#Italian Prog Rock albums | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

schismusic · 10 months ago

Text

Joy Division, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love New Order, too

Spring is weird as hell because one time you have this glaring sun that powers you up like being plugged into a wall outlet, then not five minutes later clouds begin to gather and you feel like you're going to die if anything goes south. So the most obvious combination to represent two sides of this same coin, emotional and meteorological, is Joy Division and New Order.

Sometimes you need Transmission or Shadowplay for the sunny days — impassioned jolts, sparks flying everywhere. Sometimes The Perfect Kiss hits harder on a cloudy afternoon, coming back home and in need of that extra push to not fall asleep in the train. It's surprising to realize the versatility displayed by both bands, or the same band in two different iterations according to whomever you ask. Peter Hook says, as late as 1993, that the laziest member of New Order is Ian Curtis. Or again this other person, in the comments under the Atmosphere official video on YouTube, who went to see New Order (Hooky-less New Order, which might be a relevant distinction) at the O2 Arena a couple of years ago and they gave an encore, says "Those of us who stayed got the privilege of watching Joy Division perform three of their songs". Interesting outlook on the matter. I personally saw Peter Hook and the Light play both Joy Division records and, I'm pretty sure, an encore comprised of just Love Will Tear Us Apart at the Arti Vive Festival in Soliera, back when it was still free to attend some of the events. I remember being pretty mad that Hooky had stopped to take pics with basically everyone and then left exactly as I was approaching. In retrospect I don't exactly blame the man, it was like midnight anyway. I remember nothing of the back trip home.

youtube

My first contact with Joy Division happened when I was thirteen and very much in my prog era. I was in Rome staying at an aunt of mine's place for my fourteenth birthday and she told me I could get a CD, since I had gotten some money saved up over time. Some Facebook page dedicated to Pink Floyd I'd liked (yeah, Facebook at age thirteen — I literally just wanted to play a fucking Flash game, back when Facebook allowed them, and I ended up getting to be terminally online. Crazy how things turn out) used to share a lot of memes and fanart relating to the Unknown Pleasures album cover, and me being a massive Pink Floyd head at the time I thought "I mean, if these guys are pushing this band so hard, that's gotta mean something". The album cover was pretty striking, admittedly: a far cry from the paisley ass paintings that I had grown to accept as the gold standard for the music I liked, but its simplicity struck a chord closer to The Dark Side of the Moon, or perhaps The Wall. Those were records I liked a lot, probably called them "the best records ever made" to more than one person, not like they aren't but that's a very bold statement to make when your listening experience consists exactly of

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor when I was six;

Daft Punk's complete discography (minus Random Access Memories, which wasn't out yet) when I was twelve;

Pink Floyd's complete discography, courtesy of a CD collection coming out with some Italian newspaper, that same year;

a couple random classic rock records recommended to me by older friends and relatives usually well into their fifties or sixties at the time, random people on Internet forums — which, for clarification, I did not actively attend, preferring to just lurk from time to time — and the OndaRock "milestones" page.

So browsing through the surprisingly expansive CDs section of this electronics shop in Rome, and being mesmerized by a vinyl rack in the days when Music on Vinyl was the final frontier of pretending you could re-analogue the digital ("you mean to tell me these are like CDs, but bigger? Whoever designed these truly lived in the future"), I came across that very same album art that had stricken me so hard. I had listened to the first seconds of the album on YouTube, but that weird drum sound — so echoey, so distant, ultimately not particularly powerful, meaning it didn't really sound like Bonzo: it sounded more like my own band, which at the time didn't even exist yet — I didn't really know what to make of. This store I was in had one of those preview listening machines that would scan the barcode on the CDs and give you a small snippet of the song. I pull the CD up to the scanner, the scanner lights up green, I put on the headphones and the solo from this comes up:

youtube

Clearly they had to be kidding me. I had come to know, sneaking into infinitely many rehearsals with the band from my mother's town, what it sounded like when someone tried to play lead without something else filling up the arrangement (even though I didn't really know all that, or at least lacked the vocabulary to properly express it) and, for Christ's sake, didn't these guys notice rehearsing? It sounded empty, weirdly so, and it wasn't my thing, I thought. I put that CD away and picked up a band I knew I'd like — Genesis, specifically. So Nursery Cryme became the first CD I've ever paid with my own money, the very day I turned fourteen. Not a bad pickup. I remember being very impressed with the fast blurring lead guitar on The Musical Box and digging the sweet pastoral atmospheres of For Absent Friends and Harlequin. I still think of that record more often than one would probably assume looking at this blog, or my most played on Spotify. At the time, that was the best move I could take, really: why beat my head against a record that, as your average prog nerd ballbreaker, simply wasn't speaking to me?

youtube

Then all of a sudden in August of the same year my friend's dad hands me a 16 gigabyte USB drive, full of random music from all eras of rock. A lot of it remains inscrutable to me for a really long time, most notably Tom Waits (see related post), but I spent the whole month reading random folder names, seeing if something catches my eyes, and at one point I come across the Mars Volta. Open the folder up, read the names of their first three records, and my first thought is "Christ, these guys look incomprehensible. I'm about to have some fun". Long story short: I end up having a lot of fun, the Mars Volta turns into my favourite band at the time and finding out that they had previously been called At the Drive-In makes me gain some measure of respect for punk rockers: if they tried hard enough, I must've thought, they could prog as hard as anyone. In the meantime the ghost of Joy Division remains at the back of my head. I feel like I'm missing something, for the first time in my life: it's not them, it's me. Too bad that same realization didn't occur to me when it came to the people in my life until much, much later, but that's being fourteen for you I suppose. Early King Crimson and the Mars Volta were the pinnacle of violence to me, and not even the very few Metallica songs I'd downloaded just to see what would happen scratched that itch. It felt a bit too cauterized for some reason (I would later find out I had been looking in the wrong direction the whole time: the Black Album "sucked", according to my favourite metalhead of the time, who somehow catalyzed my interest from the very second I saw him in the school's courtyard. Hard to imagine why I would imprint on people like puppies do, but what the fuck, not like I've ever outgrown that anyway, I've just gotten better at managing it). But I felt there was more than violence to this, or different forms of violence. When Christmas came around and my relatives tried to get me presents, my mother asked if there was anything specific I was interested in, and I basically told her "look, if they can get me some CDs off of this list, I'm golden". It had some bangers on it, namely Noctourniquet by the Mars Volta — it's one of their best and I will die on this hill, be warned — and The Downward Spiral, which might as well warrant its own post in an ideal world. But the best of them all I think came from a random purchase, once again with the little money I had lying around at the time.

