Nancarrow

Don't want to say too much about Conlon Nancarrow, but he was known for his compositions for player pianos. They were ahead of their time (early/mid-20th century), because rhythmically the player piano allowed pretty much anything.

Here's a trilogy for player piano:

A - measure=72

B - measure=50

C - measure=92

For violin and player piano:

Toccata, for Violin and Player Piano

And a special arrangement of one of his early player piano "studies"  by Yvar Mikhashoff:

Study No.7 (Arr. Yvar Mikhashoff)

Se7en

Made an album with a pal about the seven deadly sins.

He tackled Greed, Sloth and Lust while I sorted out Pride, Gluttony and Wrath.

We then made Envy out of bits and pieces of the first 6 tracks.

DOWNLOAD

Band Leader

I'm A Band Leader by Captain Beefheart. 

It's funny and it works cos it's Captain Beefheart!

Spoken word track, just a warning.

World News

Here's MJ's original demo version of "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough":

Pretty cool.

Forever

This video was taken off Youtube a while ago but it's back now.

Phew.

B Day Highlights

Beyoncé's second album sold loads but less people seem to remember anything about it (there's no Crazy In Love or Single Ladies).

It's noticeable for being quite Jay Z influenced too, with him popping up all over the shop.

I think he also influenced the insane process behind making the album (quote brought to us by MTV News via wikipedia):

"She had multiple producers in Sony Studios. She booked out the whole studio and she had the biggest and best producers in there. She would have us in one room, we would start collaborating with one producer, [and] then she would go and start something else with another producer. We would bounce around to the different rooms and work with the different producers. It was definitely a factory type of process."

Anyway, here are two tracks from the album that I really like:

Kitty Kat

Green Light

RSM

R. Stevie Moore is a very early lo-fi musician.

He's very much a magnet for words like genius and legend, which I think has a lot to do with him remaining relatively obscure.

Definitely interesting though!

Here are some videos made for tracks of his from the 70s.

Yeah!

John Zorn Filmworks

John Zorn somehow manages to run the non-profit label Tzadik which releases a huge amount of music, including a lot of his own.

A lot of the releases fall under a particular series, and Zorn releases music he's written for films under the "Filmworks" tag.

I ended up buying number VII, Cynical Hysterie Hour the other day as I read it was music written for a set of Japanese cartoons by Kiriko Kubo.

The music is played by an extremely tight band, here are some tracks:

Hysteric Logo

Walk To Park

Fighting Pirates

Filmworks XXII, The Last Supper is extremely different, being written for voices and drums.

It's more typical "soundtrack music" in a way. Here are three tracks:

Opening Invocation

Dance For The Vernal Equinox

Le Diable

I'm not sure which I prefer, but it's impressive as these releases are kind of a sideline to his main stuff.

Changes

Basically went through my awesome blog and took out almost all the download links.

Makes some of the posts look even more futile than they did in the first place, sometimes in quite a funny way.

Just trying to change the nature of things a bit!

Love to all my fans,

Alex 

x

Lovely