What is new in my music library? (recent purchases I enjoy)
- Thread starter flez007
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"Bruno Battisti D'Amario (born 1937) is an Italian classical guitarist, teacher and composer. D'Amario is known for his performances on film scores by Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota and became Professor of Classical Guitar at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. Morricone claimed D'Amario as his favourite guitarist and said that he was "able to conjure up extraordinary sounds with his guitar" for his appearances on the soundtrack to the film "Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo" (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly). He was also involved in the pioneering Avant-garde band Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza." ©
Out of curiosity (to find out what "avant garde jazz with choral elements" means), I checked this one out on Qobuz. This is easily the most unpleasant (and boring) music I have ever heard! I did not grasp the link to jazz...
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You are at liberty to post and share here any recent musical releases that you have acquired that excite you, and you find very "pleasant"...
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Thanks. This is your thread, I mention things I purchase or sometimes concerts I enjoy in other threads. At least I had the curiosity to go and listen to that album you strongly recommended. Perhaps I should have just said: "I don't get it". Feel free to educate me.
Well done for checking it out. I have to say, the music the @AudioLibertarian posts is refreshing compared to some of the audiophile dribble that get regurgitated on these threads. Sure, some of it might be hard to listen to, but at least it's different, challenging and gets you thinking about music in a different perspective.
@AudioLibertarian has wide ranging and eclectic tastes but I "watch" this thread because I have discovered new music that I enjoy that I would never come across any other way. I thought the album you disliked so much was interesting enough to add to my playlist. So far I have only sampled it, but I continue to think that, at the very least, it is going to be a terrific sonic experience, albeit a potentially abrasive one. The fact that the vocals are in French will limit my enjoyment. I have no idea what it is supposed to be about, but I think in general I would put it in the same category as quite a lot of contemporary visual art, performance art, and contemporary classical where your immediate aesthetic, visual, or listening pleasure simply isn't the point. In any case, it is certainly your prerogative to actively dislike a piece of music. I find a great deal of the stuff most of us older audiophiles listen to boring in the extreme. But I do always try to keep in mind that may be more of a limitation of me and my tastes than the music itself.
Since the album is a bit hard to track down here is a link for those following this thread. https://open.qobuz.com/album/ng37afpcxmzzb
And @AudioLibertarian do please keep posting what you listen to. It would be helpful if you included text with the album title or a link to the music. It gets a bit tedious trying to decipher album cover art and track things down. I'm guessing you live outside the US because often the music isn't going to be released here until the next day which makes it even more challenging to find. Anyhow, I'm not trying to task you with more work, just a suggestion.
I do live in the US, sometimes as a music collector, I do get to sample of some releases in advance of their official release. I always put info of the release if its not on the album's cover.
I will most certainly continue to post here anything I find worth mentioning and exploring. As cliche as it may sound I have been in this hobby for the love of music, and thus tend to find musical beauty and enjoyment in many genre from wide variety of sources.
Its NOT my thread. Any member can post any music they like and just has added to their collection. I just post here more often than other members.
I most certainly don't wish to educate you, we all have different tastes. I post here simply to add a little musical "diversity" so to speak, and to introduce a wealth of music that exists outside of the "usual music" that some audiophiles may not be aware.
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Once again, thank you. I appreciate reading your thread.
Schola de la Sainte-Chapelle & Brigitte Lesne - Splendeurs de l'Ars nova - Plain-chant et polyphonies du 14e siècle
Some enchanting choral music from the 14 century.
Classical vocal avant garde .. Loadbang- A garden adorned
Recording quality is superb as well!
In the liner notes for A Garden Adorned, loadbang vocalist Ty Bouque identifies a fascinating duality at the heart of the garden; it is an attempt at organizing and controlling nature while nevertheless being subject to the rules of the natural world. The album presents works by Oscar Bettison, Raven Chacon, Yotam Haber, Christina J. George, and Laura Cetilia that are curated around this concept. Composition engages with a similar dichotomy, fashioning sounds and silence in a temporal container whose materials are governed by fundamental principles. In the case of works for loadbang, an ensemble of baritone voice, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, many of those governing principles relate to breath and the nature of sound production on wind instruments. Characteristic of loadbang’s recordings, A Garden Adorned covers rich and varied aesthetic territory, and prompts insights about ideas beyond the sounds themselves.