youtube

Closer appears to be, right away, a bit more concrete, and if there's something inexperienced music fans like is a pretty packaging that conjures a strong emotional response before they've even played the record. Compare a color-inverted graph of pulsar emissions to a literal funerary monument. Opening up the booklet I was shocked to see that Genesis was used as a negative point of comparison (bad omen, I thought) by people close to the band, and I came across much more detailed information about Ian Curtis's untimely demise — at that time, something far too removed from my experience to be faced with the delicacy and attention it deserves. Atrocity Exhibition hits like a ten-ton truck, a reference which at the time I wouldn't have been able to make for obvious reasons, and Isolation exposes all the nerve tissue under the skin. Passover comes in and strips everything even barer, and then A Means to an End turns… danceable, for some reason? Big emotional moment with The Eternal and Decades, which I thought actually took them closer to my usual tastes. And yet at the same time I kept looking at Colony, Heart and Soul and Twenty Four Hours as the most compelling cuts. Geometric assault sounding like sheet metal if it were music; rhythmically driven emptiness that serves as a minimal backdrop for depressed poetry, and finally a rocking ebb-and-flow that would probably inform a lot of my interest in GY!BE-like post-rock in the coming years. Very interesting to think that the same guys who'd done Unknown Pleasures could think of this. To this day, when asked, I still do think that Closer is the best Joy Division record, but what does it even mean when the records are exactly two, compilations notwithstanding?

youtube

It was around this time that it came to my attention that both Joy Division and another band called New Order had a record called Substance out, both published by the same recording company, both coming out within a year of each other. Looking it up, it turns out it's fully intentional, because New Order is simply Joy Division minus Ian Curtis. It would turn out to be a tad bit more complex than that. Anyway, I look New Order up and kind of have to do a double-take. Synthpop? In my Joy Division? More likely than you'd think, considering Isolation exists. But yeah, that sort of seals it — I wouldn't care about this New Order for a million years. Until all of a sudden a couple of years later David Sylvian bursts like a comet in my face, which of course leads me straight to Japan, the same year as I'd come across Berlin-era Bowie, and you can probably guess where this is going, right?

youtube

Well, you'd be wrong. I still don't check out New Order. There's a whole new world open to me — vaporwave and therefore R Plus Seven come to my attention, which leads me to dissect that record like an alien tool of unclear purposes. This of course leads me onto an ambient tangent, taking me back to my Tim Hecker listens of that same year, which has the effect of renewing my interest in "pure" electronic music and the then-rising post-dubstep movement. The sheer experience of sound, the dazzling modernity and innovation, is what's in at the time. I have no time for nostalgia-pandering dimwits: the future awaits. Then all that jazz from the first Godflesh post hits, then God pulls the funniest gag in the history of viral infections to my memory, and I have some time to actually look back, a bit less prejudiced. As it turns out, synthpop is not the devil, as some of you might have surmised by now, and as I relisten to Blue Monday I realized I have never listened to either of the Substance record. I do know some, most perhaps?, of the tracks on the Joy Division one, and I do think the New Order one has the more striking cover art — not to mention I knew, by this time, that this was the one to give Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance its name, and that Your Silent Face soundtracked one of the most memorable moments in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. As the ultimate Hideo Kojima stan, I couldn't let this slide, so I pop the record on and get hit with this:

youtube

Way to go, guys. Holy shit. I knew that Ceremony was a Joy Division cut before they could record it, but what the hell — Bernard got it, too. It wasn't a matter of singing ability with songs like these, it's just getting it, finding the right energy. They had that right energy. And then it hit me just as many times these dudes have made Blue Monday over and over again before actually getting it right, and everytime I look into it it's funnier and funnier to realize just how many different attempts it took them to finally be Kraftwerk, but augmented — with the stellar results we all know. Everything's Gone Green, 5 8 6, Temptation potentially, all lead up to this one moment in the history of dance music where somehow three dudes and a girl hailing from Manchester managed to out-gay the Pet Shop Boys (by their own admission, apparently), to shake the whole world's collective booty, to do whatever it is they were supposed to do in this last comparison that would ideally make the previous one a bit less obnoxious but whatever, it's 3am as usual, you know how it goes by now don't you? But then after Blue Monday the record keeps going, and thank god it does, because it's banger after banger. How do these guys keep doing it?

youtube

So I spend some time with that record, then it fades down, then it comes back up last month, when the weather calls for it and its parent company. Which is when I find myself watching the Control movie for the first time, surprisingly enough seeing as I already enjoyed the work of Anton Corbijn as a photographer. Looking at all that, it is revealed to me that Joy Division never really having died is not a bug, it's a feature. Everyone is gasping, I get it, but please pick your jaws up and check this out: the band has never learned how to play their respective instruments. One might go so far as to argue they play their own stuff their own way, and that's basically it. Nothing could be further from the truth. These guys jammed, a lot; that's how Joy Division wrote songs, that's how New Order wrote songs, even going as far as having Bernard Sumner fucked up on acid so he could find the chorus to Temptation or the whole band bombed out of their minds on X in Ibiza clubs to write, basically, the entirety of Technique — and even then, not really, there's a couple jangly tracks that the X would most likely render unlistenable but what do I really know? Point being: it might now have been sparked by a music teacher or instructor, it might not have been the product of a process comparable to that within Television, which led them to organically seek out better, more "by the book" musicianship, but New Order were incredibly familiar with their instruments, had formed an element of comfort and understanding that counterbalanced the alien-ness to music terminology.

youtube

Peter Hook recently uploaded a Yamaha-sponsored video to his Instagram, which I am pretty sure has a say in running, where he jams on a Yamaha bass and, you know, it sounds like Hooky alright, but it's never a discernible bassline until he kicks into the A major strumming that opens Love Will Tear Us Apart. Before that, he just strolls around the neck, leisurely strumming away at power chords imbued with that thick chorus and reverb combo he became renowned for. I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I'd find myself thinking "okay, awesome, stop talking — I want to hear you jam a bit more" referring to one of the musicians who were part of possibly two of the craziest storiest in the history of contemporary rock'n'roll, also notorious for playing the rockstar whilst carrying the minimum possible baggage of technical knowledge he could. Once again, this is nowhere near a knock to the man — quite the opposite. Ian Curtis asked "persistence, well, what does it matter?", and Hooky (and, of course, the other members of New Order) found a way to constructively answer that question. Moments before Coil, but a bit later than Israel Regardie, they said "persistence is all" and built a brand on finding a way to consistently sound like splendid, eternal, golden children: "like crystal", impassionate, tightly-knit performers with the purity of a child's heart. Ian Curtis had, in certain ways (at least artistically), the purity of a child in his heart, which some might even argue was a distinguishing feature of most of his literary idols — if you think about it, William Burroughs could be your dirty-minded classmate who walked in on his parents sharing an intimate moment in the bedroom (had his parents been gay men, the metaphor would probably fly better, but that most definitely wasn't the case). So the heart of Joy Division remains untouched, if a bit more naked. Heroes of post-punk, sons of the silent age, you can sleep soundly tonight.

youtube

#schismusic #music #musica #long form content #schism writing #joy division #new order #post punk #new wave #Youtube

20 notes · View notes

unionizedwizard · 8 months ago

Text

youtube rocks so hard i'm listening to a super rare 1972 prog album from a Highly Confidential italian band rn. and it fucks severely

#I LOVE THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#MUSIC IS AWESOME .

11 notes · View notes

dustedmagazine · 6 months ago

Text

Dust, Volume 10, Number 7

Obsessed with Congo Funk in this month's dust

Without getting too deep into American electoral politics, let’s just say that we’ve been distracted lately. We’ve been mired in the slough of despair, frantic in our bargaining with god and lately, a feeling fresh breeze of optimism—it’s been so long, we hardly recognized it. But despite all that, the records keep coming, and we do our best to deal with them, not always with a fulsome 300-400 word review, but sometimes briefly, as here, in another edition of Dust. This month, we cover the run of it, from fictional characters that somehow participate in bands, to guitarists on synth holiday to vintage Swedish death metal reissued and more. Participants this time out include Jennifer Kelly, Byron Hayes, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Christian Carey, Andrew Forell, Roz Milner and Ian Mathers.

