Okkyung Lee - Noisy Love Songs (For George Dyer) [2011]

"Korean cellist Okkyung Lee is one of those musicians who is not only comfortable in any genre - modern jazz,  rock or classical - but in her own compositions she even goes beyond genres, not blending them, but defying them.

The musicians who accompany her on this album attest to that : Cornelius Dufallo on violin, Peter Evans on trumpet, Craig Taborn on piano, Satoshi Takeishi on percussion and electronics, and Christopher Tordini on bass. Ikue Mori and John Hollenbeck join on one track - "Steely Morning" - on electronics and percussion.

The second piece has a strong Asian feel, starting like soundtrack music for a Zhang Yimou movie, romantic and moving then shifting deep into avant sounds, with the strings fiddling coarsely in the higher regions, escaping sentimentalism.

Some pieces, such as "Kung" have a strong rhythmic base with cello, violin and bass circling around each other in a hypnotic counterpoint dance.

At the other end, you get "Steely Morning", a real avant-garde piece, with chime-like sounds forming the backbone for a weird electronic exploration, as sweet as it is bizarre.

Lee's compositional approach is one of control and abandon, of structure and exploration, more accessible than much of the music reviewed on this blog, and this despite its complexity of composition and arrangements, resulting in a world of sonic and lyrical magic. Yes, control and abandon describes it well : carefully crafted pieces, with memorable themes, yet with a kind of full emotional giving in the improvisations that says it all, full of depth and subtle inventivenss, without needing to resort to extremes.

A strong and beautiful album."

freejazz-stef.blogspot.com 

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Pram - Dark Island [2003]

Flac


MG
Review
Buy

Los Iniciados - El Cantor De Jazz [1982]

Imagine a film where Kraftwerk are abducted by aliens then taken back in time to an Aztec city and forced to play music at ritual child sacrifices. This is the soundtrack to that film.

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Pram - The Museum of Imaginary Animals [2000]

This sounds like a dream where I'm a child floating through a 19th century fairground which is inhabited by jazz playing, opium smoking anthropomorphic animals.

Highly recommended.

Flac

MG
Review

Rain Net Label

"One day I was sitting in my room, watching the rain through the window. It was late afternoon, quite dark around.
The drops were hitting the glass from the outside - for me it was only a rumbling. I also heard a subtle drone but I couldn't think a way where it comes from. There should be only silence around but I still heard these drones.
Was it in my head?
One important thing: that rain lasted four hours. For this whole time I was sitting there, looking, listening. Apart from anything I grew to love all this, as it was a serene feeling.
And so I wanted You too be able to feel it.
To dive into this stillness of subtle changes.
To let the time stop in Your head when You allow melancholy to rule over Yourself. "

I was going to upload Ananta - Inside My Room, Watching The Rain, an ambient album composed of one four hour track; I Sit and Listen While My Mind Is Wandering. When I came across the Rain Net Label (which seems to be run by Ananta), an ambient net label where all releases are free to download.

Check It Out

Gang Starr - Moment of Truth [1998]

Flac

MG
Review

Sons of Joy - Sons of Joy [2010]

"The three songs are accompanied by a slightly mental manifesto, whose first point is simply “We hereby reclaim folk music.”  Umm, good, I think. It also includes a clause rejecting the copyrighting of music, or at least that’s how it reads, and another stating the following: “We reject the falsification of musical truths through multitracking or use of multiple microphones”.


I wonder how they feel about adding shitloads of distortion to, say, a violin track.  Because it kind of sounds to my (admittedly rather uneducated ears) like that’s what they’ve done here. Is that not ‘falsification of musical truths‘ then?

You all probably know how I feel about distortion by now, so that’s most certainly not a complaint.  In fact, it gives the music a belligerent demand for attention, which is only exacerbated by the rough screech of the vocal and the slow but angry thumping of the drums.  It’s not frantic music, but there is so much pent-up fury in it that it feels like a massive dam about to burst.

They are true to their word in the sense that this music seems to be pretty much just guitar, fiddle and drums, without overdubs, and it is indeed folk music.  But it’s screeching, sawing, tortured folk music of the best kind.  Of the kind, in fact, that would happily tear the still-beating heart from the shattered ribcage of the jelly-spined folk pop which sullies the name these days, and eat it in front of its grieving family. Awesome."

 songbytoad.com

Really great stuff, get this.

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Bandcamp

DVA - Hu [2010]

The third album from the Czech husband/wife duo.

" HU originated in July 2010 in a cottage called “At the Devil’s” in the almost abandoned Padouchov village. “On this album, there are thirteen songs written in non-existent world languages, listened to on thirteen non-existent radio stations”. After the album Fonók, which lyrics were mostly about cold northern regions, the album Hu is dedicated to animal motifs and tropical and southern countries."


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Dengue Fever - Sleepwalking Through the Mekong [2009]

 Soundtrack to the film.


"Sleepwalking Through the Mekong follows Los Angeles based band Dengue Fever on their recent journey to Cambodia to perform 60s and 70s Cambodian rock n' roll in the country where it was created and very nearly destroyed.
The odyssey is a homecoming for singer Chhom Nimol and a transformation for the rest of the band as they perform with master musicians and record new songs along the way.
More than a rockumentary, the film serves up a portrait of modern Cambodia as the band tours through Phnom Penh and beyond, crossing a great cultural chasm with the same spirit of Cambodia's original rock pioneers.
Cambodia is often synonymous with the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that left millions dead and scattered refugees around the globe. This tragedy overshadows the story of Cambodia's music scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Cambodian musicians reinvented Western rock n' roll with a distinctly Khmer flavor to crete a sound that is at once familiar and completely original.
Sleepwalking Through the Mekong celebrates this vibrant but long-overlooked music and reveals the power of music to weave a common thread between extremely different cultures."

sleepwalkingthroughthemekong.com 

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Because one more music blog can't hurt.

Also, RIP Megaupload. Fuck the RIAA/MPAA/Feds etc.