, was created during the album’s late-night session. “Theoleptus 22″ is also notable: a Byzantine chant originally intended for the Hilliard Ensemble’s surprise hit record with the improvising sax player Jan Garbarek but re-purposed here. Night Sessions may not have the immediate appeal of the group’s first album, the remarkable In Darkness Let Me Dwell. But with its sustained, nocturnal mood and subtle musical surprises, this is an album that reveals more of itself with each listen.

Group 180, Group 180

John Schaefer — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 20:28:56 +0000

An excellent sample of the influential Hungarian group's work

Group 180 was not just Hungary’s foremost contemporary music ensemble; for many years, until their breakup in 1990, they were one of Eastern Europe’s lifelines to the sounds of contemporary Western European and American music. Taking advantage of a relatively porous Iron Curtain in Hungary in the late ’70s and ’80s, Group 180 introduced the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich to new audiences, and also championed emerging Hungarian composers who were likewise creating music that incorporated repetition, electronics, and world music influences. This collection is an excellent example of Group 180′s work. Tibor Szemszo and Laszlo Melis are both represented here, and both would go on to become leading figures in the country’s new music scene. Szemszo’s opener, “Water Wonder,” begins with a stuttering, fragmented series of motifs that gradually coalesce into a pulsating whole. Melis’s “Etude For Three Mirrors” wastes no time and dives right into the sound world of Steve Reich’s “Octet” and “Music for 18 Musicians” — a glittering, percussive surface and a steadily moving harmonic progression pushing everything forward.

Reich himself is represented by his early (and genuinely Minimalist) “Music for Pieces of Wood,” but the major American work here is Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together,” his best-known composition and one which wears its sociopolitical concerns right where everyone can see (hear?) them. The spoken text was written by a prisoner who would shortly be killed in the infamous Attica prison uprising in 1971. Propulsive, angular, relentless and questioning, “Coming Together” demands — and receives — a committed performance. The work is often paired with Rzewski’s “Attica,” to which it is both thematically and musically related. Group 180 offers that piece here; it serves as a more melodic, poignant conclusion to a record that has been unavailable in the West for many years and has now made a welcome return.

Chris Thile, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1

Hilary Saunders — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 13:00:48 +0000

Tackling Bach with astonishing elegance on the mandolin

MacArthur Genius Grant winner, Punch Brothers frontman, Nickel Creek singer and mandolin player Chris Thile surprisingly, and unabashedly, hails Johann Sebastian Bach as one of his most important musical influences. In the liner notes of his new album, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1, he specifically mentions Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s 1981 rerecording of the Goldberg Variations as the album that “humanized” classical music for him. While Thile has collaborated with a number of high-caliber orchestral musicians like violinist Hilary Hahn and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, he tackles three Bach violin sonatas and partitas by himself on Vol. 1, and does so with astonishing elegance on the mandolin.

The shrill timbre of the mandolin, an unlikely choice for unaccompanied Bach, brings a certain brightness (sonically and metaphorically) to Thile’s interpretations, which honor the disparate dynamics, stretching arpeggios and seamless harmonic transitions of their original texts. His chordal playing is especially apparent in the Tempo Di Borea movement of the first partita and his stunningly speedy precision marks the Presto movements of both the first sonata and partita. However, Thile’s creative liberties conjure the most excitement, as he constantly adapts and improvises fills for his instrument when the original sounds can’t be recreated.

The same modernization that marked the instrumental choice also manifests itself in the structure of the album. The hour-long Vol. 1 includes just three classical works, but is divided by movement into tracks about the same length as most songs on the radio, thereby rendering the record more digestible for pop-music consuming audiences. And if Thile can introduce classical music to other listeners and demographics with just his stature and skill, then maybe he really is a genius, after all.

Timo Andres, Home Stretch

Seth Colter Walls — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 13:00:42 +0000

The latest from a pure double threat with monstrous technique

When Timo Andres made his debut full-length recording for Nonesuch in 2009, with the two-piano set Shy and Mighty, most of the talk focused on how it seemed to announce a genuine young composer of interest. Less mentioned was Andres’s own monstrous technique, yet Andres is not so much a great composer with sufficient piano skills as a pure double threat. That’s going to be harder to ignore, starting with Home Stretch: For this follow-up, Andres has taken on Mozart’s “Coronation” piano concerto, along with a few new compositions of his own. Well: Make that one brand-new composition, and two halvsies.

For example, Andres’s “Coronation” is a “co-composition,” which takes the infamously unfinished left-hand piano part of Wolfgang’s and completes it with a 21st-century American, post-minimalist flair. Andres humbly calls his rumbling additions (mostly found in the left-hand part) a “bastardization” of the Mozart style, but more often than not, his crunchy dissonances and harmonic detours bear some relationship to the master’s roadmap. And the performance, undertaken with the Metropolis ensemble, has a flowing, unified feel. It’s the rare “based on” item that feels impishly creative while remaining sufficiently reverent.

The other two “originals” on this program are strong, too. “Home Stretch,” though it shows up on this album as one long track, is a piano concerto in three movements that’s worth its deliberate pacing. And “Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno” works as a counterpart to Andres’s “completed” Mozart concert. Once again, Andres’s touch steers clear of basking in easy familiarity; his final setting of the Eno song “By This River” is recognizable, but hardly derivative.

The only thing working against this album-as-an-album is that it perhaps doesn’t “flow” in an ideal way; you might be better served by taking each of these divergently structured pieces separately, at different sittings. But, as jaded recital audiences in New York have found whenever the pianist stuns both with his own pieces as well as with repertoire as familiar as Schumann and Chopin, it may only be because Andres is an artist with more talents than a single album’s sequencing can contain.

Caleb Burhans, Evensong

Seth Colter Walls — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 13:00:32 +0000

The prominent New York composer's first album devoted to his own work

While composer/singer/multi-instrumentalist Caleb Burhans has been a prominent member of New York’s contemporary new-music scene for years — writing for the Newspeak ensemble, or else backing up Grizzly Bear on Letterman — he hasn’t yet seen a full album devoted to his own compositions. Evensong changes all that, which is a good thing.

But it’s not an all-eyes-on-me-style affair; Burhans’s characteristic part-of-the-team philosophy is still present. Per the title, a reference to the Anglican evening prayer ritual and the composer’s own avowed agnosticism — this is “service”-oriented music of a secular nature. There’s some stunning choral work from the Trinity Wall Street group on the opening and closing tracks, and crisp playing from Alarm Will Sound on three of the numbers in between. But the use of these elite groups (both of which Burhans has played in himself) is not an end in itself, just as Burhans’s own motive doesn’t seem to be writerly glory. The microtonality and other experimental effects are there to be found, but they never wholly obscure the melodic motifs. This is a program of music meant to stir contemplation, not awe.

In practice, this means most of the pieces move slowly; there are few outright explosive moments. But that doesn’t rule out drama. After spending 11 minutes to set up a slow-moving, powerful three-chord guitar riff — such as the one that crops up toward the end of “oh ye of little faith (do you know where your children are)” — you can imagine many composers milking a pregnant pause, and then letting rip with something extreme. Not here. The piece just ends; it walks you up to the edge of something grave and then lets you alone with your thoughts. This exercise of restraint amounts to its own stunning effect.

It’s this surprisingly potent form of subtlety that reigns throughout: as with the glorious C-sharp major culminations of both the “Magnificat” and “Nunc Dimmittis” settings, the gently complex string parts that drive the beginning of “Iceman Stole the Sun,” or the soft introduction of amplified bass to “Amidst Neptune” (a piece that also features some Glass-like piano writing). The Tarab Cello Ensemble also handles the swooning (and gradually phasing) glissandos of “The Things Left Unsaid” with such a light touch that the encroaching complexity sneaks up on you. Few new music albums work equally well as close listening experiences and as prompts for sinking into meditation, but that’s the sort of service Evensong offers.

Daniele Gatti, Stravinsky: Petrouchka, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)

Daniel Felsenfeld — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 13:33:33 +0000

Appropriately wondrous, magical and drunk as the music requires

Though Stravinsky remains the quintessential Russian composer, his most famous — and infamous — work, Petrouchka, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), premiered in Paris almost exactly a century ago (in case you have been wondering why all the Rite-themed hoo-hah lately) and is therefore a de-facto French piece. How important, then (not to mention sexy) to have Daniele Gatti’s rendering helming the Orchestre Nationale de France — a French reading of this “French” opus.

The Rite, while built with enormous punctilio by one of the fussiest composers in history, packs a decibel-level punch. And while you’d think that such a micromanaged orchestral work would be open to precious little in the way of interpretation, you would be wrong. It is easy — and no doubt tempting — to push the Rite to its storied pre-punk edges and burn it up for “wow” factor. But Daniele Gatti reminds us that holding the extremes in check can net a dazzling payoff — for an example listen to his final moment of “The Adoration of the Earth,” one of the most potently taut iterations on record, the big come-to-Jesus of the piece, though starting there will deny you the fun of getting there. Not to say that there isn’t merit to the opposite (read: Bernstein’s) approach, which is to just throw everything out there at every moment, but this Rite, while no salve or “easy listening” version, is a different route to the same dizzying effect.

As if this was not enough — and it ought to be — this reading of Petrouchka is as open-throttled and shot through with bonhomie as his Rite is coiled-to-pounce. These two ballets, though written in succession, are very different works, and Gatti has the good sense to play to their respective strengths. His depiction of Stravinsky’s youthful country fair is appropriately wondrous, magical and drunk as the music requires.

Hidden Treasures 2013

eMusic Editorial Staff — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 12:00:21 +0000

Every year, hardcore music fans wrestle with the same wonderful problem: There are too many records. Even if we listened to nothing but new records, non-stop, the numbers just don’t add up; we’re going to miss something, it’s certain, something strange and special. But what? What are we missing?

We at eMusic know this exquisite pain better than anyone; the question “What are we missing?” keeps us up nights. Our Hidden Treasures feature is a partial answer. The records in this list span genres, from vintage soul to frozen Gothic pop; from death-obsessed classical song cycles to sloppy garage rock; from chamber music to churning doom metal. Some of these records were overshadowed by higher-profile releases in the same style; some are on labels that never get the attention they deserve. Some of these records are simply damned weird. They all caught our ears and hearts, however, for one reason or another, and we think they’ll do the same to you.

Bleak Visions

Lang: Death Speaks

David Lang
Cantaloupe Music

First, I feel it's important to say that, as of this writing, David Lang is nowhere near death. I see him walking through the neighborhood from time to time and he is his usual cheery, deadpan self. And yet the Bang on A Can co-founder has produced an incandescent string of pieces in recent years focused exclusively on death and dying. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion gravely watches a poor... young girl freeze to death as passersby ignore her. His yet-to-be-recorded Love Fail takes an oblique look at the fatal love affair between Tristan and Isolde. His haunting, drifting Salle des Departs (recorded here under the title "Depart") was written for a hospital morgue. And then there's Death Speaks, a five-movement work which takes up most of this recording. Here, death is not an event, but a figure, like something out of an engraving by Albrecht Dürer. But unlike the American folk song "O Death," in which Death is a scary, implacable foe — the singer asks, "oh Death, won't you pass me over another year" — Lang has assembled a text in which Death is addressing us, with a message that is ultimately reassuring, and comforting.

