The Book of Knots, Garden of Fainting Stars (2011)

A requiem for the space age, Garden of Fainting Stars completes Book of Knots' “By Sea, by Land, by Air” trilogy, which captured the hopes and dreams wrapped up in different forms of transportation. Where the massive layers of sound on their self-titled album echoed the huge ships that helped shrink the world in the heyday of seafaring, and Traineater's Americana leanings reflected the blood, sweat, and tears that went into building the U.S. railways, this set of songs is a rusty graveyard for humankind’s dreams of flight, and the combination of science and idealism that led to the belief that anything was possible. Fittingly, Garden of Fainting Stars sounds mechanical in an old-fashioned and malfunctioning way, with elements that evoke gears turning and pistons pumping, torn and corroded metal and short-circuiting electronics. “Microgravity” begins the album with an ode to space monkeys powered by dense vocal harmonies and clanging metallic chords; “Moondust Must”’s lyrics compare the Moon’s oceans to wine and its dust to gunpowder, conflating fairy tales with destructive potential. The band does a particularly vivid job of describing space’s vastness and chaos on “All This Nothing,” a panorama of echoing voices that suggests unanswered transmissions, and on “Nebula Rasa,” which repeats the phrase “It is a dead world” over storms of distortion. All of this is a far cry from Traineater's rustic songcraft; indeed, Garden of Fainting Stars may be the trilogy's most experimental installment, making it all the more apt that it was released by Ipecac Records. The most thrilling moments occur when Book of Knots throw caution and overt structures to the wind: “Lissajous Orbit” spans eerie strings, Aaron Lazar's nearly operatic vocals and disturbingly decayed vocoder in its trajectory. As with the group’s previous works, several well-chosen guest stars make cameos. Nervous Cabaret's Elyas Khan adds a caustic theatricality to the title track; Einstürzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld ruminates on class envy and ruined elegance on “Drosophila Melanogaster”’s long-distance flights; and Ipecac co-owner Mike Patton's powerful vocals seem to sing the universe into being (or destruction) on “Planemo.” Much like Jóhann Jóhannsson's trilogy of albums about the rise and fall of technology, the “By Sea, by Land, by Air” albums paint vivid portraits of ambition and folly; Garden of Fainting Stars might be the darkest and most difficult volume, but it's no less fascinating because of that.

1 Microgravity

2 Drosophila Melanogaster

3 Moondust Must

4 Lissajous Orbit

5 Garden of Fainting Stars

6 All This Nothing

7 Yeager's Approach

8 Planemo

9 Nebula Rasa

10 Obituary For the Future

Blixa Bargeld: Vocals, Narrator

Tony Maimone:  Bass, Choir, Chorus, Synthesizer Bass, Group Member

Mike Patton:  Vocals

John Vanderslice:  Choir, Chorus

Trey Spruance:  Saz, Electric Guitar

John Davis:  Choir, Chorus

Nils Frykdahl:  Vocals

Carla Kihlstedt:  Violin, Theremin, Viola, Vocals, Choir, Chorus, Kalimba, Marxophone, Bass Harmonica, Group Member

Marc Goodman:  Choir, Chorus

Shahzad Ismaily:  Electric Guitar

Moe Staiano:  Sheet Metal

Dawn McCarthy:  Vocals

Matthias Bossi:  Synthesizer, Piano, Drums, Bass Drums, Glockenspiel, Triangle, Vocals, Choir, Chorus, Synthesizer Bass, Wurlitzer, Optigan, Glass, Group Member

Allen Willner:  Narrator

Sam Bass:  Cello

Elyas Khan:  Vocals

Joel Hamilton:  Piano, Electric Guitar, Vocals, Choir, Chorus, Various, Marxophone, Analogue Synthesizer, Group Member

Ian Pelicci:  Choir, Chorus

info |

http://www.ipecac.com/artists/book_of_knots

http://music.barnesandnoble.com/Garden-of-Fainting-Stars/The-Book-of-Knots/e/689230012726

http://www.allmusic.com/album/garden-of-fainting-stars-r2190877/review

spotify |

http://open.spotify.com/album/5XSrBeBjoglzIIWPc67ICi

David Sylvian, Died In The Wool (2011)

Died in the Wool — variations on David Sylvian's 2009 release Manafon including collaborations with acclaimed composer Dai Fujikura, producers Jan Bang and Erik Honoré and a stellar roster of contemporary musicians and improvisers.

