Records.
They have sounds on them.
We have them.
You should too.
<3
Two audio professors and musical wizards venture forth deeper into the outer realms of more unexplored musical dimensions bringing you the most astonishing aural treasures for your pleasure - straight from the Prog Cellar.
3/18/2013
Tenhi - Maaäet
Artist: Tenhi
Album: Maaäet
Year: 2006
Line-Up: Ilmari
Issakainen
- Drums, piano, guitar, bass, percussions, backing vocals
Tyko
Saarikko
- Vocals, piano, harmonium, synth, guitar, percussions
Ilkka
Salminen
- Vocals, guitar, bass, harmonium, percussions
Inka
Eerola
- Violin
Jaakko
Hilppö
- Backing vocals
Janina
Lehto
- Flute
Tuukka
Tolvanen
- Backing vocals
Label: Prophecy
Productions
Tenhi’s
music is Finnish melancholy in its' finest. The dark, soft ambience
that these musicians create is minimal and small, but at the same
time kind of huge and even epic. Tenhi takes great inspiration from
nature, especially from Finnish nature. They claim it to be an
endless source of amazement and beauty. Maaäet is their third studio
album and they describe its theme as follows:
“We
compare our album Maaäet to an autumnal forest. It was its feel that
we aimed for when we were creating the music. Life slowly fleeing
from everywhere, fatalism, acceptance, gentle fall to sleep, turning
towards an end of a cycle, giving energy back to earth — giving it
to be a seed of new life.”
The
album contains 12 tracks, almost all including vocals sung in
Finnish. I usually tend to understate the beauty of the Finnish
language, and even consider it occasionally pretty ugly, but I have
to admit that Tenhi makes my mother tongue sound enchantingly
beautiful and it suits this kind of music perfectly. Their use of the
violin together with piano is brilliant and smooth while guitar,
drums and bass are actually used rather rock-oriented. Only a few
graceful melodies and some minimal fingerpicking with the guitar can
create lovely emotions and soundscapes. Some tracks even include
heavy riffs, but mainly the music is pretty folky with a progressive
touch.
Tenhi
is an old Finnish word meaning a village elder, wise old man, or
seer. For Tenhi, visual arts are almost just as important as the
music. The band creates the album covers by themselves. The dark
artwork dominating in the sleeve of the CD works as a window from
where the themes are captured, as it has guided the band in composing
the music for this beautifully floating piece. Maaäet is a very
interesting album, and if you want to explore the Nordic melancholy
Tenhi is a good place to start. Varpuspäivä (Sparrow Day) is the
opener of the album, enjoy:
Written
by: Oz
3/11/2013
Jorge Cardoso - Origenes
Artist: Jorge Cardoso
Album: Origenes
Year: 1998
Line-up: Jorge Cardoso – Vihuela,
modern classical guitar, baroque guitar,
classical-romantic
guitar
Label: Guitar Masters
Continuing to cover albums of artists
which I have had the pleasure of seeing perform live, today I am
going further back to the year 2009. I was attending a world music
festival where I saw the Argentine guitarist/composer/musicologist
give a solo recital concert on the classical guitar. Cardoso has done
an impressive life work on studying the deep roots and secrets of
Latin and Spanish classical guitar music. The recital performed in
the festival was based on his album Origenes
which tries to build a musical and historical bridge between Spain
and South America originating from several hundred years ago to the
present. I was so enthralled by the concert that I absolutely had to
purchase a copy of the Origenes album
afterwards.
The
album contains 15 compositions the oldest dating from the 16th
century and the newest being the compositions of Jorge Cardoso. Some
of the composers featured on here are Luis de Narváez (Spain,
1526-49), Francois Le Cocq (Belgium, 1685-1729), Ferdinando Carulli
(Italy 1770-1841), Matteo Carcassi (Italy, 1792-1853), Napoléon
Coste (France, 1805-1883), María Luisa Anido (Argentina, 1907-1996),
Eduardo Falú (Argentina, 1923) and the master himself, Jorge Cardoso
(1949, Argentina). In addition, the album contains also works of less
known composers from Latin America. In the concert Cardoso performed
only on one modern classical guitar, a type of guitar which was
established in the 19th
century Spain. However, on the album the maestro strives for
authenticity by performing each piece with respected instrument of
the given time period. Thus, we are being treated with the sounds of
vihuela (a guitar-shaped instrument from 15th
and 16th
century Spain, Italy and Portugal), baroque guitar (a string
instrument with five courses of gut strings and moveable gut frets)
and romantic guitar which is the immediate precursor of the modern
classical guitar.