Apifera — Keep the Outside Open (Stones Throw)

Four Israeli jazzmen take a jaunt through psychedelic rock and prog, incorporating trippy vocals and squalling synth runs into a space-age fusion. The musicians— Nitai Hershkovits on keyboards, the beatmaker (and evident link to Stones Throw) Yuvi Havkin, drummer Amir Bresler and guitarist Yonatan Albalak—have spent their careers crossing jazz with funk, hip hop and rock. Here they push it even further with vocal tracks that hardly sound like jazz at all. Trippy “Iris Is Neil,” for instance, delivers the title phrase in a keening vocal chant, as explosions of percussion go off like firecrackers on a string. Squiggles of synth, arcs of electric guitar reach for the epic, but in a manner more like Yes or ELP than Return to Forever. “Lucky Zoe” delves further into psychedelic pop, its wavery keyboards framing fanciful whimsies a la “Lucy in the Sky.” “Theodor Marmalade” thumps a funky beat behind flourishes of keys and vocal narratives about desert fauna. “Don’t you want to see the floating lights?” the cut inquires, and yes, I can just about make out strange, glowing objects in the sky. The instrumental pieces have a more conventionally jazzy feel; “I Love ECM” makes it case with light-fingered syncopations on rims and cymbals, liquid loops of bass and ice-chilled runs of electric keyboard. “Sera Sam,” at the end, brings on the trumpeter Avishai Cohen for a lyrical turn.

Jennifer Kelly

Majesty Crush — Butterflies Don’t Go Away

(Numero Group)

Butterflies Don't Go Away by Majesty Crush

A double LP or digital download from Detroit’s own Majesty Crush, the motor city’s answer to the sounds coming out on 4AD. With dreamy vocals by David Stroughter about being an obsessive fan or about bad relationships and a rhythm section kicking up a swirl of noise around him, Majesty Crush brings to mind about a dozen English bands without feeling particularly in debt to any specific group. Occasionally the guitar makes a really cool, almost crunchy sound, but mostly the music moves in the fog, blanketing the vocals in layers of distortion. They lack the fey lyricism of the Cocteau Twins or the dreamy harmonies of Lush but guitarist Michel Segal holds his own against Kevin Shields’s sheets of sound. Meanwhile, they invoke David Hinckley on “No. 1 Fan,” wake up with a bottle and a cigar in hand on “Brand” and dip into ambient spaces on three small interludes. The first half is made of their lone album Love 15, while sides three and four contain an early EP and singles, putting pretty much their entire catalog into one handy set. These Detroit guys seem unjustly forgotten, but thankfully Numero’s made their music easy to find.

Roz Milner

Dennis Callaci & Heimito Künst — First Light (Pass Without Trace)

Heimito Künst is one of many characters in Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a tangled multi-narrative epic. The enigmatic Italian musician who produced the sounds underpinning First Light has adopted Heimito Künst as his pseudonym, likely in reference to the knotty soundscapes he builds from organs, synths and field recordings. On paper, Dennis Callaci’s lyrics and vocals seem like an odd pairing for Künst’s oblique audio collages. Callaci is half of the long-running lo-fi pop project Refrigerator and has helmed the Shrimper label for over three decades. His signature mid-range nasal utterances, more spoken than sung, populate the extraterrestrial ecosystems of Künst like strange seedlings peeping up from beneath loamy soil. First Light serves as a bridge between the mysterious and the familiar, another worthy entry in Callaci’s discography and a port of entry into an unknown artist’s body of work.

Bryon Hayes

Buck Curran — The Long Distance (Eiderdown/Obsolete)

Buck Curran is a guitar devotee. He’s a fluent player, a custodian of historic instruments, a chronicler of esteemed players and a compiler of albums that pay tribute to others. But sometimes a guy just needs a change of pace; enter The Long Distance. Mostly competed in a single night, it’s Curran’s holiday from the guitar. Instead, he plays analog synthesizer, layering sweeping tones and helicopter-rotor cadences into something rather like a lost Tangerine Dream album. Curran explains in the album notes that each piece is connected to a memory of a person or place, which may explain the melodies’ intimations of yearning and melancholy. But if you’re not Curran, they might evoke other associations; this music could easily be repurposed for film soundtracks.

Bill Meyer

Rhodri Davies — Telyn Wrachïod (Amgen)

Back in the mid-20th century, kids motorized their bikes with clothes pins and playing cards. The customization might not have yielded much additional propulsion, but the sound was cool. It turns out that they were simply following in the footsteps of 16th century Welsh harpists, who attached brays (slips of wood) to their strings to get a loud, buzzing sound. Rhodri Davies has explored the harp’s options in all manner of settings — Fluxus happenings, minimalist compositions, rock bands, free improv ensembles, the list goes on. Recently he’s commissioned speculative recreations of instruments from centuries ago, which he then uses to play the sort of short, wheels-within-wheels pieces that he formerly played with instruments amplified to a Konono No. 1-level of distortion. On Telyn Wrachïod he turns to the bray harp, which sounds rather like a cross between a banjo and a sitar. Each of its 12 tracks is spiky but so engrossing that you might find yourself hitting repeat a few times before you move on to the next one.

Bill Meyer

Desultory — Darkness Falls (The Early Years) (Darkness Shall Rise)

The repackaging and re-release of underground metal’s extensive archive of hyper-obscure demos and records continues apace. Darkness Falls (The Early Years) collects three demos from Swedish death metal outfit Desultory, originally independently issued on cassettes between 1990 and 1992. The record’s principal interest is its documentation of the sonic flexibility that informed the term “death metal” in the early 1990s; there’s just as much lightning thrash in these songs as there is moldering morbidity, especially the four engaging tracks on the band’s first demo, From Beyond (1990). The title track is especially pleasurable, in its sprinting, bludgeoning fashion — and this reviewer notes the added benefit of the title’s reference to an excellent H. P. Lovecraft story (is that you, Cthulhu?). Swedeath completists take heed. For the rest of us, it’s a fun release, and of some historical interest. Its relative necessity is open to debate — but hey, we didn’t really need that reissue version of Pig Destroyer’s Painter of Dead Girls on “black ice with metallic silver glitter” vinyl, either. Maybe Darkness Shall Rise should get some points for only releasing four different product versions of Darkness Falls….

Jonathan Shaw

Devouring the Guilt — Not To Want To Say (Kettle Hole)

Devouring The Guilt is a Chicago-associated (meaning two members live there and one moved away but remains connected) improvising trio. The line-up is pretty classic — Gerrit Hatcher on tenor sax, Eli Namay on bass, Bill Harris on drums. And so are the trio’s roots. Hatcher summons a burly tone, steers mostly clear of extended techniques, and gives occasional nods to free jazz heroes like Archie Shepp, Frank Wright and Frank Lowe. These familiar parameters establish a framework to display their collective originality, which lies in the personal vernacular they’ve fashioned. Namay is an alternately pithy and seething presence, plucking spare, structure-defining figures or bowing a maelstrom of woody sound. Harris pushes back against expectations that the drums should push the music forward by punctuating his clearly articulated attack with lots of negative space. Hatcher situates lyricism in long, understated tones and vigorously masticated phases, but also navigates unpredictably through the tight corners and sudden gaps that the other two set up.