Throughout his career, David Sylvian has ventured from his pop origins into riskier strains of music. Following his adventures into modern electronic and improvised music on Blemish andManafon, Sylvian offers remarkable new work with the celebrated contemporary composer Dai Fujikura. Died in the Wool features the fruits of this collaboration, alongside material derived from and inspired by the Manafon sessions. Old and new friends, ballads and ambient improvisations, and works both groundbreaking and extreme come together in an important new collection.

An acclaimed young composer and a protégé of Pierre Boulez, Fujikura discovered Sylvian’s work through the album Secrets of the Beehive. “The main reason I was hooked by his work was, of course, his voice. The most beautiful voice in the world,” says Fujikura. He sought out Sylvian in London, where they started what sounds like an unlikely partnership: a conservatory-trained composer who had never worked in pop, with a singer looking for more than an accompanist. As Fujikura explains, “We live in totally opposite parts of the musical globe. So this was a collaboration in every sense, and not a collision.”

Take “The Last Days of December,” where the string quartet incorporates extended technniques to conjure a variety of sonorities from their instruments, while a bass flute adds disquieting multiphonics. The ensemble doesn’t simply back the singer but haunts and possesses him, providing a searing contrast to the solemn but melodic vocal line; there’s tension between the contrasting elements, and yet they come together powerfully to evoke the tragedy in the lyrics.

Fujikura also reworked material from Manafon, starting with “Random Acts of Senseless Violence.” He adds a string quartet that picks and pulls apart the terror in the lyrics. His mix makes John Tilbury’s quiet piano interjections more ethereal, while the silences he adds leave the vocals more exposed. Fujikura also contributes to “Anomaly at Taw Head,” a Manafonouttake presented here for the first time, and a striking new version of “Snow White in Appalachia,” where the strings follow the narrative with urgent pizzicato and forgiving swoons.

Producers and electronics artists Jan Bang and Erik Honoré are the other featured collaborators, and they contribute remixes of two tracks from Manafon, “Emily Dickinson” and the title track. Bang and Honoré have remixed Sylvian’s work in the past, and here they also contribute to two new songs: “I Should Not Dare” and “A Certain Slant of Light,” which are settings of poems by Emily Dickinson—the first time Sylvian has adapted poetry to song. The most conventionally beautiful pieces on the record, they are produced from a rich concatenation of sources. On “I Should Not Dare,” a bed of glitches and Christian Fennesz’s treated guitar blend with a live recording of Supersilent keyboardist Ståle Storløkken. From all these materials comes one of the most romantic ballads in Sylvian’s catalogue.

The title track, “Died in the Wool,” is a similar construction: It began as an experiment with clarinet multiphonics that Fujikura casually sent to Sylvian, who fleshed it out with Manafonouttakes while Bang and Honoré grounded it with samples from a Skúli Sverrisson concert at the Punkt Festival. This mélange of studio and concert material emerges as a single, seamless piece. Says Honoré, “The finished album seems to be remarkably consistent, especially when considering how it was produced. The main reason for this consistency is probably David’s choice of musicians and arrangers, who seem to blend very well together, and to expand on each other’s ideas in an organic way. There seems to be a kinship of sorts, despite the very different backgrounds of the people involved, both musically and geographically.”

“I don’t think I’ve produced work of a more intensely emotional nature than that of the past eight years or so,” says Sylvian. “I never work from a purely intellectual standpoint, it’s the intuitive and the emotional that are my guides therefore all the elements you hear in the work are in the service of the emotional truth of a piece. Not to sweeten the bitter pill as much as more traditional musical elements might, but by fleshing out the picture via other means.”

Disc Two: “when we return you won’t recognise us” — For the first time, a stereo mix of David Sylvian’s audio installation “when we return you won’t recognise us,” is available on CD. First commissioned for the Biennial of Canaries 2008-2009, the work was inspired by a 2003 genetics research article focusing on the Canary Islands, which discovered that despite Spanish colonization and the slave trade, fully half to three-quarters of the population retains its aboriginal genetic lineage. As Sylvian writes, “My interest lay in the connection between the physical or scientific reality of our biological make-up, the links to lineage (genetic genealogy), location and, to move beyond the realm of science into intuitive logic, the interior life of a community or people. An implied cultural heritage.”