The text is built around the many and varied instances in the songs of Franz Schubert in which the figure of Death speaks. The music, as in the other death-themed works named above, has a transparent texture that sets off and subtly colors those texts, and the voice delivering it. That voice belongs to Shara Worden, one of the current breed of musicians who move fluidly between the worlds of classical music and indie rock. While still leading her own band, My Brightest Diamond, Worden has become the go-to voice for the so-called "indie classical" crowd. The rest of the ensemble here is equally remarkable: Bryce Dessner, one of the twin electric guitarists from the popular rock band The National, and a fine composer himself; Owen Pallett, the violinist, vocalist and composer who formerly recorded as Final Fantasy; and Nico Muhly, the in-demand composer and keyboardist whose works range from choral to electronic. With essentially an all-star band, Lang has chosen to write music which is not conventionally virtuosic, relying instead of the quartet's musicality and precision. The results are quietly stunning. Highlights include the gentle, chiming minimalism of part 1, "You Will Return"; the resonant percussive use of the piano's bass end in part 2, "I Hear You"; the deft, rhythmic use of the violin in part 3, "Mist Is Rising"; and the lovely duet that blossoms in part 5, "I Am Walking."

After Death Speaks, the album invites you to relax in the dark-hued but warm ambience of "Depart," for chorus and strings. Probably best not to think too much of the French morgue for which it was written.
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Meir

Kvelertak
2013 | Roadrunner Records

Metal typically exists in a kind of "either/or" dichotomy: either bands are grinding and infernal or they're triumphant and anthemic. The Norwegian group Kvelertak is strictly "both/and." Their scorching second record Meir pairs the bludgeoning brutality of bands like Cannibal Corpse Rotting Christ with the kind of sugary hookiness typically found on an album by Andrew W.K. "Manelyst" is the perfect example: It opens with a barrage of barnstorming chords, a terrifying... asteroid shower of sound, before cruising up into a refrain that's practically singable, sounding like something from the Rocket From the Tombs catalog, if someone set vocalist John Reis on fire. "Burane Brenn" opens full-hurtle, frontman Erlend Hjelvik's wrecked-larynx howls offset by a holler-along soccer-anthem chorus. Kvelertak ride AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" right to its fiery end, and stage a never-ending kegger amid the flames.
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Excavation

The Haxan Cloak
2013 | Tri Angle Records / SC Distribution

It may be glib to assume that London-based producer Bobby Krlic dwells exclusively on the dark side, but given the evidence it's hardly unreasonable. His alias references a 1922 Scandinavian docudrama about witchcraft and inquisition, and his 2011 self-titled debut album aligned him with avant-black-metal/doom acts like Mayhem and Sunn O))). And the sleeve of his gloomily titled follow-up depicts a single length of rope coiled into a noose.

However, The Haxan Cloak's... thrillingly dark and chilly aesthetic goes far deeper than the kind of parent-bothering occult primer these details might suggest. There are echoes of Burial's cavernous dub and Demdike Stare's haunted techno in Excavation, but its magnificently maleficent, post-dubstep soundscapes have more in common with musique concrete, Expressionist cinema soundtracks and medieval monastic cantos than so-called witch house or drone metal.

Krlic's sounds are again rooted in acoustics (cello, violin, guitar, vocals) and field recordings, but this time they've been heavily processed — magnified, stretched, dissembled, reconstituted and rearranged — to produce nine micro-symphonies of stark beauty and extraordinary menace. Whether suggesting the dull throb of an old nuclear power plant, the spooked echo inside an abandoned iron foundry or the howl of an Arctic wind at a remote scientific station, they evoke a compressed anxiety that seeps into every note, causing the likes of "Dieu" to heave and quiver before it dies away and underlining the fact that despite its title, epic closer "The Drop" is concerned with something rather more ominous than build-and-break patterns.
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Abandon

Pharmakon
2013 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

Pharmakon is noise artist Margaret Chardiet, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was some infernal ghoul. Abandon opens with a scream, and then plunges to unholy depths, full of icepick electronics, horrifying turbine wooshes and suffocating layers of static. It makes Swans sound like The Byrds.
A Breathtaking Trip to That Otherside

Alexander Spit
2013 | Decon

Alexander Spit's bleak, baleful Breathtaking Trip to That Otherside is not good-times music. Spit is from California, but his dank, druggy rap music feels allergic to sunshine. Spit produced the entire album, and his sticky, bleary sound owes more to Dilla and RZA. Everything seems to move through a thick film, including Spit's raps, which gob up into bits of blacklit surrealism about Roswell and chemtrails and unspool into long spleen-venting rants.... If you've ever sat, stoned, in an apartment during a blazingly hot day with the blinds drawn, Breathtaking Trip will feel clammily familiar.
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Vexovoid

Portal
2013 | Profound Lore / Revolver

Nirvana once wrote a song called "Endless, Nameless." Take a look at this picture of Portal's lead vocalist, and then submit to the swirling, backed-up churn of "Orbmorphia," from the Australian death metal band's fourth album Vexovoid, and you may find yourself with an entirely new appreciation of what those two words can mean.

Portal, as a band, is all texture, no melody. But they have mastered so many different textures... that you never think to yearn for melody. The down-tuned guitars, gurgling beneath the ever-shifting blastbeats of the drums, bring to mind all kinds of things, none of them musical: the alarming suck of wet mud when you walk in loose boots, the sounds old motorcycle engines make. The album title evokes a zone of confusion, a place where you can't get your bearings and the ground is constantly shifting. Exactly.
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Arriving Angels

Helen Money
2013 | Profound Lore / Revolver

Play any of the songs on the harrowing third record by Alison Chesley — who records as Helen Money — on electric guitar, and you'd have one of the most brutal, unnerving metal records of the year. But play them as she does on cello, and — well, you still have one of the most brutal, unnerving metal records of the year. Much of this comes from Chesley's command of dynamic. Aptly-titled... album-opener "Upsetter" starts with a low thrum that skitters forward like a tarantula before erupting into slasher-film goring, Chesley's instrument so distortion-caked it sounds like a rotary saw. She's joined by Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder on "Beautiful Friends," which progresses from seasick lurch to undead horse stampede, growing more violent and insistent as it goes on. It's a snarling, suffocating record, and by the time you get to the avalanche that concludes "Radio Recorders," it's clear the angels of the title aren't coming down from the sky, but up from below, horns gleaming, eyes yellow as old bones.
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Obsidian Spectre

Crosss
2013 | Telephone Explosion / The Orchard

In the chilling video for CROSSS's "Bones Brigade", a figure in an ominous black cloak kneels motionless on a beach, staring blankly off into the grey sky, as if in a trance. He remains like that, stock still, hypnotized, for a full three minutes and 30 seconds, his motionlessness becoming more sickeningly unsettling the longer it lasts. Finally, at the end of the video, he bows — as if in supplication... to some god or spirit or eerie form that only he can see. He straightens, and the video cuts to black. That turns out to be a handy encapsulation of the Halifax group's aesthetic: slow-moving, hypnotic and deeply, deeply creepy. Sounding something like Thee Oh Sees slowed down to about 2 RPM, the group tops grimy, repetitive chord patterns with wicked-warlock sneering, making for a final product that feels invested with prime '70s sorcery rock black magick. "Smoke" warns, "Look into your mind's eye/ don't forget to not let your guard down" as guitars churn and boil like the steaming liquid in a witch's cauldron. "Old Sound" draws its dark strength from its continual, gooseflesh-raising dives from major to minor key. Throughout, its members acquit themselves as if they've all just done kegstands with the blood of Kali Ma — dead-eyed, dutiful, and wearing sickening grimaces.
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Lost Mixtape Gems

Out of View

The History Of Apple Pie
Marshall Teller Records

On their debut album Out of View, London quintet The History of Apple Pie blend the most precious of indie-pop impulses with the messiest squalling noise-rock has to offer. Vocalist Stephanie Min's feathery vocals float high in the mix, leaving her teen-romance lyrics ("We're having so much fun in the light of the sun/ You're so cool") faintly discernible above the thick clouds of My Bloody Valentine-style glide guitar that threaten to... overwhelm them. It's that constant give-and-take between pop and art-rock chaos that keeps Out of View interesting: A gruff chord or two always cuts the cotton candy at just the right moment, like when the full-on breakdown interrupts the strawberry lemonade-flavored workout "I Want More." On "Mallory," the daydreaming verses and the yearning melody are tossed about by an underlayer of sneering riffs and distorted noise. No one side ever wins out over the other for long and the seesawing can give you a powerful sugar buzz.
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Cruise Your Illusion

Milk Music
2013 | Fat Possum Records

On Cruise Your Illusion, the first proper full-length from Olympia, Washington's Milk Music, the quartet wedges itself somewhere within the SST Records-Neil Young-Wipers universe, pitting sweat-stained, heavy hardcore punk against indelible melodies and endless sincerity. Since their early output, a 2009 demo cassette and a 12-inch in 2010, the band has turned their DIY determination into full-fledged ambition, and the songs on Cruise are as honest and spiritual as they are messy... and loud. On "Lacey's Secret," Alex Coxen's shouting, imperfect voice cuts through the instrumental heap with lines that that scan endearingly like poetry in a rest-stop bathroom: "You got to get all you can here/ when you're burning every night".

The songs on Cruise Your Illusion bask in youthful charm. "…And although the sun sets heavy on the dreamer/ You can feed your pain to the song," Coxens sings on "No, Nothing, My Shelter" as the band rips into the overdriven wail of "Coyote Road" before running amok on "I've Got A Wild Feeling," a populist manifesto that might as well be the band's anthem. When Milk Music started out, their songs were loud, fast and full of Big Muff. And while the sound is still bruising on their debut, they've found a larger scope and a deeper message. On "Cruising With God" Coxen invites the listener into the band's inner sanctum: "They all love our songs/ But even with the music on/ Baby you've got it all wrong/ You haven't danced in so long."
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Sock it to Me

Colleen Green
2013 | Hardly Art / Sub Pop Records

Colleen Green writes simple songs about simple things and records them as simply as possible. The first song on the irresistible Sock it to Me is basically just Green singing, "Oh yeah, uh-huh, oh God, I really love my boyfriend," and the lazer-light dollar-store Elastica song "You're So Cool" builds to an equally straightforward refrain: "You're so cool, how do you do it? You act like there is nothing to it." Her... logo is a stick-figure drawing of herself that looks not entirely unlike Fido Dido's long-lost sister, and her music is defiantly, joyously basic: just Green's distorted guitar, pouting voice and a Goodwill Store drum machine.