Bill Meyer

Carol Genetti / Peter Maunu — Gleaners (Amalgam)

No matter how you approach it, Gleaners will stretch your mind. Just what are Carol Genetti (voice, electronics) and Peter Maunu (guitar, violin, mandolin) gleaning? Not other people’s music, that’s for sure. Maybe the languages of long-extinct species, confidences exchanged between dusty appliances that come to life after the staff leaves the thrift shop, ideas about what instruments might sound like if you see them in pictures. Even when Maunu resorts to rock-ish fuzztones or Genetti exhales an unspooling coo, their co-creations are resolutely sui generis. Their partnership has been honed through years of regular performance, often with other Chicago-based musicians, which likely explains the brisk confidence that this resolutely abstract music exudes. Genetti is a ceramic artist as well as a musician, and the physical manifestation of this album comes in two forms. She made ten one-of-a-kind clay cases that you can mount on a wall; the regular CDs come in a folio adorned with close-ups of the art edition.

Bill Meyer

Dave Douglas — GIFTS (Greenleaf Music)

GIFTS by Dave Douglas

With sizzling guitar lines and a frontline horn duo of Douglas and James Brandon Lewis, you’d think it would be easy for this to be a mere blowing session. But it’s not. The music is frequently introspective and has a very ECM kind of ambience: it has this wide-angle sonic clarity where each instrument has room to breathe and let their notes slowly linger. The suite of Strayhorn songs in the middle doesn’t feel tired, either. Rafiq Bhatia’s chugging guitar keeps “Take the A Train” moving while Douglas and Lewis move in sync for the theme. When they stretch out, they’re sometimes playing against each other but always seem like they’re on the same page. Meanwhile Bhatia’s playing draws on Bill Frisell, making up for the lack of a low end with well-placed chords and sonic textures. These four make the music their own and it’s one of the year's most rewarding jazz records.

Roz Milner

Samara Lubelski & Marcia Bassett — Indexical/Rhizome (Relative Pitch)

Samara Lubelski and Marcia Bassett are both well-established members of the U.S. scene that engendered the moniker “new weird America” back in the early aughts. Both have CVs that stretch on for miles. Lubelski is best known as a star in the MV&EE solar system, while Bassett churns out murkier sound pools in a variety of projects, such as Double Leopards and Hototogisu. The pair have a long-standing partnership unfurling phosphorescent drone webs through guitar and violin. This is their eighth recording, and it presents two extended string seances that coax electric spirit whisps from unseen worlds. “Indexical” is the lengthier of the pair and features zoned out but controlled guitar howl from Bassett alongside Lubelski’s rapid bowing. The undulations intertwine to become a radiant lattice of sound. Alien timbres infect “Rhizome,” which sways between a noise-drone wall of sound and hushed electronic whispers. Both are live recordings, showing off the raw magic that this pair of string sirens can conjure.

Bryon Hayes

Joe McPhee With Ken Vandermark — Musings Of A Bahamian Son (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

Joe McPhee’s been toting folders full of poems and brief musings to gigs for years, but in recent years they’ve assumed an increasingly prominent place in his performances. Now, he’s finally put 28 of them on record, punctuated with nine short soprano sax/clarinet interludes that he improvised with Ken Vandermark. Oppression gets defied, history acknowledged, but most of all, love gets its due. McPhee muses about folks from the neighborhood, jazz heroes that inspired him, old friends now gone, and the balm and galvanization imparted by music itself. Abstract but tender, the interludes amplify this sentiment, showing by example how much appreciation for life and fellowship can be invested in a few tones.

Bill Meyer

Kate Nash — 9 Sad Symphonies (Kill Rock Stars)

youtube

On 9 Sad Symphonies, Kate Nash leans into her musical theater background, with skillfully crafted arrangements that incorporate classical orchestrations reminiscent of the film musicals from the 1930s-1950s. As on most of her albums, she tweaks her sound and musical partners, here working with producer Frederik Thaae. There is a sauciness to her lyrics, which even go so far as describing lunch breaks in toilets. All is not a lark. Nash seeks to exorcize personal demons on “Vampyre” and “My Bile '' is a bracing assessment of a broken relationship. 9 Sad Symphonies may have a bucolic surface, but the singer-songwriter ventures down dark pathways where stars of the Silver Screen would have likely feared to go.

Christian Carey

Occulta Veritas — Irreducible Fear of the Sublime (I, Voidhanger)

Occulta Veritas plays an avant-garde variety of black metal, long on complexity and idiosyncratic compositional sensibilities. It’s abrasive and disorienting, and not especially fun to listen to — which yes, that’s the point, but there’s a huge amount of this sort of thing circulating through the metal underground at any given point, and deliberately distancing music from listeners’ parameters for pleasure can be a tough prospect in that oversaturated context. For this reviewer, the record’s engagement with the theoretical concepts of Jacques Lacan (big-deal psychoanalyst, post-structural Daddy and important player in France’s academic politics of the mid-20th century) helps Irreducible Fear of the Sublime stand out. It’s pretty great that one of the songs is called “Metonimia,” since Lacan’s projection of metonymy along a diachronic axis of spatio-temporal relations fits the music’s tortured snarls and chaotic, off-kilter arrangements. The utterances want to go somewhere, but the structures those utterances are trapped in make meaningful progress a near impossibility. It would be even better to have a lyric sheet, to get more than just the tantalizing engagements with Lacan provided in song titles (“The Mirror Stage,” “Bound to Incompleteness” and so on). There’s an overheated quality to the record that’s additionally compelling: This is your brain; this is your brain on Lacan. But it would be useful to know what specific ideas accompany specific sounds and turns in the music’s syntax. Or is it all just sound and fury, signifying nothing?

Jonathan Shaw

J. Pavone String Ensemble

Reverse Bloom by Jessica Pavone

The current edition of Jessia Pavone’s String Ensemble is reduced to essentials. There are just three players including Pavone, who plays viola, Aimée Niemann on violin, and Abby Swidler switching between those two instruments. The language is likewise paired down on Reverse Bloom. The first two pieces (of four) emphasize long tones that hiss and sigh at a deliberate pace, evoking an uneasy state. “Obstructed Current” pushes against the prevailing vibe with jolting, energetic phrases that move joltingly out of synch. The closing piece, “Embers Slumber,” likewise explores contrasting elements, which resolve by settling into a deliberate, belly-breathing rhythm. The album charts a course towards a grounded state that’s not so much a happy ending as a sonic enactment of the honest word that gets you through.

Bill Meyer

Keith Rowe / Gerard Lebik — Dry Mountain (Inexhaustible Editions)

Dry Mountain by Keith Rowe / Gerard Lebik

Despite having his name on the spine, Keith Rowe did not play on this record. However, he did originate the process of sound (re)imagining that it presents, and his cover image of a wiggling digit raises the question — how deep does a fingerprint go? The score of Dry Mountain originated from the imprint Rowe’s gear left on a sheet of paper. Rowe and Gerard Lebik interpreted that score and then handed a recording of their performance to three visual artists, who created their own scores based on what they heard. These scores were then played by the group of electronics, string, and percussion players heard on this album while listeners drew responses to the music, which they then handed to the musicians, who played them on the spot. The further you get from the first piece heard, the further the music gets from Rowe’s sound world; in a reversal of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, the music gets segmented and defined.