The work pairs a group of star improvisers—John Butcher, Arve Henriksen, Günter Müller, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Eddie Prévost—with a string sextet directed by Fujikura. “The process of creating the piece was informed by the Manafon sessions themselves but taken a step further by having both written text, regarding the context of the installation and the concept behind it which included references to specific sound, and by having Dai ‘improvise’ with a sextet of string players. This was handled by settling on a handful of chord clusters prior to the session and Dai formulating a series of hand gestures that would indicate which combination of responses were required from the sextet at any given moment in time. I believe we recorded five takes total and each take was vastly different from the one prior.”

The installation will be presented again later this year at the Punkt Festival in Kristiansand, Norway. This rendition will include newly commission work by visual artist Atsushi Fukui, and its setup will allow for individual musicians, poets and writers to interact with the audio element in live performance.

Disc 1

01. Small Metal Gods

02. Died In The Wool

03. I Should Not Dare

04. Random Acts Of Senseless Violence

05. A Certain Slant Of Light (for M.K.)

06. Anomaly At Taw Head

07. Snow White In Appalachia

08. Emily Dickinson

09. The Greatest Living Englishman (coda)

10. Anomaly At Taw Head (a haunting)

11. Manafon

12. The Last Days Of December

Disc 2

1. When We Return You Won’t Recognise Us

info |

http://www.davidsylvian.com/diedinthewool/

http://www.amazon.com/Died-Wool-David-Sylvian/dp/B004UA8OQ8

http://www.discogs.com/David-Sylvian-Died-In-The-Wool-Manafon-Variations/release/2919560

Charles Mingus, Oh Yeah (1961)

For an artist as perpetually re-inventing as Mingus, it's almost a given that one album will be very unlike the next. OH YEAH is, in fact, quite different than the bassist/composer's other releases for two reasons: Mingus plays piano throughout the entire set, and he sings--not the standard grunts and exhortations that one usually hears from Mingus as bandleader, but an actual hoarse, blues-rattled vocal directly into the microphone. If this weren't enough to distort his already unpredictable program, the compositions, though based primarily on blues patterns, are infused with even more frenzied energy than usual and range into free-form instrumental explorations that shove at structural boundaries.

The musicians, including the wonderfully individualistic trombonist Jimmy Knepper and the inspired Rahsaan Roland Kirk, sound like a drunken congregation ascending to heaven after the world's most beautiful train wreck. The musical and emotional energy is raw and powerful, pouring out of rattle-trap tracks like "Hog Callin' Blues," the Gospel-based "Ecclusiastics," the hilarious nod to Fats Waller in "Eat That Chicken," and the psychedelic freak-out of "Passions Of A Man." The bonus track, a 25-minute interview Mingus gave to producer Nesuhi Ertegun, is an additional surprise on an album already full of surprises.

01. Hog Callin' Blues

02. Devil Woman

03. Wham Bam Thank You Ma'Am

04. Ecclusiastics

05. Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me

06. Eat That Chicken

07. Passions Of A Man

08. Charles Mingus Interviewed By Nesuhi Ertegun (bonus track)

Charles Mingus: Vocals, bass

Rahsaan Roland Kirk: Tenor saxophone, manzello, stritch, flute, siren

Booker Ervin: Tenor saxophone

Jimmy Knepper: Trombone

Doug Watkins: Bass

Dannie Richmond: Drums

info |

http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,3856737,00.html

http://www.tomajazz.com/musicos/mingus/mingus_oh_yeah.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Oh-Yeah-Charles-Mingus/dp/B000002JLQ

Sam Rivers, Fuchsia Swing Song (1964)

Recorded in 1964 immediately after leaving the Miles Davis Quintet, Sam Rivers' Fuchsia Swing Song is one of the more auspicious debuts the label released in the mid-'60s. Rivers was a seasoned session player (his excellent work on Larry Young's Into Somethin' is a case in point) and a former member of Herb Pomeroy's Big Band before he went out with Davis. By the time of his debut, Rivers had been deep under the influence of Coltrane and Coleman, but wasn't willing to give up the blues just yet. Hence the sound on Fuchsia Swing Song is one of an artist who is at once very self-assured, and in transition.