But lean closer in and the images start to distort. Green opens the provocatively-titled "Every Boy Wants a Normal Girl" by singing, "Sometimes I wish I was a normal girl," and then follows it with the height of abnormality: "Like the ones on TV, like the ones in the movies." The drowsy "Darkest Eyes" scans quickly as plainspoken puppy love, with Green celebrating her true love's eyes and contemplating how to retain his affections. And what's her solution? "There's no better way to keep appearances preserved/ than a razor to the optic nerve." And then you skip back to that first song, the one where she's singing about loving her boyfriend, and catch what she says near the ending: "When he tells me that he loves me, I lose the air from my lungs/ his love has finally killed me." Sock it to Me is strychnine-laced Strawberry Fanta.
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Mozes And The Firstborn

Mozes And The Firstborn
2013 | Mozes And The Firstborn / The Orchard

Anyone looking for a 21st-century analog to Weezer's "El Scorcho" should start with "I Got Skills" from the debut album by the Belgian group Mozes & the Firstborn. It's got a similarly motley, gang-hollered chorus, that same nerdish braggadocio ("I got skills to make it through your doorway") and a shambling, thrown-together aesthetic that is charming in spite of itself. The rest of the record pinballs between that same kind of... Jr. High sheepishness — "Skinny Girl" is what Mellow Gold might have sounded like if Beck was a teenager when he recorded it — and genuine star swagger. "Peter Jr." opens with an instant-classic rock couplet — "The longer you work here/ the less you get paid" — before sailing straight into the kind of cruising melodicism that characterizes the best Brian Jonestown Massacre songs (its cocky stride singlehandedly earns the group the right to own this coat) Mozes and the Firstborn are teenage panic and grown-up confidence all at once.
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Paper Moon

Georgiana Starlington
2013 | Hozac / Revolver

As K-Holes, Jack and Julie Hines kick up an unholy racket. Their work as Georgiana Starlington is different in sound, but just as grim in feel. Their dusky, country-influenced songs foreground their dazed, trancelike vocals as they glide over arid guitar like phantoms across the prairie at midnight.
Ex-Cult

Ex-Cult
2012 | Goner / Revolver

Boasting the same feral ferocity as '70s US post-punkers like Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu, Ex-Cult (nee Sex Cult) solder clambering riffs to half-spoken, half-hollered vocals and drench the resulting songs in enough echo to make them sound almost alien. Much murkier and moodier than the music of their producer Ty Segall, Ex-Cult seethe and stalk where Segall storms right in. "Shade of Red" circles and circles, guitars humming like... old Cessnas looking for a place to land. "On Film" is doomier — its downcast bassline could have been lifted from Unknown Pleasures, its howled chorus coming off like some dark warning from a fortune teller. Throughout it sounds both ragged and well-aged — like a relic from an earlier era, recently unearthed. That they are both new and still active is to our great fortune.
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Ultramarine

Young Galaxy
2013 | Paper Bag Records / The Orchard

On their fourth LP, Young Galaxy go big, trading woozy, lo-fi-leaning dreampop for busy, dancefloor-ready electropop hits. They returned to producer Dan Lissvik, who worked on 2011's Shapeshifting, but this time the group traveled from Canada to Lissvik's studio in Sweden instead of sending their unfinished recordings overseas. The result is slick, cinematic and cohesive: There are disco influences ("Out the Gate Backwards"), tropical beats ("Fall For You"), and glorious pop anthems... ("Pretty Boy," "Fever"). In losing all hints of the haziness that masks their earlier releases, Young Galaxy simultaneously shed the Slowdive comparisons and make their best record yet.
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Peach Kelli Pop

Peach Kelli Pop
2013 | Burger Records / Redeye

Like a lollipop caught in a lint filter, Peach Kelli Pop nestles sticky sweetness beneath layers of cottony fuzz. The group, fronted and more or less embodied by White Wires' Allie Hanlon, takes their name from a Redd Kross song, and in many ways, they're that group's cheaper, sunnier analog. Both bands have a fondness for immediately-memorable hooks and piles of guitar, but Peach Kelli Pop seems to be constantly operating in... fast-forward. "Panchito Blues II" sounds like the Shangri-La's trying to outrun The Monkees, and "Julie Oulie" is floor-filler at a jackrabbit sock hop. By the time your brain has caught up you're ready to savor the sweetness, the next song is half over.
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Ready For Boredom

Bed Wettin' Bad Boys
R.I.P. SOCIETY

Australia's Bed Wettin' Bad Boys are basically a drunker version of The Faces, a bunch of hooligans getting shitty on Foster's then stumbling over to their guitars, cranking the amps and seeing what happens. Their live shows are notoriously sloppy (and, depending on whom you talk to, hilarious or infuriating) — bend members swap instruments, goof off interminably between songs and pound beer after beer after beer.

We're spared all of that on... the amazingly-titled Ready for Boredom, skipping instead right to the busted Mustang riffing and the blown-throat vocals. "Sally" is to The Rolling Stones "Happy" what Turkish Star Wars is to regular Star Wars: It has a lot of the same component parts — a blues lick deep-fried in axle grease, a somersaulting two-note hook — but is decidedly lower-budget and flaunts its inattention to detail. Their closest US analog is probably The Men — both bands mine classic rock for its junkiest spare parts — but the Bad Boys are sloppier and soggier still. The glistening album-closer "Keep it From You" is the closest they get to actual sentiment, but Nic Warnock's heartsick lyrics sound like they're coming from the business end of a drunk dial. He may not remember what he said in the morning, but he sounds like he means it in the moment. And isn't that all that matters?
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White Orchid

French Films
2013 | GAEA Records

The phrase "French Films" doesn't generally evoke the happiest images: the last-act betrayal in Breathless, a stricken Jean Pierre-Leaud standing balefully on the beach in The 400 Blows, pretty much all of Shoot the Piano Player. So chalk up the fact that this impossibly hooky Finnish band chose it as their handle to either irony or bad translation. Or move right past it and get right to the main thing that matters:... the songs. And what songs they are: French Films force-feed uppers to the Field Mice and kick the keyboard player out of New Order, delivering a batch of breathless Britpop-inspired songs with gargantuan choruses and guitar lines that glisten and glide like tiny tin airplanes. "Never let me go, never let me go," is the central plea on the rocketing "Where We Come From" — which, sonically, is the Pains of Being Pure at Heart by way of recent Mikal Cronin. As if shaking free of songs this addictive were even an option.
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Rare Birds & Strange Beasts

Sing to the Moon

Laura Mvula
2013 | Columbia

"I don't need love to rescue me/ I'll be all that I choose to be," Laura Mvula sings on "Make Me Lovely," the second track on Sing to the Moon. The British soul singer's voice is as strong as her sentiment, augmented further by delicate orchestra flourishes, soulful handclaps and college-a cappella-style vocal acrobatics. Elsewhere, Mvula fights against ideas of conventional beauty ("That's Alright"), sings about the power of music during hard... times ("Sing to the Moon"), and triumphs over loves that didn't work out ("Flying Without You"). A truly stunning, powerful debut.
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Apocalypse

Thundercat
2013 | Brainfeeder

Apocalypse, the follow-up to the madcap jazz-fusion/Saturday-morning-cartoon hallucination that was The Golden Age of the Apocalypse, explores the more chilled-out and unzipped side of Stephen Bruner. Bruner's command of jazz, R&B, Quiet Storm and straight-ahead bachelor-pad pop is stunning, and this gorgeous album makes a nice companion to the new Daft Punk.
The Moths Are Real

Serafina Steer
2013 | Stolen Recordings / PIAS Digital

Creating a sense of mystery in an age of instant information is difficult, but Serafina Steer manages it beautifully with her third album, The Moths Are Real. There's nothing particularly enigmatic about her CV — classically trained London harpist who has worked with Bat For Lashes, Patrick Wolf and John Foxx — but left to her own devices, Steer enters a world of her own, drawing you in by her side. Produced... by Jarvis Cocker, The Moths Are Real flickers between the physical realities of love, sadness and urban life — the naked romance of "Skinny Dipping," the wintery alienation of "Ballad Of Brick Lane" — and a frosted mythological wonderland that lurks the other side of the looking glass. It's a record that trembles on the threshold between worlds, not just in its merging of folk, psychedelia, prog and electronica, but in the way the lyrics are sweetly conversational one second ("Of course, my scanty life philosophy, as you suspected all along, is actually based on lines from songs," shrugs "Disco Compilation") and as stylized and strange as a temple oracle the next ("Island Odyssey," "Lady Fortune"). The reference points might seem to be in place — Joanna Newsom, Shirley Collins, Alice Coltrane, Robert Wyatt — but Steer sends the compass needle spinning, charting the places where magic and mystery poke through threadbare normality.
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Flume

Flume
2013 | Mom & Pop Music / The Orchard

Few have ever looked to Australia for the latest trends in electronic music. Although it has produced its fair share of innovators, from disco flirts Vanda & Young to hip auteurs The Avalanches, Down Under electronic music is largely seen as the foppish cousin to rock's more masculine manoeuvres. There was a brief flirtation with acid house in the early '90s, mainly fueled by British ex-pats, but interest was always confined to... pockets of aficionados. Until, that is, the arrival of Flume on forward-thinking label Future Classic.

With comparisons to The Weeknd and Toro Y Moi (whom he supported on a recent London date), 21-year-old Harley Streten has seemingly risen from nowhere to produce one of the most exciting electronic debuts of the year. Breakthrough single "Holdin' On" is a sublime slice of wobblesome R&B, while the instrumental "Ezra" has crunk beats leavened with a hook that could have been lifted from the Art of Noise. "Left Alone," which features Melbourne's magnificently-named Chet Faker, feels delivered straight from a Pentecostal church rather than a precocious kid from the Sydney 'burbs, while "More Than You Thought" veers towards stomping Skrillex territory without ever resorting to the easy pay-offs the American producer favors.

This album has already knocked Justin Bieber off the No. 1 spot in Australia — an astonishing achievement for music that is still some way from being pure pop. From a trickle to a torrent: This Flume is unstoppable.
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Leave Me Midnight

My Gold Mask
2013 | Goldy Tapes / CD Baby

At this point, the breakup album has been bent into countless shapes. So rather than try to re-shape it, on their debut album My Gold Mask's Gretta Rochelle and Jack Armondo simply amplified its effects. They didn't skimp on dramatics, with Rochelle's pleading vocals, Armondo's spiraling guitar riffs and lyrics that grapple with psychosis and reference Gothic literature and Italo horror flicks. The result achieves a spellbinding emotional intensity that's easy to... inhabit.
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Baroque

Nadia Sirota
New Amsterdam

Nadia Sirota is the violist of choice for the New York contemporary-classical scene, and on Baroque, she follows up her astoundingly assured debut, First Things First, with fresh works from many of the composers who contributed to that recording. Judd Greenstein's piece for seven violas (all of them multitracked by Sirota), "In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves," employs a variety of dizzying riffs, separated by episodes of subtle pizzicato, in order to... evoke the many stages of cosmos-crossing undertaken by the famous "Golden Record" shot into deep space by NASA back in 1977. It's also a tour de force opportunity for Sirota to show off her otherworldly chops and a variety of techniques: Nico Muhly's jaunty "Etude 3" is as memorable as the two others in his series, which he gave Sirota the first time around, and is a showcase for Sirota the player.