Bill Meyer

D. Sablu — No True Silence (Yes We Cannibal)

No True Silence by D.SABLU

D. Sablu is a New Orleans punk lifer, late of Casual Burns and Feverish, but forced (or inspired or motivated) by COVID to strike out on his own. No True Silence is Sablu’s first full-length, and it’s a killer, a slaughterhouse frenzy of punk /garage/ hardcore and a little metal, all chopped up with chainsaws and spraying all over the walls. Indeed, you’ll have to stand well back from the player when you first put the record on, because it leads with “Bomber Stomp,” a two-minute assault of lumbering, heavy punk that sways noticeably as it comes down on the ones and twos. Sablu lets off a howl near the end that raises the hairs on my neck, because it’s so sulfurous and tortured. “69 Forever” lights a new wave hook on fire with a blowtorch; it’s catchy as hell but blows you back with sheer volume and aggression. The brief “World Peace” is pure, adrenalized chaos, drums galloping wildly, guitars flaring, bass buzzing and Sablu screaming “World pee-eeea-eace!” like a banshee. Fun stuff. Turn it up.

Jennifer Kelly

Mark Sims — Take Me Faster (Carousel Horse Records, Old 3-C Label Group, Anyway)

Take Me Faster by Mark Sims

Deindustrialization has hollowed out the Midwest’s economy, leaving shuttered factories and empty main streets all across the central American states. Mark Sims, a bricklayer when he’s not performing, sings with the soft, wry melancholy of a man left behind by tectonic shifts, finding solace in well-turned melodies and plain-spoken turns of phrase. It was fashionable half a decade ago to interview Ohioans in diners about their economic circumstances; Take Me Faster provides the same sort of snapshot of dislocation and disappearing opportunity.

For instance, in “Hold On To Me,” the narrator is driving long-distance to a job somewhere, trying to find a song on the radio and thinking about home. “Money comes and goes so quickly/I could work a million hours/and still be broke when I die,” Sims confides, against a radiant lattice of picking. The song is unassuming, and kind of perfect, a distillation of the struggle to stay connected and human in a low-wage high-uncertainty economy.

The songs are simply arranged, a mesh of Sims’ dusky, resonant voice and acoustic guitar, mostly, with a little synth in the background for texture. And yet, this is more than enough, as on the haunting “I’m Always by Your Side,” where Sims’ voice lifts up through the sadness, fluttering soulfully in the upper registers before drifting back to earth. These songs don’t pull any tricks or do any somersaults, but they’re satisfying all the same.

Jennifer Kelly

Jason Stein / Marilyn Crispell / Damon Smith / Adam Shead — Spi-raling Horn (Balance Point Acoustics/Irritable Mystic)

spi-raling horn by Jason Stein, Marilyn Crispell, Damon Smith, Adam Shead

The trio of Shead, Stein, and Smith first convened with the former two’s duo shared a bill with Smith. They recognized in each other a common aesthetic intent, a shared wish to improvise within a particular set of parameters; there’s no predetermined material, but a collective intention not to be confined to jazz. They’ve all listened closely to the great 20th century European free improvisers, and part of what they’ve taken from them is an intent to fashion their own language. There’s no soloing here, although occasionally someone will drop out if that’s what the music requires. And when they invite a fourth musician into the action, they participate as an equal contributor, not a featured guest. Marilyn Crispell’s associations with musicians as disparate as Barry Guy, Anthony Braxton and Joe Lovano reveal her to be an artist similarly concerned with fluent exchange, not ego-boosting display. But she’s also a stern bringer of velocity and complexity on this recording, which is the studio half of a single brief encounter which took place in Chicago in the middle of 2023. Dense assertion, abrasive texture, and bursting co-existence cohere into a seven-part sequence of collaborative invention.

Bill Meyer

SUSS — Birds & Beasts (Northern Spy)

Birds & Beasts by SUSS

Gorgeous hovering tones of pedal steel, guitar (with e bow), keyboards and synths coalesce in these cuts, each a glowing, vibrating meditation on the beauty and fragility of the natural world. SUSS, from New York City, explores many of the same haunted textures as Chuck Johnson and Pan*American, letting sustained notes linger in shimmering layers of slow-moving sound. “Overstory” encases picked acoustic notes in a translucent amber of pedal steel arcs and violin, letting the sound grow as slowly—and as enormously—as old growth forest. “Flight” follows a more pronounced rhythm than other cuts, its steady pulse of strumming beating like wings on a long trip south. The disc is not all sunshine, however. “Prey” lurks in ominous buzzes and hums of feedback, building threat into dark-toned dissonance and animal screeches into wails of guitar. The long closer, “Migration,” pulls taut with anticipation, its beat like a metronome, its melody unfurling in the wheeze of harmonica and the shifting twang of pedal steel. SUSS often gets tagged as cosmic country, but which country? Unearthly, luminous and beautiful.

Jennifer Kelly

Their Divine Nerve — Return of the Lamb (Staalplaat)

The Return of the Lamb by Their Divine Nerve

Dmytro Fedorenko and Jeff Surak have been collaborating for about 20 years now, but this first album as Their Divine Nerve appears to be the first time the self-described “Ukrainian-American noise duo” have collaborated on record at length. But right from the churning, thumping 14+ minute opener “The Infinity Book” here it’s clear that their long association has led to a certain sympatico comfort with each other. Whether on the more overtly aggressive shredding (not guitar riffs, actual shredding) of “Glowing Skulls” or the more pensive, droning likes of “Dignityphobia,” here the pair have arranged a rich, expansive (71 minutes on CD, plus about another half hour in bonus material on digital) feast for anyone looking to add some variety to their noise diet. By the time the CD thunders and shudders to a half with “Civilization Was Never Civilized” the listener may not know anything more about the titular lamb, but it’s clear its return is momentous indeed.

Ian Mathers

Various Artists — Congo Funk: Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) (Analog Africa)

Congo Funk! - Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) (Analog Africa No. 38) by Analog Africa

Mobutu Sese Seko was a murderous tyrant, but he changed African music forever when he invited James Brown to play Zaire 74, the three-day musical festival put on alongside George Forman and Muhammed Ali’s epic Rumble in the Jungle. American funk transformed an already vibrant musical scene like a chemical catalyst setting off an explosion of electrified, psychedelic soul in Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Congo Funk! collects 14 incendiary cuts from the 1970s and 1980s — culling from an original haul of over 2000 sounds — not a dud in the bunch and more than a couple of revelations. M.B.T’s eponymous “M.B.T.’s Sound” is one of the best on this two-disc set, all brassy swagger and intricate polyrhythmic percussion, as is Orchestre National du Congo’s full-throated celebration “Ah Congo!” with its wild call and response, feral sax play and unhinged drumming. Lolo et L'Orchestre O.K. Jazz’s “Lolo Soulfire,” sets up a Stax-like groove and lives in it, slouching and swaggering like Booker T in a fever. Fire.

