It was a long day at work in the office as my colleague Jack
had the day off. Still it was a good
opportunity to catch up on my purchases from the past week.
(101) Ornette Coleman
– Twins
I’d never heard of this album when I came across it on
Saturday. According to the liner notes,
this was an outtakes album released in 1971 of sessions made during Coleman’s
brief time on Atlantic Records between 1959-1961. All tracks were made by a quartet led by him
and also featuring trumpet player Don Cherry (father of Neneh). The main reason to hear this album is its
opening track, an alternative version of First Take, an epic track also
featuring Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard.
It seemingly starts off at a random cacophonous
point and susequently rises and falls in intensity for seventeen minutes. At times, it employs a bare bones approach
that reminded me very much of the later and equally intriguing Don Ellis movie
soundtrack to The French Connection, a real favourite of mine. The remaining tracks are all good but pale in
comparison. Perhaps these should have
been sequenced first.
(102) Kaki King – Dreaming Of Revenge
Like many, I first became aware of King when she toured Australia
with The Foo Fighters around 2007 and played on their instrumental track
dedicated to the Beaconsfield miners.
That has coloured many people’s perceptions of her music, obscuring some
of the stylistic shifts she has made.
For this album, she employed Malcolm Burn as producer and his production
values are very much in evidence here. A
warm sound is wrapped around this combination of instrumentals and gentler
songs making the latter sound eerily like an Ani DiFranco recording. Her renowned guitar playing is subdued here,
basically limited to subtle flourishes and it is only on album closer 2 O’Clock
that she appears to let fly. But the
highlight is the preceding track, a lengthy instrumental with one of the longer
titles in my collection; Can Anyone Who Has Heard This Music Really Be A Bad
Person?
(103) La Dusseldorf –
Self Titled
This was part of my first internet delivery from overseas
for the year. La Dusseldorf was the
first project initiated by Klaus Dinger after the breakup of Neu! following their
’75 album. Anyone wanting to get into
70s German experimental music (with or without exposure to Kraftwerk) might
very well wish to start with this. Tracks
here are generally more up tempo than usual and, for the first time, I can distinguish non
German influences at work, particularly on the title track which
has a distinct Roxy Music feel to it. This
is understandable; Roxy’s Brian Eno recorded with Cluster and Harmonica, similar
bands of the era but neither included Dinger. The highlight of this disk is the
opening track, Dusseldorf, which is about as frantic as any track from this
scene that I’ve heard to date. (For the record,
Dusseldorf does not feature in the titles of the two remaining tracks.)
(104) Laibach –
Laicachkunstderfuge
Let’s break down that title.
This album is by the Slovenian industrial/prog act Laibach. Included in the band’s name are the letters
bach, as in the classical composer J.S Bach.
Separate the remainder and add a die and you have Bhe title of Bach’s unfinished
piece, Die Kunst der Fuge. Apparently
Bach did not specify the instrumentation for this piece and so Laibach decided
to turn it into a piece of electronica.
It’s another of the intriguing concepts Laibach has pursued over the
years including their re-recording of The Beatles Let It Be album, an album
with seven different versions of The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil,
and Volk, an album that seems to be about various countries of Europe based on
their respective national anthems. Once
you become accustomed to the concept, the album does actually sound like an electronic
version of classical music with about a 10-15 sequence where it threatens to
become a fully-fledged industrial track.
An interesting listen and one I’ll need to come back to, although as I’m
not a classical music buff in the slightest, I don’t know how radically the
source material has been reinterpreted.
(105) Kathryn Williams
and Neill MacColl – Two
Kathryn Williams is an English singer/songwriter with a
wonderful voice. I’d been impressed by
her Little Black Numbers album and, as her albums seem to be rarely stocked
here, jumped at the opportunity to get this.
The songs are all delicate with MacColl providing guitar, dulcimer and
autoharp and Williams, guitars, organ, harmonium and melotron. Given that combination, it is no surprise to
hear that there is a Tom Waits cover (Innocent When You Dream) and that the
overall effect of the album is not unlike the wonderful sounds made by Gillian Welch
and Dave Rawlings.
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