But there are new composers this time as well, even if they are generally familiar to the New Amsterdam coterie. Shara Worden's "From the Invisible to the Visible" is a brief, attractive offering that introduces keyboards and organs into the mix to considered effect. Missy Mazzoli's "Tooth and Nail" continues the electronic theme and is the album's standout, featuring some exciting hyper-glitch programming by the composer in during its opening minutes. Solid pieces from Paul Corley and Daniel Bjarnason complete this satisfying program, which, while more tricked-out electronically than Sirota's first offering, retains her aesthetic imprint.
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Smart Ass Black Boy

Fat Tony
2013 | Young One

Fat Tony is the kind of guy fated to slip between the cracks. He's from Houston, but sounds like no Texas rappers; occasionally political, but not much of a firebrand; muted and thoughtful, but no one's idea, really, of a "conscious rapper." He has a casual, conversational voice, and his raps tumble out like early Common, before he got too serious. There are dumb puns, a few trenchant insights and, above all,... an appealing confidence. The entire project was produced by Tom Cruz, a producer with a rubbery, cut-and-paste style, and Smart Ass Black Boy slips by agreeably like a late night dorm room bull session.
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Your Turn

Ceramic Dog
2013 | Northern Spy Records / Redeye

"We have a new business model, we'll blow you for a nickel." This is the acidic guitarist Marc Ribot, summing up the effect that the internet has had on the value of recorded music, in one pithy quote. Ribot, who played with Tom Waits just as the singer was morphing from hobo crooner to glass-spitting carnie barker, has never been afraid of sharp edges, and has made his career since his Waits... days in the avant-garde circuit. But Your Turn is a veer back into rock-song territory, albeit rock songs with big crayon doodles all over them: Title track "Your Turn" is a driving motorik groove defaced with a sloppy guitar solo that could be a Shreds video.
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Clayton: The Julius Eastman Memory Depot

Jace Clayton
New Amsterdam

In his performances as DJ/rupture, Jace Clayton has been part of that experimental breed of DJ/producers who draw on the sounds of the classical avant-garde. But while names like Edgard Varese, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen have become hip in DJ culture, Clayton has turned to one of music's true outliers, the gay African-American composer Julius Eastman. (Both his sexual orientation and race figure prominently in his titles.) The Julius Eastman Memorial... Depot is neither a mash-up nor a straight remix. It is a recasting and reimagining of two of Eastman's most important and defining works, "Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerrilla," both originally for four pianos but arranged here for two pianos and live electronics. And it is a remarkable, heartfelt tribute to a man who was a fixture on the New York "downtown" scene in the '70s and '80s, performing with Meredith Monk and singing the lead role in Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs For a Mad King before succumbing to alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness and death at the age of 49.

"Evil Nigger, Part 1" is almost pretty, with the layered chiming of its minimalist pianos; Part 2 abruptly switches to a more obviously electronic sound; Part 3 takes on a darker, dramatic hue as the music descends to the bass end of the keyboards, heaving and rolling in waves of increasingly dense sound that almost sounds like a kind of broadband drone. The final part announces itself with the sounds of glitch electronica, while the piano textures thin out, creating a sense both of space and of expectation that something will soon come rushing in to fill it. Shards of gamelan-like piano, impossibly rapid trills and tolling chords hover around the edges of the mix, until a brief explosion of massive piano sounds takes over. It ends as ambiguously as one of Bela Bartok's nachtmusik ("night music") pieces, with the half-remembered echoes of those earlier trills in a haunted electroacoustic haze.

"Gay Guerrilla," in five parts, begins with the steady pulse of the pianos; Clayton's electronics are subtle but telling, often hard to distinguish from the pianos themselves. In Part 2, a web of shifting electronic drones grows out of the patter of almost bell-like tones in the upper registers of the keyboards. When the pianos return, in a gently galloping rhythm, the result is perhaps the most conventionally beautiful music here. "Conventionally" being a relative term, of course. Part 3 begins to build up rhythmic counterpoint that sounds reminiscent of Steve Reich's work, but no sooner does that happen then the sound of a turntable dying brings the music to a grinding halt — at which point we hear Martin Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." (This appropriation appears in Eastman's original version of the piece.) Echoes of that tune flit through the thick piano textures of Part 4; and Part 5, with its endlessly ascending pianos, has a more reflective, even valedictory cast.

The album concludes with a Jace Clayton original, a short song that takes the wry humor of Eastman's own work and turns it on the usual "equal-opportunity employment" speech, turning it into a pensive contemplation of a man who was driven to despair in part by a lack of employment opportunities.
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Betty Rubble: The Initiation

Mykki Blanco
2013 | UNO NYC

Mykki Blanco is a performance artist, a black gay drag queen and a rapper. She is the center of her own Venn diagram, in other words, and on Betty Rubble she went from "promising" to great. Her voice is raspy and manic, a bit of Lil Wayne at his most enthusiastically unhinged and a bit of Young Dro in how audibly she relishes the vowel and consonant sounds leaving her mouth. The... beats on Rubble are a collision of electro, snap music and Neptunes, a lot of empty space and room for attitude and personality. Blanco obliges, calling herself "Richie Rich with a clit in the middle" and interpolating "If I Was a Rich Man" on "Angggry Birdz" and telling a hilariously detailed story about a tour-stop conquest on "Vienna."
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Out-of-Time Dispatches

Sudden Elevation

Ólöf Arnalds
2013 | One Little Indian / The Orchard

The most attractive thing about Ólöf Arnalds's music is the sense of mystery. Beginning with her beguiling 2007 debut Við og Við, Arnalds spun songs that felt like recitations from some yellowing old elvish spell book, her soprano curling like enchanted vines and gentle guitar spinning out notes like spiderwebs reflecting sunlight. That she sang in Icelandic — with its strange vowel runs and twisting cadence — only made her songs feel... more otherworldly. So it's no small risk for her to write and sing the entirety of Sudden Elevation in English; like a sitcom actor suddenly deciding to go Method, peeling away Arnalds's gauzy façade leaves the raw essence of her music exposed.

The good news is that the songs can bear the scrutiny. Sudden Elevation contains all the tender beauty of Arnalds's previous efforts — the wandering-bard guitar playing, the vocal melodies that bob like butterflies in a spring breeze. And though her lyrics are in English, that doesn't mean they're any more easily parsed. The verses in the gently waltzing "Return Again," for instance, are tangled as old riddles. Though the decision to forsake her native tongue could be read as a bid for more mainstream acceptance, thankfully, Arnalds has resisted any temptation to further burnish her sound. There are no horn charts, no swooping orchestras, nothing much beyond Arnalds's guitar and voice. All of this only contributes to Sudden Elevation's dreamlike feel: You can understand the words and make sense of the general narrative, but the overall meaning remains as alluringly ambiguous as ever.
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Leanin' On Slick

Aceyalone
2013 | Decon

From the breaks that first propelled Kool Herc's parties in '73 to Dre's minimoogs to Mystikal's manic James Brown tics, funk has not only provided a foundational structure to hip-hop, it's often risen to the surface and flat-out driven it. West Coast indie-rap vet Aceyalone has spent more than 20 years riding the outskirts of that territory, through his time with Freestyle Fellowship to his cult-classic solo debut All Balls Don't Bounce... to the later-career triumph of RJD2 teamup "A Beautiful Mine" (aka the Mad Men theme song). So after a long career — concurrent with a stab at making another excursion into grown-man rap — Leanin' on Slick sees Aceyalone toeing that line between underground rap and the traditions that scene built its base on.

The title track draws off the J.B.'s sound more in a way befitting a '70s indie-label garage-funk band (or a Daptonian revivalist group) than, say, the Bomb Squad, and the lyrical conceit isn't the only throwback — Acey's smooth-rolling delivery relays hustler tales from days when Caddies rolled long and low instead of high on 24s. That's not the only nod to vintage soul: "I Can Get It Myself" cockily struts through the door that James Brown demanded be opened back in '69, the handclaps and horn stabs of "What You Gone Do With That" is an old-school road-show with Acey's own overdubbed echoes standing in for call-and-response vocalists, and the pairing of his steady-job grind motivation with a wailing Cee-Lo chorus makes "Workin' Man's Blues" the closest Aceyalone's come to a genuine but uncompromised potential pop crossover. If the record vibe skews older, it's by design — leadoff cut "30 and Up" practically decrees it — but if this is the album young Aceyalone figured he'd be making once he approached middle age, he had some right-thinking foresight.
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The Coming Tide

Luke Winslow-King
2013 | Bloodshot Records

The 29-year-old singer/songwriter, slide guitarist and eMusic Selects alum Luke Winslow-King is from Michigan, but he has called The Big Easy home since 2001. On his third full-length, you can hear that the city has made its way into his bones. On The Coming Tide, Winslow-King masters the art of revivalist folk, seamlessly blending New Orleans jazz, Delta blues and ragtime into an album as sweet and satisfying as devouring plate of... beignets and sipping a café au lait on the banks of the Mississippi.

Accompanied by his girlfriend, the sugary-voiced, washboard-wielding Esther Rose, Winslow-King amasses a fine collection of traditionalist originals and personalized covers on The Coming Tide. Rose sings harmony while a thumping upright bass and a brass section leading call-and-repeats accompany them, and the album sways with easy confidence. Winslow-King particularly shines in his blues numbers, namely a faithful, slower rendition of Blind Willie Johnson's "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning" and a slide-driven cover of "Got My Mind Set On You," made famous by George Harrison in the late '80s. Nostalgia rains heavy on The Coming Tide, but Winslow-King reins it in, refashioning weathered words and sounds and branding them his own.
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The Stand-In

Caitlin Rose
2013 | ATO Records

Given her avowed love of old Hollywood glamour (just check out that album cover), the title of Caitlin Rose's sophomore full-length likely refers to the 1937 backlot comedy The Stand-In, about a love triangle between the title character, a hapless number cruncher and a hopeless film producer. While Rose does write about similar romantic confusions, the film reference nevertheless comes across as false modesty: On these dozen songs, she emerges as a... confident, distinctive pop-country artist with a biting lyrical style and a smart way with a hook. Perhaps A Star Is Born sounded too cocky?

Like any good actress, Rose has impressive range. The Stand-In has roots in classic country, displaying the poise of Tammy Wynette on "Everywhere I Go" and the assertiveness of Loretta Lynn on "Waitin'." Standout "Golden Boy" casts her as a countrypolitan chanteuse against a widescreen arrangement that recalls Owen Bradley, and she turns that chorus into a gently devastating plea: "Golden boy, don't go away/ I won't ask you what you're here for/ If you stay." Occasionally she holds her twang in check, but for the most part her vocals are expressive, building from the conspiratorial whisper of "When I'm Gone" to the full-throated belt of "Only a Clown."