Jennifer Kelly

Ricki Weidenhof — Church (We Be Friends)

Church by Ricki Weidenhof

A member of Pittsburgh avant-collagists Sneeze Awfull, Ricki Weidenhof examines a life of religious ambivalence and search for identity on their solo album Church. Working through a range of styles that illustrate and amplify those themes, Weidenhof produces an emotionally rich and sometimes challenging fractal mosaic. The wonderfully titled suite “Raptured in Formal Violence” contrasts liturgical solemnity and a babel of religious voices with jittering house to capture that mixture of dread and ecstasy the Church so often induces. At the other of the scale “Dreary Field” is an Arthur Russell inspired idyll of acoustic guitar and cello as Weidenhof singsof the past “I finished that game of hide and seek long ago/Only it was still at play/I remember the last place I had hidden.” “Extinction Meditation” begins in a similar vein, the religious and personal entwined with vivid imagery, before a chaos of multi-tracked vocals, distorted beats, and razor strings. A powerful, heartfelt record that deserves a wide audience.

Andrew Forell

Wormed — Omegon (Season of Mist)

OMEGON by Wormed

It’s hard to say anything meaningful about Wormed — pretty much everything about the band is absurd, or at least verging on it. To identify some key elements of the absurdity: the “vocals” of Jose Luis Rey Sanchez (appearing on Omegon, as always, under the appropriately throaty appellation Phlegeton — Sanchez is likely referring to the mythic river, but all I can think of is phlegm…), for whom the unappetizing term “throat fart” might have been coined; the sheer nuttiness of the band’s tech death wankery, which the band has actually moderated a wee bit for Omegon; the fact that Wormed have been at it since 1999, mostly developing a continuous narrative of a fictional cosmos, full of conflict among evil extraterrestrial forces, multiple timelines and a protagonist named Krigshu (some song titles from this record are indicative: “Aetheric Transdimensionalization,” “Gravitational Servo Matrix,” “Virtual Teratogensis”). You figure it out. Beyond the music — more tech than slam, but still seeking some sort of apotheosis of that quality death metal freaks name “brutality” — what’s most engaging about Wormed is the band’s ability to sustain the absurdity and to seem absolute serious about it. Maybe that makes the Spanish band especially well-suited to our times. Or maybe we just haven’t gotten the joke yet.

Jonathan Shaw

7 notes · View notes

noridal · 2 years ago

Text

This post was supposed to be a rant about ESC fans asking for countries to only sing in their native language, instead I'm turning it into a music recommendation post since I feel like these requests comes from a place of "I want to listen to music that's different from usual, and not the usual pop radio songs".

As someone whose music taste can be summed up as "if it's weird, I'm in" have some music that you definitely don't listen to on the radio:

Albums:

The Rabbit that hunts tigers -Yin Yin (This would the perfect soundtrack for a futuristic western movie where the main character is also a samurai imo)

Kontinuum- Klaus Schulze (cool background music, mysterious sci-fi but not in a soul crushing or scary way)

Flight of the Ancients- The Shaolin Afronauts (the best intro to an album I've ever heard and funky jazzy vibes. Cool trumpets)

Semillero- Dengue Dengue Dengue (idk how to describe this but mh. Would use it as a soundtrack for Heart of Darkness by Conrad)

The Gereg -The Hu (Mongolian Rock-Metal, worth checking them out)

The Gods We can Touch- AURORA (this is way less obscure than other suggestions but I swear to god AURORA sounds like an angel to me but the vibes are those of a biblically accurate one)

Songs:

Hocus Pocus- Focus (prog rock jodel?!? Spotify suggested this to me and I'm in love with this)

Acid Rain- Liquid Tension Experiment (found this by searching jazz metal. Instrumental. Very good)

Trumpet Sketches - Janko Nilovic (trumpet makes brain go brrrr)

Artists:

NanowaR of Steel (Italian comedy metal band. Sings both in English and Italian, if you ask me they go for the too-good-to-be-just-a-joke comedy)

Dr. Steel (Dark with dieselpunk vibes. Every song is unique yet the vibe is so familiar, definitely villainy. Comes with lore)

Paul Shapera (a compilation of rock operas that take place in the same universe, there's plot. Lots of it. I can't recommend a single one because the cool part is seeing the story evolve)

Tales under the Oak (dungeon synth music, very calming and frog themed)

Specific playlists I have too much fun making:

POV: you just died but luckily there's a party on the other side

This is about craving your lover's insides (both playlists are currently in progress and will be updated whenever I feel like it)

All links lead to spotify, except for kontinuum which I could find only on YouTube. Also please note that the playlists include less obscure songs so maybe that's a good place from where you can start? Idk. Italic means that it's only instrumental, I feel like Hocus Pocus should be in the group too but jodel counts as singing.

#mentioning Eurovision Song Contest #music recommendation #this is stuff I actually listen to while studying #I also lowkey hope of finding my people out there #Dr steel #AURORA singer #Paul Shapera #alternative music #nanowar of steel

25 notes · View notes

turtlemagnum · 8 months ago

Text

so, a friend asked for music recommendations and instead of spamming their DMs with Way Too Many Links i'm gonna get out what i wanna get out on this post. ok? ok.

so, i was specifically asked what i've been getting into recently, which has been japanese progressive rock. but i feel like in order to get into japanese progressive rock, context of what its precursor inspirations were is important to. arguably the most important formative prog rock (and, as i've heard some argue, metal) bands is king crimson, and i think the best album to get into them with is in the court of the crimson king, which is incidentally their first album. they tend to change pretty significantly from album to album, so i can't recommend slowly working your way through their discography enough. i still haven't fully gotten through it! another important prog band would be emerson, lake and palmer, and i think a good first step would be tarkus. one of my favorites of the era is definitely yes, and i think a good choice for getting into them would be fragile, which honestly has some of the most iconic music of all time, to me.

so, onto japanese progressive rock. the reason i mentioned king crimson and emerson lake and palmer as particularly important context is that bi kyo ran and ars nova each started off as a specific tribute band that evolved into its own thing. i can't recommend them enough, here's bi kyo ran's self titled first album, and here's ars nova's fear and anxiety, which i think(?) is their first studio album. it's also worth noting that there's other bands also named ars nova, i think specifically there's an italian band that comes up when you search them. probably a pain to sift through online, i found a download of their music just fine though. i believe the person i'm recommending this to played final fantasy as a kid, so i can't help but recommend midas in specifically midas ii, which very much strikes me as a particularly nobuo uematsu type album. the thing with him (final fantasy's main composer dude) is that his music is pretty much just chiptune japanese prog, so me going "hmm, definitely getting some 'final fantasy' vibes from this..." is just a symptom of just like. listening to japanese prog. but still, i feel like this is a particularly strong case of it, y'know? i also can't go remiss in recommending masayoshi takanaka's rainbow goblins, i'm pretty sure takanaka was one of japan's most popular performers in general at the peak of his career, and he definitely brings a less hardcore and more jazzy edge to his work.

gonna end this out with a few non japanese prog recommendations, two of which are specifically prog metal. here's lost horizon's a flame to the ground beneath, it honestly took me a bit to start to like the vocals but they definitely grow on you, and it also just has some truly iconic shit in it. i'd consider rainbow rising to be one of the most important pieces in early prog metal, and is honestly one of the albums that just inspires me to write. and, of course, i couldn't not mention jethro tull's thick as a brick, just one of the best pieces of prog rock in general imo. can't recommend enough

4 notes · View notes

metalhead-brainrot · 11 months ago

Text

[Album of the day] Various Artists - HDK 151 † Hell Night

Milan, ITA // 2023 // Heimat Der Katastrophe (HDK)

[Genres] dungeon synth, synth rock, prog rock, doom metal

[Themes] Hell's generals have escaped onto the material plane and you're a biker who has to track them down and drag them back, one by one

[FFO] indie RPGs, liturgical metal, Lingua Ignota

[Thoughts] This is the first album I've picked from the label HDK, an independent group of synth-loving Italians. Quoth their Bandcamp page: "DIY label focused on ambient punk, minimal-synth, dungeon-drone, wartime music and post-nuclear wave. Managed by a creative punx collective from Milano city."