Oscar Bettison’s I am a Garden Adorned is inspired by the famous Moorish temple in Granada, Spain, the Alhambra. Struck by its enduring symbolism of an era of peaceful coexistence and fruitful progress, Bettison adapted Arabic text inscribed on the walls of the Alhambra by the 14th century Muslim poet Ibn Zamrak as the basis for the text in his piece. We hear texts in Spanish and English, creating a metaphor for the translation process of a region with a complex history as well as the filtering of musical ideas from composer to performer to listener. The piece unfolds patiently in obscure, mystical gestures and incantations, evoking the spiritual power of its site of inspiration. Extensive use of mutes on the brass instruments, a battery of vocal techniques, and developing variation of motivic material creates an extended sound vocabulary of textured reverence.
Raven Chacon’s Reckoning opens with a chorus of growling, multi-timbral techniques across the ensemble that echo throat-singing practices, evoking the Chihuahuan Desert that was the site of its rehearsal. Chacon’s work often centers the Indigenous American experience, cultivated here through timbrally driven, ritualistic masses of sound. Chacon pushes the ensemble to the edges of conventional sound color and expression, evoking visceral, human responses to sound.
Yotam Haber sets a text by Thomas Bernhard (translated by James Reidel) in In a Rug of Water, a work for triple quartet in which the loadbang musicians are heard in a kind of musical house of mirrors. The enhanced forces facilitate voice chorales, exuberant brass fanfares, and a quantity and density of sound that is a contrast to the often delicate, tactile focus of much of the ensemble’s repertoire. Swelled figures act as connective tissue across the stereo footprint of the ensemble, as Haber grinds up against closely spaced intervals.
Christina J. George’s >>liminal songs>> is a five part setting of her own poetry, an examination of in-between states for their own unique experiential qualities. This self-reflective work takes a turn towards lyricism and more conventional text setting and expressive presentation, featuring Bouque’s baritone with the ensemble providing coloristic accompaniment and shading. “This delicious rain” revels in lush harmonies and poignant melodic phrases. “ancient h i s t o r y” is taut with inquisitive anxiety, as short fragmentary phrases explore the ineffable: “There is a pattern here, and I am in it.” “A Prayer:” is based on a lilting, meditative repeating figure that ascends and supports a plaintive wordless vocal line. Percolating ensemble figures shape “Not Quite” as the voice sings repeated fragments of texts, alternating between joining the group texture and singing from the fore. The final movement, “(dis)illusionment” is a somber, bittersweet ballad, with growing markers of liminal disorientation manifesting themselves in an arc through stasis, restlessness, and repose.
Laura Cetilia’s breath of cinder, depth of moss is the only piece on the album that includes electronics, consisting of white noise, sine tones, and manipulated samples of a vinyl record player. The environmental electronics provide the background for gentle exhalations of sonority that coalesce over the piece’s duration into luminous harmonic gems. The piece closes the album with eternal serenity.
loadbang's evolution as an ensemble represents significant contributions to the repertoire for their unique instrumentation as well as the development of new techniques in instrumental playing and ensemble hybrids. As notable and impressive however is their curatorial prowess; with each new album the ensemble demonstrates its capacity to not only commission some of the most influential composers active in contemporary music, but to do so in a manner that engages with the cutting edge of new music aesthetics while marshaling music’s unique capacity to speak to our most profound human experiences. A Garden Adorned is only the most recent fruit of the group’s efforts, and succeeds once again in its endeavor to be an album length statement in its own right alongside a documentation of several landmark new compositions."
–Dan Lippel ©
Recording quality is superb as well!