Rarely reverent to one style or genre, The Stand-In mixes country with classic rock, radio pop, and even speakeasy jazz on closer "Old Numbers." The rollicking Hank- and Tennessee Williams-inspired "Menagerie" and first single "Only a Clown" both hinge on Byrds-style guitar riffs that suggest an affinity for West Coast nuggets, and the Las Vegas-set "Pink Champagne" is debauched country folk, a sad-eyed and slightly sloshed reimagining of Gram Parsons's "Sin City." No matter how blue she sounds, there's always a lively hint of humor even in her despair — a distinguishing trait that suggests she may be ready for her close-up.
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Berberian Sound Studio

Broadcast
2013 | Warp Records

When it came to soundtracking Peter Strickland's horror film Berberian Sound Studio, about a British sound engineer working for an Italian film company in the 1970s, there could have been no other name on the list than Broadcast. The band, aka Trish Keenan and James Cargill, were recording this album when Keenan died from pneumonia in 2011, age just 42, and it is a sublime, sad reminder of a remarkable talent lost.... On their own albums, the pair's haunting songs are constructed from elements that evoke half-remembered television themes, or a ghostly folk group transmitting from the future. It's rare that a soundtrack album constructed from fragments of music and snatches of dialogue is a rewarding listen, but Broadcast — perhaps because they are so adept at creating otherworldly sounds from pop's detritus — managed it beautifully here. Some of the tracks are genuinely unnerving, such as "Mark Of The Devil," its mean electronic pulses and chants sounding like wraiths in charge of a power station, or the guttural gabbling of "A Goblin." These terrifying moments are contrasted with pastoral instrumentals, built largely from flute, xylophone and organ, which could soundtrack a cold, misty morning as well as the original film. A bewitching last Broadcast.
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Kid Face

Samantha Crain
2013 | Ramseur Records / The Orchard

Singer-songwriter Samantha Crain has always sounded like an old soul, her dusty alto worn down by restless thoughts and free-floating anxiety. On the autobiographical Kid Face, the Oklahoma native sounds even more wizened as she explores loneliness, wanderlust and emotional disruption. Produced by John Vanderslice, Kid Face is a sparse record, laced with stark folk and Americana signifiers: acoustic guitar, wobbly piano, curled pedal steel and keening violin. Shambling banjo, stabs... of synthesizer or electric guitar add occasional jolts of urgency to the mix.

But significantly, Crain comes into her own as a lyricist on Kid Face. Besides being a meticulous wordsmith ("I'm going to shows, counting my toes and crying over you" is how she describes one particularly trying breakup), she offers thorough, unflinching self-analysis. Crain uses Kid Face's songs to examine her place in the world — and figure out how her actions affect others, for better and for worse. "Churchill" addresses the realization that "my whole life I thought I was an opportunist/ But I'm not"; "Sand Paintings" struggles with overcoming self-sabotaging tendencies; and "Ax" is a call to be kind in the face of negativity. Perhaps most impressive is "Never Going Back," which describes (hopefully) breaking free from a disastrous affair: "The ending of 10,000 dreams/ My soul has finally been set free from his cool eyes." The song is devastatingly effective because of its economy, the same trait that also makes Kid Face a wonderful record.
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Fairouz: Native Informant

Mohammed Fairouz
Naxos

Native Informant begins with a tense, mournful clarinet, sobbing quietly in bent phrases. The soprano Melissa Hughes joins in, her voice blending eerily with the clarinet. The piece is "Tahwidah," by the composer Mohammed Fairouz, and it blends harmonic languages and geography in a way that will remind modern classical listeners of the famous Osvaldo Golijov, before the composer got lost in his own hype. The piece is meant as a lullaby,... but it carries a deep sadness that could curdle milk.

Native Informant is an arresting showcase for Fairouz's voice, which is plangent, melodic, folkloric and unpredictable: His lines spool out in ways that don't follow your ear's predetermined path for them. He wrote eloquently of soaking in Armenian and Lebanese art and poetry for the Huffington Post, and Fairouz's music is that of a thoughtful traveler: Native Informant traverses boundaries without ever losing its gentle footing.
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Nightmare Ending

Eluvium
2013 | Temporary Residence Ltd. / SC Distribution

As gentle as mist settling over a lake at daybreak, Nightmare Ending, the latest album from Eluvium, is a work of tender beauty. Piano drifts down slow as snowflakes, soft bands of sound expand and Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan turns in a lovely, fragile vocal on "Happiness."
Selected Studies Vol. 1

Lloyd Cole & Hans-Joachim Roedelius
2013 | Bureau B

Hans-Joachim Roedelius is a towering figure of Krautrock: He formed Qluster (later renamed Cluster) and Harmonia, and his deceptively simple synth pieces in the late 1970s and early '80s are a genre unto themselves. Lloyd Cole is better known for literate guitar rock than synth drones, but here the two find a serene common ground, creating an airy, spacious album full of twinkling, twirling little mobiles. The music seems to move forward... and backward at once: Roedelius's genius was in creating gently hypnotic pieces out of minimal materials, and Selected Studies, belying its forbiddingly dry name, sparkles.
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Lady

Lady, The Band
2013 | Truth & Soul Records

This invigorating retro-soul album comes from a duo consisting of one-time UK 2-step garage star Terri Walker and Nicole Wray, whose "Make It Hot" (under her first but not last name) was one of a half-dozen Jeep bombs Timbaland concocted in 1998. Nothing about Lady, also the name of their act, feels forced — Walker and Wray sound like they're having the time of their lives, not least because nothing is stopping... them from getting to dig in lyrically. "If You Wanna Be My Man" analyzes a relationship sharply but without rancor ("You changed, and I changed/What we used to be") over a groove that's equal parts Spinners and Bill Withers. And the amazing "Money" is a bad-boyfriend anthem (she likes the green better than him) that doubles as a proud feminist declaration ("I feel proud that I'm an independent lady") — not to mention a classic soul single, whatever the calendar year.
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Underdogs and Introverts

TORRES

TORRES
2013 | TORRES / TuneCore

The debut album by this woman who calls herself Torres (real name: Mackenzie Scott) was recorded in a creaky old Nashville house that happens to be owned by Tony Joe White, he who gave the world "Polk Salad Annie." But that may have just been a lucky coincidence. These songs feel as if they were bound to come crawling out of Scott's body no matter what she did or where she was,... a strange litter of scowling, writhing fuzzballs just dead set on getting born. Dominated by the wavery tones of her Gibson 355 electric, the songs explore the fragile architecture of human relationships, often finding Scott standing amid a steaming pile of rubble, wondering not about what caused the house to fall but what to do, now, with all the shattered pieces left behind. "Everything hurts, but it's fine, it's fine," she sings — almost seethes — on "Honey," the album's lead single, a languid meditation on stasis and confession that builds up slow around a ground-out guitar line and crests in waves of pummeling drums, frayed vocals, frayed everything. Though lit up with distortion and drum-machine pulses, Torres is easily imaginable as a stripped-down acoustic affair, and in some ways might be better as such; "Come to Terms" finds Scott unplugged and fingerpicking, allowing lines like "just because the two of us will both grow old in time/ don't mean we should go old together" the time and space to make their full devastation known.
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Ripely Pine

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper
2013 | Ba Da Bing! / Revolver

The first two minutes of Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's Ripely Pine seem to reinforce the notion of fragile acquiescence that 23-year-old Aly Spaltro's stage name suggests. "Take me by the arm to the altar/ Take me by the collar to the cliff/ …Take me by the braid down to my grave," she croons on "Hair to the Ferris Wheel" over a languidly-thumbed electric guitar, the ghost of an autoharp shuffling around in... the background. But on this, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's first record cut in a proper studio, nothing is quite as it seems. Just when a lesser song might be content to wrap up its delicate reverie, the wool is ripped away and a Technicolor blast of crunchy guitars and detached-garage drums gush forth, Spaltro's dusky voice bottoming out over the deluge. This is par for the course on Ripely Pine; these songs tend start in one place, end in another, and cycle through sometimes a dozen imaginings of themselves on the way — like "You Are The Apple" which, over seven minutes, slides from a nervous acoustic twitch to a swampy low-slung romp to a billowing, spiking orchestral swoon. The album's lyrical turf is both elemental and surreal, like a funhouse mirror turned on a dream of an anatomy lab; hearts are eaten like strawberry cake, blood is canned like jam, love is handled like a newborn's skull. By the end, it's clear those opening lines weren't a coy feint, but a trap; it's you who is being led, and Lady Lamb the Beekeeper with her claws in your arm. And you will go with her — to the altar, to the grave, wherever — and love every weird minute of it.
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A Love Surreal

Bilal
2013 | eOne Music / Entertainment One Distribution

Bilal's career is odd: He is indelibly associated with the rise of early-'00s neo-soul, and while he hasn't become as famous as some of his contemporaries, he also didn't disappear down a wormhole like D'Angelo. Bilal's elastic, glorious voice has been a reliable presence on Roots records and other rap projects over the last 10 years, but his solo career, hampered by the usual setbacks, sputtered. His name seemed destined to be... forever preceded by a "ft."

A Love Surreal, released last winter, is only his third in 12 years, a batting average only slightly higher than D'Angelo's. The album doesn't reflect any bitterness or discontent, however; it is a lush, relaxed album, one that pivots neatly between styles. "West Side Girl" is grotty, sexy and Prince-ly; "Slipping Away" gazes at the stars like Donny Hathaway; "Lost For Now" even sounds remarkably like Big Star.
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Open the Crown

Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat dan Slnga
2013 | K Records / SC Distribution

Now 16 years into his career, Arrington De Dionyso is essentially doomed to be underrated. His work with the brilliant, ignored Old Time Relijun channeled the same chaotic mania of The Pop Group, full of slashing voodoo guitars, hyperventilating percussion and De Dionyso's urgent, terrified howl — which bore more than a passing resemblance to Pop Group frontman Mark Stewart. Since embarking on a solo career in 2006, his work has only... gotten more daring and more fascinating. It's guaranteed to appeal to anyone with any measure of fondness for pioneering late '70s UK groups like the Slits, Swell Maps and PiL. Like those groups, De Dionyso dismantles jazz, dub and reggae and uses the individual elements to create something riveting and otherworldly. "There Will Be No Survivors" crawls grimly forward, a strangled saxophone punctuating De Dionyso's seething promise: "We're going down in flames." "I Create in the Broken System" is essentially Satanic reggae, De Dionyso doing his best Don Van Vliet over burnt-to-a-crisp, undead two-step. The title track is glorious cacophony, full of falling-down-the-stairs drums, horror-house organs and De Dionyso's madman proclamations ("I am the shapeshifter! I am the song of psychic fire! 10,000 tigers in my temple!") It's one of the year's most fearless records, daring music for those who dare investigate.
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House of Woo

Maxmillion Dunbar
2013 | RVNG INTL. / SC Distribution

Maxmillion Dunbar, a DJ/producer from Washington, D.C., makes sleek, spacious electronic music pitched between the current vogues for the rhythmic action of vintage Chicago house and the heady contemplation of cosmic synthesizer jams. About half of House of Woo plays as certifiable dance music, with upright rhythms that assert themselves with force, while the other half has nary a beat to speak for. Representing the former, "Slave to the Vibe" opens with... unbound '80s keyboard sounds, patiently arrayed in floating fashion, that snap into a formalist grid when the beat kicks in a little more than two minutes in. The way the hi-hat hangs in what sounds like a sweaty expanse of the stratosphere evokes old Chicago house anthems by the likes of Larry Heard (Mr. Fingers, Fingers Inc.), but "Woo" pulls back, quiets down, and drifts into comparatively ambient territory. A few beats still clack and clang, but the background textures creep the fore, and a wandering, thinking-out-loud synth-riff establishes itself in a way that remains present in tracks like "Coins for the Canopy" and "The Figurine (Nod Mix)." The funky dancefloor-filler "Ice Cream Graffiti" goes big and beat-intensive again, but it's never long before the sound spaces out and spreads in a manner befitting the title of "Loving the Drift."
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Ugly Heroes

Ugly Heroes
2013 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard

Ugly Heroes is comprised of two rising emcees, Verbal Kent and Red Pill, and one veteran producer, Apollo Brown, who set out to create rap music that embodied the spirit of the diminishing blue-collar workforce. "It's the person that works on your car. It's the factory worker that's counting parts all day, smelling like oil and grease," Brown says. "That individual that provides for their family, makes a living and is a... human being — that's a ugly hero." Ugly Heroes' debut, self-titled album takes a hard look into a life of grueling work: clocking in long hours, drinking afterward and somehow maintaining enough strength to continue.
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Haw

Hiss Golden Messenger
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

After making music for nearly 20 years, veteran Michael Taylor is just now finding his largest audience with Hiss Golden Messenger. It's actually his third band, following the short-lived punk group Ex-Ignota and the longer-lived San Francisco alt-country act The Court & Spark. When the latter broke up in 2007 — after four albums and nearly a decade of near-constant touring — Taylor settled down in Durham, North Carolina, where he started... a family, pursued a degree in folklore, and made music more as a hobby than as a priority.