As a fan of dungeon synth, I think HDK is grand. Most of their releases can be split into about three categories:

Old-school, fantasy dungeon synth (e.g. Kobold, Gnoll). Great music for classic TTRPGs. If you purchase the cassette release, you'll typically get a mini dungeon map and a scenario for any old-school RPG.

Cinematic synth music in the Italian tradition. Think Claudio Simonetti's Goblin, films like The Long Good Friday and Tenebre, bands like Zombi. Check out TEETH OF GLASS and A. RALLA.

Cold-War synth/signalwave, typically with a focus on the atomic era (i.e. sovietwave).* Conceptually interesting and a little underrated. I'd recommend RNLT and TSAR-BOMB.

Other frequent features in the HDK catalogue are proggy synth rock (e.g. POLONIUS), space rock (e.g. LOGIC GATE), and synthwave (e.g. MAX ROGUISH). HDK also has several official soundtracks to indie RPGs, most famously GNOLL's soundtrack to MÖRK BORG and CASIOTOMB's soundtrack to ALTNYC88.

Today's album is an official soundtrack to the indie RPG of the same name, Hell Night by Gavriel Quiroga (link to the DriveThru RPG page below). I haven't played the game,** but I have listened to this soundtrack about a dozen times. I love it. It's a compilation album but feels very proggy; all the tracks are from different artists and different musical styles, but they fit together really well.

Give the album a listen, try out the game, and check out HDK's other releases. I subscribed to their label on Bandcamp a while back, and I haven't regretted it.

o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::> o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::> o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::>

* These tend to remind me of the menu screen for CoD: Black Ops.

** But I would like to, it looks like a lot of fun.

o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::> o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::> o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::>

[From the band/label]

"As these last words were spoken, an explosion of blinding white light filled the black palace, cowing even the grim death lords. The angelic messenger was gone, the message delivered, and outrage soon broke among the ranks of the defiled, cacophony of blasphemy and cursing that announced the arrival of dusk and the beginning of a... HELL NIGHT".

Here is the official soundtrack of the Role-Playing Game HELL NIGHT, by the author Gavriel Quiroga that you may have already known for NEUROCITY and WARPLAND. For now only in digital, the cassette will be available later! Info about Hell Night: * www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/hell-night-pdf * www.kickstarter.com/projects/gavrielquiroga/hell-night * www.drivethrurpg.com/product/399162/HELL-NIGHT

3 notes · View notes

pagingdrmusic · 10 months ago

Text

Finisterre's xxv, was expecting a cd edition but this is just as good!

#music #album #new album #album update #vinyl #rock #progressive rock #italian prog #finisterre

1 note · View note

hammill-goes-fogwalking · 2 years ago

Text

The top 30 of my favourite artists -22. May '23-

Little not even necessary disclaimer first; I don't own any of these photos; only thing I did is some editing that's all. By the way it's just for fun and I'm only a random amateur.

Inspiration from Sea of Tranquility on YT

Why these artists? It doesn't mean I listened deep into EVERY single album of them but they're all here for a reason. People whose history and music has a pretty -lets say remarkable place in my life and that's it.

Part 1/4

At first - honourable mentions

(Category 1) Bands I absolutely enjoyed some years ago but now they don't fit it into the 30 anymore :/ who knows if a revival will come

Mamas & the Papas // Beach Boys // Jefferson Airplane

(Category 2) Bands I discovered not long ago so I'm still at the beginning to get into them

^ Eloy [prog, German art rock]

^ Quatermass [prog rock, art rock]

^ Various Italian prog rockers, also here, there's constantly more

^ Beggars Opera [prog rock w/ different elements of other musical directions]

^ Captain Beyond [supergroup, especially prog w/ hard rock]

^ okay. Don't judge. They have to be here. As well as the photo.

(Category 3) They don't deserve to be in the 30. As well as they don't deserve to be excluded.

^ Black Sabbath especially the '83 lineup

#as promised #That 'not long ago' thing means two three four months #60s #70s #The Mamas and the Papas #The Beach Boys #Jefferson Airplane #Eloy #Eloy band #Quatermass band #Beggar's Opera #Captain Beyond #Black Sabbath #Emerson Lake & Palmer #ELP #Recommendations #🧡LOVE BEACH ☮️#Sea of Tranquility- no better YouTube channel out there

15 notes · View notes

spoiledstrawberry · 1 year ago

Text

One of the best Italian Prog rock albums. (I think the cover is pretty and iconic too) luv Alphataurus. :D

#Alphataurus #prog rock #progressive rock #70s #70s rock #italian rock #progressive italian rock #1970s

6 notes · View notes

clouds-of-wings · 2 years ago

Text

Male operatic singing in metal, vol. III (Freestyle edition)

[Volume I] -- [Volume II]

Since there has been some interest in my first two posts on the topic and I also see people on Reddit ask about male opera in symph fairly often, I figured I'd do a part 3. Unfortunately it seems such voices are still not very common, so today I'll post about bands that sort of fit or only do this style sometimes.

This is more of an "If you liked the bands in the last two posts, you may also be interested in these" post.

youtube

Enid

Some underrated German symphonic black metal from 2002. Martin Wiese's singing goes in an operatic direction on many tracks, plus there's the wonderful choral harmonies. It's a bit like Empyrium from Volume I, but more metal. I knew this music as a teenager but didn't appreciate it nearly enough. Looking back I think it's actually really cool and avant-garde.

Caveat: To me the vocals sound a bit more "medieval" than operatic but I don't feel competent to really make this judgement. Either way, give it a listen!

youtube

Magni Animi Viri

This Italian band only released one album, Heroes Temporis, in 2006 and an English-language re-release in 2016, but the album has tracks like this with the beautiful voice of Francesco Napoletano. The style on the rather eclectic album varies from song to song though and they have three singers, of which only this one fits the bill.

Caveat: More prog-rock and neoclassical than metal.

youtube

Amberian Dawn

Amberian Dawn made a name for themselves as a power metal band in the late 2000s and often got categorized as symphonic due to the voice of their first singer Heidi Parviainen. After Capri took over as singer, they turned to what they call "ABBA metal", which, while very fun, has no symphonic ambitions. However, on this track they have the baritone Markus Nieminen as a guest singer. One of the rare instances of a metal band combining a male operatic and a female non-operatic voice.