Using a rhythm section that included Tony Williams (whose Life Time he had guested on), pianist Jaki Byard, and bassist Ron Carter, Rivers took the hard bop and blues of his roots and poured them through the avant-garde colander. Today, players like Joshua Redman, Branford Marsalis, and James Carter do it all the time, but in 1964 it was unheard of. You either played hard bop or free; Davis' entire modal thing hadn't even completely blasted off yet. The title and opening track is a case in point. Rivers opens with an angular figure that is quickly translated by the band into sweeping, bopping blues. Rivers legato is lightning quick and his phrasing touches upon Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, Coleman, and Coltrane, but his embouchure is all his. He strikes the balance and then takes off on both sides of the aisle. Byard's comping is actually far more than that, building in rhythmic figures in striated minors just behind the tenor. "Downstairs Blues Upstairs" sounds, initially anyway, like it might have come out of the Davis book so deep is its blue root. But courtesy of Byard and Williams, Rivers goes to the left after only four choruses, moving onto the ledge a bit at a time, running knotty arpeggios through the center of the melody and increasingly bending his notes into succeeding intervals while shifting keys and times signatures. He never goes completely over the edge as he would on his later Blue Note dates. The most difficult cut on the date is "Luminous Monolith," with its swing-like figure introducing the melody. Eight bars in, the syncopation of the rhythm sections begins a stutter stem around the time and then the harmony with Byard building dense chords for Rivers to jump off of. On the Connoisseur Series CD (shame on Blue Note once again for making some of its best outside records "limited editions"; titles like this should be as readily available as Horace Silver's Song for My Father, but the label had been playing it ever so safe for a while and making fans buy the limited number of titles over and again) there are alternate takes of "Luminous Monolith" and three more of "Downstairs Blues Upstairs," making it a very worthwhile look at the entire session. This is a highly recommended date. Rivers never played quite like this again.

01. Fuchsia Swing Song

02. Downstairs Blues Upstairs

03. Cyclic Episode

04. Luminous Monolith

05. Beatrice

06. Ellipsis

07. Luminous Monolith (alt tk)

08. Downstairs Blues Upstairs (1st alt tk)

09. Downstairs Blues Upstairs (2nd alt tk)

10. Downstairs Blues Upstairs (3rd alt tk)

Ron Carter: Bass

Sam Rivers: Sax (Tenor)

Tony Williams: Drums

Jaki Byard: Piano

info |

http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,3948886,00.html

http://www.amazon.com/Fuschia-Swing-Song-Sam-Rivers/dp/B0000CDL63

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=12978

La casa de Bernarda Alba, Mario Camus (1987)

AÑO 1987

DURACIÓN 103 min.

PAÍS España

DIRECTOR Mario Camus

GUIÓN Mario Camus & Antonio Larreta (Teatro: Federico García Lorca)

MÚSICA Varios

FOTOGRAFÍA Fernando Arribas

REPARTO Irene Gutiérrez Caba, Ana Belén, Florinda Chico, Enriqueta Carballeira, Vicky Peña, Aurora Pastor, Rosario García Ortega, Mercedes Lezcano

PRODUCTORA Paraíso Films

PREMIOS 1987: Goya a la mejor dirección artística

GÉNERO Drama

Después de la muerte de su marido, Bernarda somete a sus cinco hijas a una disciplina inquisitorial que equivale, en la práctica, a un enterramiento en vida. La aparición de un hombre, Pepe el Romano, que parece tener intención de casarse con Angustias, la hija mayor, desencadena una serie de acontecimientos que desembocan en un inesperado y trágico final. (FILMAFFINITY)

info |

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092729/ 

http://www.filmaffinity.com/es/film507645.html

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_casa_de_Bernarda_Alba

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_casa_de_Bernarda_Alba_(pel%C3%ADcula)

Cheer Accident, "No Ifs, Ands or Dogs" (2011)

"Tons of weird rock records have streamed out of Chicago over the past two decades, but none have blended pop smarts and avant-garde impulses as skillfully as this marvelous brainteaser of an album..." – Time Out New York

Emerging from the incredibly diverse crucible of music that is Chicago, Cheer-Accidentembodies and re-affirms the “promises made” by previous generations of progressive rock, post-punk, and post rock bands—the creation of a thoroughly new rock-based music. There are bands with pretty melodies, bands that rock, bands that dazzle with exalted technique, bands that make you laugh, and bands aiming to perplex even the most intrepid listener. Cheer-Accident is all those things and more, truly a band for the 21st century. Cheer-Accident wrap creativeness inside an inviting enigma of honeyed vocals, harmonious pop melody, and thorny dissonance. They have the rare ability to synthesize and juxtapose pure pop, thundering rock, and avant-garde complexity and ambiguity, intuition and intellect, sweetness and sarcasm, to create a stunning signature sound.