Over several albums — a few self-released, a few more via North Carolina indie label Paradise of Bachelors — Hiss Golden Messenger has alternated between an austere solo acoustic project for Taylor and a full band featuring Scott Hirsh on guitar and Terry Lonergan on drums. For Haw, the fourth and arguably best release under the HGM moniker, they added members of Lambchop, Megafaun and the Black Twig Pickers to the line-up. Whether alone or with friends, however, the primary elements of Hiss Golden Messenger remain constant: Taylor's voice, which sounds both genial and mysterious, and his lyrics, which examine thorny issues of faith, fidelity and family.
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Bazooka

Bazooka
Slovenly Recordings

The house band at the Wild Rumpus, Greek grime peddlers and brothers-in-arms with fellow countrymen Acid Baby Jesus and Gay Anniversary deliver big, clanging songs built for late-night deep-woods campfire dancing. They've got two drummers, which is probably part of what makes the music feel so frantic: "Koritsi Stin Akti" roars forward like some kind of demonic Mustang out for one last, doomed street race; "Bye Bye Girl" is deranged country, twanging... guitar and full-gallop percussion while "Ravening Trip"'s steady chug almost sounds like a bunch of greasers mocking Madchester, its shuffling backbeat smothered by horror-film riffing. This is party music for 20-foot monsters.
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Come Cry With Me

Daniel Romano
2013 | Normal Town Records

Singer/songwriter Daniel Romano hails from Canada but sounds like he's from America's Deep South as he writes old-school country ballads sung in a deep, Man-in-Black drawl. On his latest record, this year's aptly titled Come Cry With Me, there's a dirge about unrequited love, reflections on being a rejected middle child, and a rambling saga about getting a ride with a guy who calls himself Chicken Bill.
Jay Arner

Jay Arner
2013 | Mint Records / Revolver

Jay Arner's self-titled solo debut begins with a low bass groove that sounds like an engine idling, ready to rev "Midnight on South Granville" into high gear. To say the song never bolts away is no complaint, though, as the lyrics recount a night spent catching the bus, missing your stop, getting lost and wandering aimlessly. Set against that chugging bass line, those buzzy synths and that stoner guitar, half-drunk anomie has... rarely sounded quite so epic. A Vancouver-based musician who has helmed album by Mount Eerie, Apollo Ghosts and Rose Melberg, Arner recorded these new songs during lonely sessions at his practice space, recording straight to laptop to emphasize a DIY mid-fi sound, and the resulting Jay Arner mixes mopey postpunk instrumentation with power-pop song structures. Even though the unhurried tempos are far too laidback to sell the "power" in the pop, that spacey, narcotized vibe can be deceptive: The music reveals new sonic and lyrical details with each listen, whether it's the M.C. Escher hook on "Broken Glass" or the world-weary cautions of "Nightclubs," which finds a tricky balance between wry and romantic.
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Mohammed Fairouz, Native Informant

Jayson Greene — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 21:06:09 +0000

Native Informant begins with a tense, mournful clarinet, sobbing quietly in bent phrases. The soprano Melissa Hughes joins in, her voice blending eerily with the clarinet. The piece is “Tahwidah,” by the composer Mohammed Fairouz, and it blends harmonic languages and geography in a way that will remind modern classical listeners of the famous Osvaldo Golijov, before the composer got lost in his own hype. The piece is meant as a lullaby, but it carries a deep sadness that could curdle milk.

Native Informant is an arresting showcase for Fairouz’s voice, which is plangent, melodic, folkloric and unpredictable: His lines spool out in ways that don’t follow your ear’s predetermined path for them. He wrote eloquently of soaking in Armenian and Lebanese art and poetry for the Huffington Post, and Fairouz’s music is that of a thoughtful traveler: Native Informant traverses boundaries without ever losing its gentle footing.

Sequentia, Hildegard von Bingen – Celestial Hierarchy

Steve Holtje — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 20:55:01 +0000

10 pieces of lovely and passionately intense medieval monophony

With this album, Sequentia becomes the only group that has recorded all of the music of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), over the course of eight albums starting in 1982. This compilation of antiphons and responsories is certainly not mere leftovers; the 10 pieces of medieval monophony heard here are both lovely and passionately intense. Though this is all chant, Hildegard’s highly personal music is full of bold leaps and is never formulaic. For textural variety, the selections alternate between solo and group singing, and there is occasionally some instrumental accompaniment: Norbert Rodenkirchen contributes flute on two tracks (the flute on one of them was used on Sequentia’s first Hildegard album, so a circle is closed here), and co-founder Benjamin Bagby plays harp on one work. The seven female singers all get at least one solo moment, adding to the range of timbres. They recorded in St. Remigius, a lushly resonant Belgian church, further enhancing the group’s sound. Both historically important and beautiful, this is recommended to both medieval specialists and early-music neophytes interested in something of timeless appeal.

Lubomyr Melnyk, Melnyk Corollaries

John Schaefer — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:13:59 +0000

Think Franz Liszt playing Terry Riley

If Lubomyr Melnyk were a painter instead of a pianist and composer, he might be termed an “outsider artist.” Melnyk, a Canadian musician of Ukrainian extraction, is one of those solitary geniuses who populate the margins of our various art worlds — in his case, working for decades on a style that he early on dubbed “Music in the Continuous Mode.” Developed in the ’70s and ’80s, this music is a wholly personal but winning combination of the mesmerizing patterns of American minimalism and the florid keyboard virtuosity of the late Romantics. Think Franz Liszt playing Terry Riley. Early recordings like the Tolkien-inspired “Galadriel” built a small but devoted cult following for Melnyk in the early ’80s, but Corollaries seems likely to introduce him to a potentially wider audience.

Like both Liszt and Riley, Melnyk likes to think big; many of his works unfold over extended periods of time, rarely clocking in at less than 10 minutes. That makes this a tough album to cherry-pick, although “Le Miroir d’Amour” is available separately. This work is unusual in its open, atmospheric use of the piano and its slow and graceful violin melody (played by producer Peter Broderick, an associate of the Danish electronic rock band Efterklang), although Melnyk’s trademark rapid arpeggios begin flowing in gradually building waves about halfway through. A more representative piece, and one that has strong echoes in fact of the earlier “Galadriel” period, is “The Six Day Movement,” which creates so much movement in both the lowest and highest ends of the piano that it reaches for the kind of transcendence we find in the repetitive trance music of Morocco or the dervishes of Western Asia.

But this new album also shows how Melnyk’s musical palette has grown: “A Warmer Place,” again with Broderick’s violin, echoes the sounds of ambient electronica, and “Nightrail From The Sun” offers a scintillating interplay between keyboard and guitar (played by Martyn Heyne) that grows increasingly electronic as the piece progresses. The album’s opener, “Pockets of Light,” includes Broderick’s tremulous singing as well as his violin and seems to orient Melnyk’s current effort at the post-rock crowd — with whom Melnyk may well find the larger audience that has so far eluded him.

Richard Moult, Yclypt

John Schaefer — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:11:16 +0000

Sacred music for wanderers of the hills and roads

Richard Moult is an English painter, pianist and composer whose work has a simultaneously spiritual yet earthbound cast. His Celestial King for a Year, for example, is a three-part suite inspired by ancient Christian (pre-Gregorian) chant, and by the even more ancient pagan rituals that marked the changing of the seasons. Ethe is a collection of atmospheric works in a simple, homespun style for what sounds like an upright piano alternating with electronic soundscapes. (Both are available on eMusic.) For Yclypt, Moult has continued in both veins. The album’s opening suite, “Apollo Winceleseia,” is a three-part work for bowed strings; as with the earlier Celestial King, those strings are played with almost no vibrato in Parts 1 and 2, sounding for all the world like an Elizabeth consort of viols (the fretted instruments that were largely supplanted by the fretless members of the violin family). In Part 3, the writing grows even sparer and still, with the use of tremolo suggesting a wintry wind blowing over a barren English countryside.

Moult himself has written that these pieces were inspired by the pastoral countryside of England, and that they represent “sacred music for wanderers of the hills and roads.” Two of his string works might also suggest electronic music: “Song For Mourie” has the timeless, slightly haunted quality of a traditional Gaelic air (Moult now lives in remote northern Scotland), even as the string parts unspool in single lines, like a series of synthesizer drones; and “Symbol of an Infinite Past” uses a heavily-reverbed string sound to create a sense of space and distance, as if we’re hearing the music echoing not from distant hills but from some other time.

Five Essential Roscoe Mitchell Recordings

Seth Colter Walls — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:24:06 +0000

Saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell has been at the forefront of innovation in jazz — hell, in music in general — ever since his landmark 1966 recording Sound. With that debut, he helped usher in a less constantly frenetic avant-garde. Though Mitchell and his cohorts from Chicago’s South Side revolutionaries in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) could bust reeds and pound with the best experimental screamers, they also thrilled to the spare, austerely gentle classical modernism of Anton Webern (for example).

Sound, along with subsequent titles from the “Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble,” issued by the Delmark label, would the proving ground for a band that would eventually take on a different, better-known name: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. While serving a year as the toasts of France in 1969-70, the band cut more than a dozen records. By the time they rotated back to the U.S., the Chicago scene that had influenced Mitchell in his post-Army days had already made significant inroads in New York. Mitchell hasn’t looked back since, whether as a teacher at Mills College (where he currently has the Darius Milhaud chair in composition) or as a gigging and recording musician. This year has already seen two fantastic new albums from Mitchell: the classically-oriented Not Yet, on Mutable Music, and a record of duets with drummer-pianist Tyshawn Sorey. (Trumpeter Hugh Ragin appears on a few cuts, too.)

Here are five of Mitchell’s essential recordings.