Caveat: The guest singer appears only on this track.

youtube

Fabio Lione Secret Opera Superstar (with Angra)

Fabio Lione sings a duet with Tarja Turunen and reveals a side of his voice that I had no idea existed, even after two decades of listening to Rhapsody. Personally, I wonder why he doesn't always sing like this if he has the skills.

Caveat: Sadly, only in this performance.

youtube

The Tolkien Ensemble

This isn't metal at all, but a lot of metalheads like Tolkien. If you want to hear Legolas and Operaragorn sing poetry for their dead friend Boromir with a piano backing, here is your chance. Christopher Lee also appears on the album, singing the role of Treebeard.

Caveat: Absolutely not metal.

youtube

Forestella

A k-pop boyband does a symph metal concept =)

Caveat: A k-pop boyband does a symph metal concept

[Volume I] -- [Volume II]

#symphonic metal #enid #amberian dawn #fabio lione #magni animi viri #forestella #music stuff

7 notes · View notes

visionairemagazine · 2 years ago

Text

ADDIO AD ALBERTO RADIUS, ARTISTA DI SPESSORE E UOMO DAL GRANDE CUORE.

Alberto Radius ci ha lasciato questa mattina dopo una lunga malattia. Ne hanno dato la notizia la moglie Cristiana e il figlio Andrea che hanno dichiarato: “Ci lascia un grande vuoto, ma tutti noi porteremo per sempre la sua musica nel cuore”. Sono molti i messaggi postati sui social per ricordarlo. Produttore, chitarrista, ex Formula 3, collaboratore di Lucio Battisti, Radius è stato un innovatore nella storia del rock italiano. Amava sperimentare continuamente e aveva continuato ad esibirsi fino a pochi mesi fa, per amore della Musica. La sua ultima apparizione in televisione è stata da Serena Bortone su Rai1 dove, nonostante la malattia, ha imbracciato la sua fedele chitarra, incantando gli altri ospiti e i telespettatori. A Sanremo 2021, durante la serata dedicata alle cover, era salito sul palco insieme ai Coma Cose, regalando momenti di grande levatura musicale. Questo eterno ragazzo, nato a Roma, già da giovanissimo ‘on the road’, è stato uno dei più importanti chitarristi rock italiani. La sua è stata una lunga e prestigiosa carriera. E' nel suo Studio di via Capolago che il grande Franco Battiato registrò “La voce del padrone” e altri successi. Simbolo del prog rock, Alberto Radius ha lasciato delle indelebili impronte di stile, lavorando con molti Artisti del panorama musicale italiano. Come ha dichiarato il cantautore Roby Cantafio, Radius era un artista di spessore e un uomo dal grande cuore. Ogni chitarrista aveva da imparare qualcosa da lui. Era stato il fratello di Little Tony, Enrico Ciacci, a insegnargli a suonare la chitarra. Aveva appena 12 anni. Verso la fine degli anni cinquanta comincia ad esibirsi nelle sale da ballo con i White Booster e in seguito, per due anni, entra a far parte dell'orchestra di Mario Perrone. Dopo il servizio militare, suona con i fratelli Gigi e Franco Campanino nei club di molte città italiane e sarà proprio con i Campanino che aprirà nel 1965 alcune serate dell'Equipe 84. Trasferitosi a Milano, suona con gli inglesi Simon & Pennies per poi passare ai Quelli (la band che diventerà la Premiata Forneria Marconi). Insieme a Tony Cicco e Gabriele Lorenzi, fonda i Formula 3 che, dopo l'incontro con Lucio Battisti, debuttano con l'etichetta Numero Uno, fondata dal cantautore. Dopo due anni incide il primo album da solista e nel 1974, dopo lo scioglimento dei Formula 3, contribuisce a fondare la band Il Volo. La sua produzione discografica da solista conta vari album e lavori importanti come “Nel ghetto”. Parallelamente, inizia un'intensa carriera da session man che lo vede affiancare Lucio Battisti, Pierangelo Bertoli, Mino Di Martino, Marcella Bella, Goran Kuzminac, Cristiano Malgioglio, Franco Battiato e i vari artisti con cui ha lavorato il cantautore siciliano in quel periodo: Milva, Alice, Giusto Pio, Sibilla e Giuni Russo, di cui, a volte, è stato anche produttore.

"Eppur mi son scordato di te" è la canzone più famosa del repertorio dei Formula 3, ma noi non ci scorderemo mai di lui.

L’amico Gigi Cifarelli gli ha dedicato questo bellissimo e commovente scritto che voglio condividere con voi:

“Alberto mio caro sapevamo che la festa della Vita stava volgendo al termine. Abbiamo scherzato e riso insieme ancora tante volte lo scorso anno e resterai sempre nel mio cuore, come in quello di tanti altri per i quali eri la chitarra della Formula 3 e di Lucio Battisti, i nostri dell'infanzia. Ma quanto ti devo? E per fortuna te l'ho sempre detto e l'ho sempre detto a chiunque. Come dimenticare? Fu come in un sogno. Correva proprio lo stesso periodo dell'anno, febbraio/marzo 1985. una sera stavo suonando al Capolinea (la mia seconda casa) e ad un certo punto, in fondo la sala riconosco quel capoccione pieno di capelli irsuti che ti caratterizzavano e trasalii... È Alberto Radius... Che meraviglia il mio idolo da bambino... Mi affrettai a fare una pausa per raggiungerti sperando di poterti anche solo stringere la mano. Appena poggiai la chitarra invece ti vidi partire per venirmi incontro, ero emozionato e sorpreso... Tesi le mia mano per stringere la tua e il mio desiderio era quello di esternarti il mio affetto e la mia gioia nel poterti conoscere, ma non mi facesti nemmeno iniziare. Partisti a cannone esordendo così: “Aoh!! Ma ma li mortacci tua! Ma d'addo vieni?? Da Marte? Maestrone (e mi ha poi sempre chiamato così) ... Anzi sai che famo? Domani devi da vení in via Capolago 5 a lo studio mio. Famo un ber Disco.” Me l'aveva detto Marco (E. Nobili), ma chi se lo aspettava? Non dormii la notte e alle 9, il giorno dopo, stavo da Te. Già scrivevo per Guitar Club e così conobbi direttamente il caro Marco e anche Giuni Russo, i tuoi cari amici, che adesso avrai raggiunto, e conobbi anche la cara Rossana Pasturenzi, tuttora una cara amica. Ci sedemmo, progettammo e in due settimane nacque "Coca&Rhum", il mio primo disco e la mia vera scrittura, da lì, grazie a tutto questo, partì una sequela di cose bellissime della mia Vita. Coca&Rhum fu disco dell'anno e io iniziai a essere votato nei referendum, vincendone tanti. Ero un ragazzo ed ebbi tante gioie e tante gratificazioni. In questa foto c'è tutto l'affetto che provavi per me e che io ho sempre ricambiato. Senza di Te nulla sarebbe stato così e domani il mio concerto al Grace di Lodivecchio, vicino a San Colombano dove mi invitavi sempre e ci sono venuto troppo poco, sarà dedicato a Te, Alberto mio caro. Ti vorrò bene sempre... Saluta tutti quelli che abbiamo amato insieme. Hendrix su tutti.” ❤️Gg

4 notes · View notes