The
actual music on the album is a pleasant and lovely collection of solo
guitar and vihuela works which explore, in the most interesting
manner, the origins and the evolution of this fine instrument and the
similarities and differences between the European and the South
American tradition. The playing and the performances of Jorge Cardoso
are absolutely brilliant. The virtuosity and the control which he has
over the guitar is astounding, resulting in delightful performances
which are not are not only technically flawless but also full of
purity, clarity, dynamics and, above all, emotion. In addition to
being a virtuoso on his instrument, Cardoso also proves himself to be
a quite talented composer who writes very subtle and delicate pieces
never putting his technical proficiency ahead of the actual music.
Along with the compositions of Cardoso, one of the definite
highlights of the albums has to be the 14-minute long tour
de force Folías de España,
which is one of the oldest remembered European musical themes.
It goes without a
saying that this record is a must for all fans of the classical
guitar for having such lovely and rare repertoire and featuring also
various precursors of the modern classical guitar. The album is also
quite relaxing and smoothing and serves well as music to have playing
while reading, having a cup of coffee or tea or before going to bed.
Yet again, the more careful listens bring forth the rich details of
the featured compositions and Cardoso's playing.
Please enjoy a composition of Jorge
Cardoso, a beautiful milonga:
Written
by Παναγιωτιης
3/04/2013
ECM
ECM Records (Edition of Contemporary
Music) is a German record label founded in 1969, in Munich, Germany,
by a record producer and double-bass player Manfred Eicher.
Musically, the origins of the label lay in jazz music, and especially
in modern jazz, but nowadays ECM has broadened its' catalogue to
western art music and various world music traditions. However, many
ECM artists and Mister Eicher himself have been reluctant to
categorize their music and move fluently across the borders and
boundaries of traditional genres. To date, ECM has released over 1200
albums covering a wide variety of different musical idioms.
The first release of ECM was Free at
Last by American pianist Mal
Waldron, and at first the label was known for releasing records by
great modern American jazz masters such as Keith Jarrett, Chick
Corea, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie and Ralph Towner.
Nonetheless, from very early on the label served also as a medium for
putting many gifted jazz musicians from all over Europe on the map
and bringing various musicians, often with very different
backgrounds, together in new and exciting combinations and ensembles.
In 1984 ECM New Series saw its' daylight originally launched to
introduce the composition Tabula Rasa by
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Since then, the series has become an
essential part of the label as a platform for documenting the works
of western art music ranging from early music to modern compositions.
Eventough lacking its' own series, world music has also become an
important ”genre” of the ECM catalogue. In the label's true
fashion, their catalogue also include a great deal of releases where
the idioms of jazz, classical music and different world music
traditions are mixed seamlessly.
ECM
has also a very special relation to the art of cinema. Founder
Manfred Eicher is himself a passionate aficionado of cinema, and thus
his label has been active in various film projects. For example, ECM
has released the soundtracks of the films of such directors as Theo
Angelopoulos, Jean-Luc Godard and Andrey Zvyagintsev. The
collaborations with Godard have expanded to the usage of various
still photos of numerous Godard's movies as album covers and to
Eicher's involvement on Godard's films as a musical director.
Additionally, a number of prolific European actors have released
spoken word-albums for the label and some projects and albums are
dedicated to iconic people in motion picture history. ECM has also
released a couple of concert performances of its' artists, a
collection of short films by Godard as well as a quality documentary
named Sounds and Silence which
captures the daily routine and work of Manfred Eicher with various
musicians.
The
founder and producer of ECM Manfred Eicher continues to the date to
take active interest in the music which is released by the label by
picking new artists usually based on his own very wide musical taste
and he is also close friends with many of the artists. Yet, the
integrity and the musicians' control over their art and creations has
always been an important policy of the philosophy of the label.
Eicher acts as the producer on the majority of the releases being
almost always present in the recording sessions which usually last
only three days: two for recording and one for mixing. The ECM's
motto, taken from a 1971 review of ECM releases by Canadian jazz
magazine called CODA, is the Most Beautiful Sound Next to Silence.
This motto sums up very well the very prolific, iconic and
recognisable sound which the ECM albums are known for. Despite the
difficulty of verbal expression of sound, one could use such words as
”ascetic”, ”pure”, ”clear”, ”meditative”, ”ethreal”,
”dreamy”, ”peaceful” and ”reflective” while trying to
capture the general atmosphere of a typical soundscape of an ECM
record. The importance of texture and atmosphere are usually the key
elements of the sound engineering on an ECM album. Part of it is
based on producer Eicher's tendency to approach the sound engineering
with the aesthetics normally associated with classical music
production which aims for clarity and detail.
Altough
ECM is without a doubt a familiar name to many music connoisseurs,
such a fine and quality record label can never get too much
attention. For the end, I have picked a number of less known samples
of the vast catalogue of ECM.