In the liner notes for A Garden Adorned, loadbang vocalist Ty Bouque identifies a fascinating duality at the heart of the garden; it is an attempt at organizing and controlling nature while nevertheless being subject to the rules of the natural world. The album presents works by Oscar Bettison, Raven Chacon, Yotam Haber, Christina J. George, and Laura Cetilia that are curated around this concept. Composition engages with a similar dichotomy, fashioning sounds and silence in a temporal container whose materials are governed by fundamental principles. In the case of works for loadbang, an ensemble of baritone voice, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, many of those governing principles relate to breath and the nature of sound production on wind instruments. Characteristic of loadbang’s recordings, A Garden Adorned covers rich and varied aesthetic territory, and prompts insights about ideas beyond the sounds themselves.
Oscar Bettison’s I am a Garden Adorned is inspired by the famous Moorish temple in Granada, Spain, the Alhambra. Struck by its enduring symbolism of an era of peaceful coexistence and fruitful progress, Bettison adapted Arabic text inscribed on the walls of the Alhambra by the 14th century Muslim poet Ibn Zamrak as the basis for the text in his piece. We hear texts in Spanish and English, creating a metaphor for the translation process of a region with a complex history as well as the filtering of musical ideas from composer to performer to listener. The piece unfolds patiently in obscure, mystical gestures and incantations, evoking the spiritual power of its site of inspiration. Extensive use of mutes on the brass instruments, a battery of vocal techniques, and developing variation of motivic material creates an extended sound vocabulary of textured reverence.
Raven Chacon’s Reckoning opens with a chorus of growling, multi-timbral techniques across the ensemble that echo throat-singing practices, evoking the Chihuahuan Desert that was the site of its rehearsal. Chacon’s work often centers the Indigenous American experience, cultivated here through timbrally driven, ritualistic masses of sound. Chacon pushes the ensemble to the edges of conventional sound color and expression, evoking visceral, human responses to sound.
Yotam Haber sets a text by Thomas Bernhard (translated by James Reidel) in In a Rug of Water, a work for triple quartet in which the loadbang musicians are heard in a kind of musical house of mirrors. The enhanced forces facilitate voice chorales, exuberant brass fanfares, and a quantity and density of sound that is a contrast to the often delicate, tactile focus of much of the ensemble’s repertoire. Swelled figures act as connective tissue across the stereo footprint of the ensemble, as Haber grinds up against closely spaced intervals.
Christina J. George’s >>liminal songs>> is a five part setting of her own poetry, an examination of in-between states for their own unique experiential qualities. This self-reflective work takes a turn towards lyricism and more conventional text setting and expressive presentation, featuring Bouque’s baritone with the ensemble providing coloristic accompaniment and shading. “This delicious rain” revels in lush harmonies and poignant melodic phrases. “ancient h i s t o r y” is taut with inquisitive anxiety, as short fragmentary phrases explore the ineffable: “There is a pattern here, and I am in it.” “A Prayer:” is based on a lilting, meditative repeating figure that ascends and supports a plaintive wordless vocal line. Percolating ensemble figures shape “Not Quite” as the voice sings repeated fragments of texts, alternating between joining the group texture and singing from the fore. The final movement, “(dis)illusionment” is a somber, bittersweet ballad, with growing markers of liminal disorientation manifesting themselves in an arc through stasis, restlessness, and repose.
Laura Cetilia’s breath of cinder, depth of moss is the only piece on the album that includes electronics, consisting of white noise, sine tones, and manipulated samples of a vinyl record player. The environmental electronics provide the background for gentle exhalations of sonority that coalesce over the piece’s duration into luminous harmonic gems. The piece closes the album with eternal serenity.
loadbang's evolution as an ensemble represents significant contributions to the repertoire for their unique instrumentation as well as the development of new techniques in instrumental playing and ensemble hybrids. As notable and impressive however is their curatorial prowess; with each new album the ensemble demonstrates its capacity to not only commission some of the most influential composers active in contemporary music, but to do so in a manner that engages with the cutting edge of new music aesthetics while marshaling music’s unique capacity to speak to our most profound human experiences. A Garden Adorned is only the most recent fruit of the group’s efforts, and succeeds once again in its endeavor to be an album length statement in its own right alongside a documentation of several landmark new compositions."
–Dan Lippel ©
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