A Jackson in Your House / Message to Our Folks / Reese and the Smooth Ones

Art Ensemble Of Chicago
2013 | Charly / The Orchard

Three hugely important 1969 albums — some of them infrequently available digitally — by Roscoe Mitchell's breakout project, the Art Ensemble of Chicago are collected here in a high-value, no-duh purchase. (Look at that price point!) The title track of Jackson reveals the band's postmodern mashup strategy: after the opening, jump-cut switches between free playing and modern composition, the band transitions to a New Orleans-flavored outro (one that is sincerely soulful, not... mocking). Message is even better, and somehow more varied: "Old Time Religion" blends gospel and drone textures; "Dexterity" underlines the band's connection to Bird; while "Rock Out," as an abstraction of popular song-form, feels like avant-jazz's answer to White Heat-era Velvet Underground. Reese is one long improvisation, split into two tracks, that is particularly worthy for the noise-guitar freakout on the second side of the original LP.
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Roscoe Mitchell And The Sound & Space Ensembles

Roscoe Mitchell
1984 | Black Saint / CAM

In which the polymath Mitchell embraces the emergent sounds of hip-hop as well as those of late 20th-century chamber music styles — on the same album. Four of the six tracks here are austere, small ensemble compositions (some of them featuring modern-opera singer Tom Buckner). But two uptempo groovers, "You Wastin' My Tyme" and "Linefine Lyon Seven" show that, some 15 years after the Art Ensemble created R&B-inflected avant-jazz jams like "Rock... Out" and "Theme De Yoyo," our hero can still return to the wellspring of pop inspiration. The former even offers a chance for Mitchell to try his hand at appropriating the good-humor cadences of early NYC rap. He works it!
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Solo [3]

Roscoe Mitchell
2004 | Mutable Music / The Orchard

This is a late-period tour de force: three different "solo" albums, packaged together. The opening "album," subtitled Tech Ritter and the Megabytes, opens with a multi-tracked Mitchell (on different horns), blasting through a staccato composition called "The Little Big Horn 2." Two long, proper solo improvisations follow (featuring various extended techniques, circular breathing, the works); while the "Tech Ritter"-titled pieces bring the multi-tracked intensity back. The more familiar, purely alto-saxophone album starts... with the lovely "Nemus." The final album, a percussion-heavy suite that harkens back to some of the Art Ensemble's "little instrument" pieces, isn't as dynamic — but the set as a whole brings welcome evidence of Mitchell's conceptual, performative and compositional power in a new century.
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Far Side

Roscoe Mitchell
2010 | ECM

How influential and well-respected is Roscoe Mitchell, at this point? Well, on this live date for ECM, the two pianists in his octet are Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn (arguably the two biggest names in contemporary jazz piano). The rumbling, droning opening suite of three pieces takes its time winding up — but explodes in a gratifying way at the midway point. (Hearing Taborn going nuts behind Mitchell's soprano playing is a... singular highlight of modern jazz.) The "Quintet" and "Trio" pieces are shorter, and more consistently driven by pulse, while "Ex Flower Five" is driven by the stellar piano power on offer.
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Not Yet

Roscoe Mitchell
2013 | Mutable Music / The Orchard

This is Roscoe Mitchell's finest classical album yet. And, interestingly, it's one on which his own horn playing is absent; he's intent on fully inhabiting the role of composer. It's no secret how a modern conceptualist gets good performances of fiercely difficult, experimental works: you get a chair in composition at a major music school, draw interested students to your side, and present concerts. Mitchell has done that as a chair of... composition studies at Mills College. And his student Jacob Zimmerman does the teacher proud in the skittering, sheets-of-sound atonality of the title track (for saxophone and piano), as well as in the sax-quartet arrangement of the infamous Mitchell piece "Nonaah." Some more senior eminences drop by to tackle a chamber orchestra version of "Nonaah," also. When paired with the finest recorded example we have of Mitchell's writing for string quartet ("9/9/99 with Cards"), this album becomes an essential document of a portion of the composer's legacy.
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Various Artists, Real World Records Label Sampler

eMusic Editorial Staff — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:25:55 +0000

Since its inception in 1989, the Real World label has been home to some of the most forward-thinking, boundary-shaking music from around the globe. Founded by Peter Gabriel as a kind of recorded complement to his WOMAD festival, the label soon took on a life of its own, releasing records by giants like Tabu Ley Rochereau, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jocelyn Pook and more. This sampler is a good place to start if you’re looking to discover the label’s all-encompassing sound.

Who Is…Marques Toliver

Barry Walters — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:43:49 +0000

File under: Effusive soul meets baroque pop

For fans of: Frank Ocean, Owen Pallett, Rahsaan Patterson, Kronos Quartet, James Blake, Nico Muhly

From: Daytona Beach, Florida

If Marques Toliver comes across a bit brash, it’s because there’s little precedent for him. Both a classical violinist and R&B singer-songwriter, this 26-year-old world traveler boasts talents too big and broad to fit into any one box. On his stunning London-recorded Bella Union debut album Land of CanAan, Toliver combines literary and historical influences — among them, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin — with music that ably blends an unlikely combination of Bach, Bobby Womack and Antony and the Johnsons. His voice may be urgent, but his virtuoso playing, elegant melodies and heavenly arrangements are the height of refinement. It’s not pop with strings tacked on: Violins supply the heart of nearly every song and Toliver plays all of them plus cello, guitar, keys and more. The result is southern soul mixed with equally intimate chamber music to create a third deeply spiritual, yet-to-be-named thing.

Barry Walters talked with Toliver about busking, determination and his status as Adele’s favorite new artist.

On how he spent his teenage years:

I was in orchestra from the age 10 all the way up until I was about 20. I was just immersed in the classical setting, the classical doctrine and classical foundation of music starting with the Suzuki method. When it was time for middle school, there was only one school in the county that had a string program, so I had to wake up at 5:30 to get to school before the bell rang at 7:30, and I did that for three years. I just kept studying the violin and going to specialized schools for the instrument. I was a part of the university and youth orchestra, which was about 45 minutes away from my home town, so I was always taking long trips to be a part of these musical ensembles that were a part of my public school training.

On moving to New York:

I came to New York just to visit a friend, and from that I started busking in the subway because the friend who invited me to New York wasn’t picking up her phone. I went to the gay and lesbian center to go online to find an orchestra friend who moved to the city — and luckily I did, through Facebook. From there, I just stayed in Brooklyn. One week led to two weeks because I was being asked to come to casting for modeling, so I got wrapped up in that world of being a 20-something in New York City. So between playing violin on albums of people I’d meet in the subway, I split my time working as a barback in Williamsburg and also teaching violin lessons. I was doing sessions for Kyp Malone and TV on the Radio, which would later lead to David Sitek of the same band asking me to work on another musician’s album [Holly Miranda's 2010 Sitek-produced The Magician's Private Library]. Then from that I was touring North America and that lead to England, and it just kinda snowballed.

On splitting his time between Brooklyn, London and Antwerp:

I’m a citizen of the world, similar to James Baldwin when he left the States during the Civil Rights movement and went abroad to Europe. When you’re African-American, your sense of home is a bit of a gray area because of the uncertainties when it comes to heritage due to slavery. That’s why church has always been such a big connecting factor for blacks in America, because it brings you all together despite not knowing what tribe or what region of Africa you may be from. You all can rejoice in the fact that you have this religion holding you together, despite it being a western religion [laughs].

On Adele proclaiming Toliver her “favorite new artist”:

Adele and I have a mutual friend, Richie Culver, and he’s an up-and-coming artist. He saw me busking on the Lower East Side and basically told Adele that Marques Toliver exists and that she should check out his music. And she did. So she decided to put up a little blog entry that I was her new favorite artist. Adele sat in on the first [A&R] meeting with Island Records because I had never met with a label before. It was definitely a good platform to gain a bit of notoriety within the industry without having to tour.

On working with UK pop songwriter/producer Eg White:

Eg White came into the picture simply because of his arrangements and what he had done for Adele with the string influence on songs such as “Chasing Pavements.” Eg’s father is a violinist, so Eg has a big classical foundation. We joined forces to create three songs for the album. We seized a lot of classical motifs, such Bach’s three Sonatas and three Partitas for solo violin, and we also created our own similar motifs with songs such as “If Only” and “Find Your Way Back Home.”

On the YouTube clip of Toliver jamming backstage with Shingai Shoniwa of the Noisettes and Sir Paul McCartney:

That was around the time of the Olympics in the UK. We were all on a tour together called the Africa Express, and the last gig was at St. Pancras train station, where there were about 15,000 people. Shingai and I had been rehearsing a song, and Paul shows up. There was just an extra third mic, so we were like, “Hey, just sing with us.” I was just amazed by the fact that it was going on, and then the next day it’s on YouTube.

On his predecessors:

Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, all those things have contributed to my music along with a lot of classical violinists, such as Jascha Heifetz, Pinchas Zukerman, Yehudi Menuhin, and [cellist] Jacqueline du Pré. And so many things within literature, like James Baldwin and his conflict with being religious and homosexual and a Civil Rights leader. I think I need a radio show to go into more detail.

On showing off his torso in his videos for “Control” and “Deep in My Heart”:

It’s just a way to document one’s being. Maybe for the American market it’s a bit risqué, but for Europeans the body is no different from a leaf falling from a tree or the lightening striking. It’s just life. I wouldn’t put myself in the same category as D’Angelo. He’s more of a heterosexual eye-candy thing.

On taking the high road:

I’m all about being elite and pushing myself. The easy thing would be to lie about one’s sexuality, go on a reality show, and try to make it big that way as opposed to forging your own path and clearing the dirt and paving the cement — or maybe not even using cement. Maybe using some solar powered device to create your journey. [Laughs] I just don’t think about it that much. Because if you’re a violinist, your palate is a bit more refined. I’m still immersed in things considered brutish or unmusical when it comes to contemporary things. Introducing different types of sounds into my world I find helps, as opposed to limiting myself or dumbing down my music.

On his ultimate goals:

I would like to sell enough so that I can invest in property and create music schools and ensure that student programs won’t diminish because of budget cuts. [I'd like to] become the male version of Oprah and introduce cultures to one another. I take it for granted that I can live in Belgium and two days later go to Paris and then be in London and then go to Berlin. I know we all have computers, but there’s a difference between having a screen show you photos of a world far away, and going to a concert and being transported to one of these worlds. And [I'd also like to] collaborate with musicians I’ve looked up to, such as Quincy Jones or Herbie Hancock or Beyoncé or, I don’t know, Katy Perry. Or just go very traditional and do things with Smokey Robinson or Adele. I’m really at the beginning of my career, so it’s hard to say, but I definitely want to be playing music and composing.

Richard Wagner’s Radical Aesthetic

Justin Davidson — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:35:00 +0000

Why are so many Wagner lovers indifferent to all operas but his? Why is there a corps of Wagner groupies that shows up in whatever part of the globe his four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen is performed? Why, in this impatient Twitter-addled time, do thousands submit to slow-moving music dramas that last longer than a New York-to-London flight? Why, 200 years after he was born (on May 22, 1813), does Richard Wagner remain so deeply alive? A narcissistic genius with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism, he still inspires reverence and fury, still gets attacked and defended, and his influence as a musician and showbiz guru remains powerful, even for people who know almost nothing about him. Why?