A
piece from the soundtrack of the the film The Return:
A
collaboration between Norwegian saxophone player Jan Garbarek and
musicians from Pakistan:
Modern
jazz by the masters, Kenny Wheeler, Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell and Dave
Holland:
Modern
classical music by Slovakian composer Vladimir Godar:
New
age-ish music by interesting world music artist Stephan Micus:
Nu-jazz
by Nil Petter Molvaer:
Modern
art music in memory of the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky:
Written
by Παναγιωτιης
2/25/2013
Louis Chen & Friends Ya Dong - The Sound of Silk and Bamboo
Artist:
Louis Chen & Friends Ya Dong
Album: The
Sound of Silk and Bamboo
Year: 1998
Line-Up: Louis
Chen – Zheng
Ya
Ch’in – Yang qin
Li
Kai – Erhu
Lam-zi
Kun - Ti-tse, sheng
Wu
Ronghua – Pipa
Ya
Dong – Pipa
Label: Network
Medien
”It
is in the nature of the ear to love sounds; and yet if the heart is
not cheerful then the ear does not hear, even if all five tones
resound”
-Lü
Pu We
A
few weeks ago the Chinese New Year was celebrated; it was a quite
nice festival even in cold and snowy Finland. I was actually
performing lion and dragon dancing and my fellow blogger was
attending the shows. I have always felt this mysterious calling
towards China, and its culture but only a few years ago I started
listening Chinese music and I have written a few posts about the
culture in question, and here is one more! Considering how huge and
old the culture is, there is just too much to tell about the music of China. And even though I think contemporary
Chinese music has gotten stuck in adoring and glamorizing the ancient
traditions, it is still so different to a European classical
approach, and for that it is not an easy quest to take.
The
Sound of Silk and Bamboo is a diverse and comprehensive overview on
Chinese traditional music. Chinese music can be categorized into two
sub-categories: Music for the sages and scholars for the closed,
private domain strongly concentrating on nature and more meditative
feelings, and then there are more upbeat folk melodies and rhythms
for the folk festivals, such as the Spring Festival, which is the
other name for Chinese New Year mentioned earlier. We can hear both
of these genres in the piece. Confucius had a strict demand for
music: “Music of a high-minded man has to be soft and gentle”.
But for the Chinese people, music has always been also an expression
of joy and happiness. One aspect of construing Chinese culture is
with its language. The ancient characters usually tell us something
about the Chinese way of thinking and perceiving the world. The
symbol 樂(traditional)
means music as well as enjoyable, and happy.
Louis
Chen, born in Guangdong province but raised in Malaysia, was the
first musician to introduce guzheng (古箏)
to
western audience decades ago. Also simply called zheng, this wooden
instrument contains as its up-to-date form 16 to 25 metal or silk
strings, it is a close relative to guqin (古琴)
or simply qin as gu refers to “ancient”. Last year I wrote about
Wu Jinglue, a qin master. The sound of these two instruments is very
close to each other, but zheng is nowadays much more popular in
Chinese music than qin for its diversity. Li Kai, also from
Guangdong, plays the erhu (二胡)
in this piece. Erhu is a string instrument with only two strings,
that is the reason of er (two) in the name. At the end of the album
we can also hear the sharp playing of pipa (琵琶),
the very traditional and old lute-like instrument of China. It has
actually been played for more than five centuries its form totally
unaltered, which is a rare case for a string instrument.
The
Sound of Silk and Bamboo captures the essential emotions and
soundscapes of Chinese music and offers nice music played with a
professional and skillful touch. It won’t disappoint if you are
looking for, or just into Chinese music or the culture itself. This
piece contains beautiful melodies with a nerve-calming effect. Spin
the album after a long day at work and enjoy a nice cup of tea: the
small and important joys of life.
Written
by: Oz
2/18/2013
David Lagos - El espejo en que me miro
Artist: David Lagos
Album: El espejo en que me miro
Year: 2009
Line-up: David Lagos – vocals
Alfredo Lagos – guitar
Santiago Lara – guitar
Manuel Moreno 'Moraíto' - guitar
Paco González – percussion
Pablo Martin – double bass
Carlos Grilo – palmas and jaleos
Luis Cantarote – palmas and jaleos
Rafael Romero – palmas and jaleos
Juan Castro – palmas and jaleos
Londro – backing vocals
Melchora Ortega – backing vocals
David Palomar – backing vocals
Mercedes Ruiz - feet
Label: Flamenco World Music
David Lagos is a Spanish flamenco
singer born in Jerez to a flamenco aficionado family where he was
surrounded by the flamenco music and culture from am early age. He
was constantly encouraged to sing in family get-togethers and parties
and at the age of ten David made his first public performance
accompanied by his brother Alfredo on the guitar. Soon he began
making more and more shows finally deciding to immerse himself in the
world of singing to flamenco dance. Since then David Lagos has been a
much requested singer among numerous flamenco dance companies and he
has travelled the world doing shows with various groups. I myself
have had the pleasure of hearing and seeing David Lagos in concert
for three times in a span of merely three months. Not only is he a
brilliant singer , but he is also a very warm and a charming person.