Wagner’s vision of what art could be was so all-encompassing and radical that we are still digesting his influence. We have the auteur movie; he created the Gesamtkunstwerk, the integrated fusion of theater, music, poetry, art and light, all brought into being by a single imagination — his own. He draped music over serialized drama, so deliberate in its pace that characters could afford to brood and rant, even as the plot ground to a halt; we have Mad Men. There is no contemporary theme — infidelity, ambition, ruthlessness, idealism, betrayal, regret, vindictiveness, loyalty — that he could not pack into a few bars of harmony or a catchy leitmotif.

For all Wagner’s multimedia ambitions, it’s his music that supports the whole apparatus. Directors have jettisoned the big-beard-and-breastplate aesthetic of his original stagings. The alliterative thump of his librettos can cause literary inflammation. The scores, though, have remained sturdy enough to carry whole new worlds of theater: bare-stage productions with singers costumed in dowdy brown, high-tech extravaganzas with 3-D video projected on moving sets, surrealistic dreams with long-taloned gods. Whatever else is happening on stage, those impossibly high-powered voices keep cutting like spotlights through narcotic mists of orchestration. The music is so vivid you hardly need to see anything at all, which is why the purest form of experiencing a Wagner opera might be in total darkness.

Enough voltage surges through those quivering chords to power 200 years’ worth of the avant-garde. A century ago, the harmonic daring in Tristan und Isolde spurred Debussy and Schoenberg to imagine a world without major or minor keys. Film composers who sketch characters in melody (Luke Skywalker’s horn call, or Darth Vader’s ominous march, for example) are recycling Wagner’s technique of leitmotif. The vast expanses and slow churn of his music prefigured the even more leisurely pace of minimalism. So did his insistence on repetitive rhythmic units: Steve Reich quotes the hammering motif from Das Rheingold in the “Hindenburg” movement of his own three-act multimedia opera, Three Tales.

Wagner’s can be at once turbulent and slow. Choirs of horns surf on gusts of fast-moving strings, yet he lingers on each scene. Two characters — Siegfried and his adoptive father Mime, for example — keep trading heated phrases for long enough that the sense of symbolism burns off, and what remains is a pair of deeply human figures, bickering, loving, detesting, challenging. Like a documentary filmmaker interviewing a guarded subject, Wagner uses patience as a weapon, letting the characters’ bravado and weakness emerge note by note. His stateliness is merely the pace of human drama. That’s why it hardly matters whether an opera is about panicky gods and hubristic mortals (as in The Ring), about obsessive lovers (Tristan und Isolde), or about competitors in a local singing contest (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). Gods, monsters, kings, churls — all get a chance to grumble and bloom.

But it would be wrong to say that Wagner remains modern because deep down his world is so familiar: It’s not. Even as he scattered his influence, seeding aesthetic movements he might well have despised (he did a lot of despising), he also produced a body of work that remains radical, inimitable, unique. The abiding strangeness of his work is its most magnetic aspect. Tristan und Isolde is not just a love story, but a musical ritual, too, liturgy for a religion of desire. What could be more irresistibly weird in our culture of instant gratification than that protracted shudder of anticipation? It’s not the final release that matters, but the hours of aching postponement.

Emerson String Quartet, Journeys

Steve Holtje — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:25 +0000

Using dramatic harmonic restlessness to vividly portray unrest

It’s surprising that the Emersons haven’t previously recorded any Schoenberg, considering the ensemble has never shied away from 20th century repertoire, and even moreso that their first choice is not a string quartet, but his 1899 string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4.

It’s paired, in apt — and not quite unprecedented — programming, with Tchaikovsky’s 1890 (revised 1891-92) String Sextet in D minor, Op. 70, Souvenir de Florence. The album title attempts to conceptually link the two works; the Tchaikovsky is a journey because the main theme of the slow movement came during a visit to Florence, while the Schoenberg is a psychological journey.

But what really links the works is inner turmoil. While the Tchaikovsky is prototypically Romantic and the Schoenberg verges on Post-Romanticism, both use dramatic harmonic restlessness to vividly portray unrest. The players (violinist Paul Neubauer and cellist Colin Carr augment the quartet on both works) emphasize this while giving the Schoenberg enough richness of tone to remind us of the composer’s continuing debt to Romanticism’s sound and gestures — even as he began to overthrow its harmonic language. There are, separately, better performances of each, but this combination amplifies the virtues heard here.

Brooklyn Rider, A Walking Fire

John Schaefer — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:18:00 +0000

Exotic melodies and strongly accented rhythms that are easy to enjoy

The string quartet known as Brooklyn Rider is an offshoot of Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, and they follow in that ensemble’s path of cross-cultural music. A Walking Fire is a musical journey that begins in Romania, with a suite called “Culai” by the violist and composer Ljova, and ends in Iran with “Three Miniatures for String Quartet,” by Brooklyn Rider’s own violinist Colin Jacobsen. In between, the quartet plays a major piece from the string quartet repertoire, Bela Bartok’s String Quartet #2. This format — mixing a “standard” with new and more exotic fare — proved to be a winning one for the group in their 2010 album Dominant Curve, which included the Debussy String Quartet in among contemporary works that had an Eastern cast. And it works again here: The Bartok quartet, heard after Ljova’s gypsy-inspired suite, gains a kind of clarity of purpose. Ljova’s piece is named after the late Romanian violinist Nicolai Neacsu, known as Culai, and famous among world music enthusiasts as the wild fiddler who led the gypsy string band Taraf de Haidouks. Alternately ecstatic and elegiac, it is a perfect foil for Bartok’s quartet, a lament written during the First World War which includes echoes of the folk music (mostly from Eastern Europe but also, somewhat incongruously, from Nigeria as well) that Bartok loved so much and spent so many years studying and recording.

Ljova’s suite is also full of echoes of the folk music of Eastern Europe. It opens with “The Game,” a jovial, stamping dance. “The Muse” has a more obvious Balkan sound, including a moment or two of Culai’s famed “ratcheting” sound — created by dragging a piece of horsehair or fishing line over the violin’s string. “The Song” is a jaunty number with a sinuous melody that takes a couple of surprising turns; it leads seamlessly into “Love Potion, Expired,” which enters the high-speed world of Balkan gypsy music. A typically full-blooded Roma-style lament, or doina, wraps up the suite.

After Ljova’s “Culai” and the Bartok second quartet, Jacobsen offers a trio of pieces inspired by Persian music and specifically by his (and the quartet’s) long-standing and productive friendship with Kayhan Kalhor, the pre-eminent virtuoso of the Persian fiddle, or kemanche. At seven-and-a-half minutes long, “The Flowers of Esfahan” tests the definition of the title “miniatures,” but it is also a highlight of the album, as the music coils and uncoils in flowing arabesques and gossamer textures. The outer movements, “Majnun’s Moonshine” and “A Walking Fire,” with their exotic melodies and the strongly accented rhythms, are probably hard to play, but fortunately for us, are easy to enjoy.

Olafur Arnalds, For Now I Am Winter

John Schaefer — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:55:45 +0000

Richly evocative and almost cinematic

The Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds writes richly evocative, almost cinematic works in a style probably best described as “electroacoustic chamber music.” Not to be confused with his cousin, the singer/songwriter Olof Arnalds (her recordings are also worth checking out, though), Arnalds is part of the new breed of (mostly northern) European composers who draw on equal parts post-minimalism, post-rock and film music. Fans of Max Richter, Dustin O’Halloran, Sylvain Chauveau, Hauschka and Johann Johannsson will find in Arnalds a kindred spirit. New York composer/pianist Nico Muhly, a frequent collaborator on the Icelandic new music scene, provides the arrangements which, even at their biggest and most dramatic, somehow avoid pomposity and melodrama. But the most notable guest might be singer Arnor Dan, who appears on four tracks. Until now, Olafur Arnalds recordings had been a vocal-free zone. Even here though, Arnalds often uses Dan’s voice as a part of the instrumental texture, with the literal meaning of the text a secondary concern.

The title track, “For Now I Am Winter,” is a gentle song somewhat reminiscent of Antony and the Johnsons. It reappears in two remixes at the end of the album: the first an electronically-processed piano piece with a subterranean-sounding mix from Nils Frahm, and the second built around a sturdy downtempo groove by Kiasmos (Arnalds’s techno duo with fellow Icelandic musician Janus Rasmussen). The opening track, “Sudden Throw,” moves from a glittering, icy beginning to a grand, dramatic conclusion — the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from the so-called post rock crowd — except that it is compressed into a three-minute span instead of Sigur Ros’s 10 minutes, or godspeed you! black emperor’s half hour. “Brim” immediately stakes out further sonic territory with its highly rhythmic string quartet writing, contrasting with the sweeping electronics and digital percussion before ending with some plangent piano chords. Other highlights include “Old Skin,” another of the songs with Dan, with somewhat clearer vocals and a more propulsive string orchestra sound; and “Only the Winds,” an elegiac piece that seems to be inevitably headed for use in a film score.

Elliott Carter, Elliott Carter, Vol. 9

Daniel Felsenfeld — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:00:57 +0000

A wonderful place to start for those unfamiliar with Carter's work

There are ghosts on this record. Of course, the gaping maw left by the recent death of Elliott Carter — just shy of his 104th birthday, mind you — still echoes. But there is another spectre here, that of Charles Rosen, not only one of Carter’s staunchest advocates and one of the world’s great writers whose topic happened to be classical music, but among our accomplished and special pianists. So it is unsurprising that the collaboration on Carter’s ferocious mid-’60s Piano Concerto is one for the books, and Bridge has done us excellent service by making this recording (a live recording, but still) available.

This record, this ninth volume in Bridge’s important Carter sequence, is a wonderful place to start for those who might be unfamiliar with — or scared of — Carter’s work. Spanning seven — seven! — decades of his work, this collection acts as an excellent toe-dip. There is a thorough sampling of his later, more high-modernist work for which he is best known, like the behemoth Piano Concerto (in good hands with not only Mr. Rosen but the Basel Sinfonietta under Joel Smirnoff) or the solo piano works Two Thoughts About the Piano and Tri-Tribute (sumptuously rendered by Steven Beck), not to mention or the delightfully twittering, moody, breathy and ferocious Nine by Five (excellently dispatched by the Slowind Wind Quintet), but these are not even the real gems of this de-facto retrospective. Here, alongside the more jagged offerings are a few gorgeous pieces penned by the younger man: the orchestral songs “Voyage” and “Warble for Lilac Time,” thrillingly performed by Tony Arnold and the Colorado College Festival Orchestra led by Scott Woo, show a deft way with harmony and a gorgeous sense of melody — a sense that never left him, just took a radically different turn — as does the positively downright lovely “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred,” a lilting turn for guitar and soprano (the sensitive David Starobin and Rosalind Rees).

The thrill of this record as a whole (if anyone listens that way) is that these earlier and later works do us the service of informing each other, creating context. But if a lesson is not what you seek, this disc can be listened to for the sheer glory of the sound — from the concerto’s delicious dissonances to the raw emotion of the earlier songs.