Therefore, I thought that the time was finally right to write a bit
about the first, and at the moment of writing this post, the only
solo album of David Lagos called El espejo en que me miro (The mirror
in which I look at myself).
On the back cover of the album, it says
that ”David Lagos is one of the most unique cantaores in today's
flamenco”. One can certainly agree to that sentence upon the very
first ten seconds on the album as David and his musicians kick it off
with am energetic bulerias (one
of the many flamenco song types) featuring only hand clapping
(palmas),
encouragement shouts (jaleos)
and muted guitar string strumming as David enters the scene with his
powerful voice before the whole band explodes to the musical frenzy.
The artistry of David Lagos might not be unique in a sense that he
would bring something extravagantly new or innovative to the table of
flamenco music. The uniqueness lies solely in his voice: it is
instantly recognisable and while trying to describing it I would use
such adjectives such as deep, powerful, grainy and fat (in a positive
sense). Personally, I find that special something in David's voice
which attracts to me in flamenco in general: that magic, depth and
the mystical sensation on which you cannot quite put your finger. The
music itself on the album is fairly traditional flamenco featuring a
good range of the different flamenco song types. Eventough the music
might be traditional, it is performed with a good energy and the
passion of today's flamenco artists which makes this album a very
pleasant experience. David's brother, Alfredo is a real power house
on the guitar and he is obviously on of the best and most natural
choices to accompany the singing of David.
I
could definitely recommend this album to all music fans out there. If
you are already familiar with flamenco, you can surely appreciate
this album. If you, on the other hand, are somewhat or completely new
to flamenco this record could serve as a fine introduction to this
fine musical style as it is musically very traditional but the
musicianship and the performances are filled with the young and fresh
energy of today making the album exciting and exhilarating to listen.
I will conclude this post by saluting David with the very same words
which close the the album itself shouted by the wife of David: ”Olé!
Viva tu tierra!”
Preview of the
album:
David Lagos live
with his brother Alfredo Lagos:
Written
by Παναγιωτιης
2/11/2013
Focus - Focus III
Artist: Focus
Album: Focus
III
Year: 1972
Line-Up: Thijs
van Leer - Keyboards, flute, piccolo, recorder, vocals
Jan
Akkerman - Guitars, lute
Bert
Ruiter – Bass guitar
Pierre
van der Linden - Drums
Label: Sire
Records
Focus,
probably one of my favorite groups of all time. Yes, this artist may
not be an aural obscurity for the basic prog-rocker, but I have
learnt that most people, who know Focus, know it only by name and/or
their most famous track, Hocus Pocus. So, this time I will tell you
something about this wonderfully weird and humorous band’s third
studio album.
The
main drive behind Focus comes from Thijs van Leer and Jan Akkerman.
After their debut-album, which included lyrical singing by Thijs ,
they have released mostly instrumental progressive rock with good
attitude: beautiful melodies, kick-ass organs, incredible flutes,
ingenious arrangements, and weird yodeling-like singing. Between the
two successes of Moving Waves (or Focus II) and Hamburger Concerto,
Focus III is a vital addition to any prog-rock collection. It
provides all what Focus is about, charming “Sylvia” and “Love
Remembered” at the beginning and solid all the way through to the
legendary “Anonymus II”, running almost half an hour. It’s
probably one of the best rock’n’roll jams I know, brilliant solo
after another including an incredible bass solo by Bert Ruiter. The
medieval influence of Jan Akkerman and his lute is displayed on
“Elspeth of Nottingham”. Honey for your ears.
Sire
Records is an American record label founded in 1966, now owned by
Warner Music Group. It was an independent record label when Focus III
was released, but in 1978 Warner acquired the company, and it became
mainstream in the 80’s as it has released music from acts like
Depeche Mode, Ice-T, The Cure, and even Madonna.
Focus
is still releasing and performing, but without Jan Akkerman. After a
few non-successful releases in the late 70’s and the 80’s, Thijs
and Jan Akkerman parted ways and Thijs made a comeback in 2002 with
Focus 8. Focus X was released last fall, followed by a small tour
around Europe. One of my favorites, here is Focus and “Anonymus II”
Part
2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxU44vMfhUw
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