No Ifs, Ands, or Dogs, Cheer-Accident’s 17th album is a kaleidoscopic, inclusive trip into a musical madhouse that you’ll want to stay lost within. The core membership of the ever-shifting organism that is Cheer-Accident remains Thymme Jones (vocals, keyboards, brass, synth, drums); Carmen Armillas (vocals), Alex Perkolup (vocals, bass, guitar), D. Bayne (keyboards, trombone) and Jeff Libersher (vocals, guitar, keys, trumpet, bass), with able assists from Andrea Faught (vocals, keys), and Lise Gilly (saxophones), among others. Everyone makes significant and important and wonderful contributions, but since the vocalist is always the focal point in bands, I want to mention that Carmen is a real find, with a powerfully emotive voice; she really lends a huge presence to this album, working beautifully with Thymme and Jeff and the rest.

The songs on No Ifs… run the gamut of everything that makes Cheer-Accident an exceptional band: prickly, lurching psychedelia with honeyed singing, quizzical Steve Reich-meets-King Crimson rockers, and sweetly peculiar soft-pop a la Beach Boys and Free Design. This diversity does not denote dilettantism, however; Cheer Accident empowers and devotes itself to whatever style, mode, or genre it absorbs. Even after a few listens, regardless of stylistic diversity displayed during No Ifs, Ands or Dogs is the commitment to primo performance of the album/music/concept as a whole — songs often lead into one another, going from a self-contained song to a introduction (or a coda) depending on where you are or where your focus is in the listening.

After the critical acclaim and expanded audience that greeted Cheer-Accident after the release of Fear Draws Misfortune, the group responded as they always do; by a reinvention of their sound. A wonderful album that is - as usual - also something completely different!

Cheer-Accident are the quintessential Chicago post-rock band that, sadly, you may have never heard of. Too bad. They've been exploring head-scratching, creatively fucked-up time signatures and sideways guitar shenanigans for 20 years now, leaving a pronounced influence on the Windy City's art-rock scene. Their playful musical approach is a ripe aesthetic of absurdist humor." – D. Shawn Bosler/Pitchfork

1. Drag You Down (4:32)

2. Trial Of Error (4:34)

3. This Is The New That (4:58)

4. Pre-Somnia (1:27)

5. Sleep (3:48)

6. Barely Breathing (3:18)

7. Life In Pollyanna (3:19)

8. Death By Pollyanna (3:21)

9. Drug You Down (0:44)

10. Salad Dies (4:08)

11. Post-Somnia (1:11)

12. Cynical Girl (2:12)

13. Go Gaunt Green (0:29)

14. Empty Province (4:41)

15. Provincial Din (5:12)

Jeff Libersher: Guitar, bass, trumpet, keyboards, vocals

Thymme Jones: Drums, vocals, pseudo-marimba, synthesizer

Alex Perkolup: Bass, guitar, vocals

Carmen Armillas: Vocals

D. Bayne: Keyboards, trombone

Andrea Faught: Vocals, keyboards

Lise Gilly: Saxophones

info |

http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=33438 

http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/bandshtml/cheeraccident.html

http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,8774575,00.html

The Holy Mountain / La montaña sagrada, Alejandro Jodorowsky (1973)

TÍTULO ORIGINAL La montaña sagrada

AÑO: 1973

DURACIÓN 114'

PAÍS México

DIRECTOR Alejandro Jodorowsky

GUIÓN Alejandro Jodorowsky

MÚSICA Alejandro Jodorowsky, Don Cherry, Ronald Frangipane

FOTOGRAFÍA Rafael Corkidi

REPARTO Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horácio Salinas, Zamira Saunders

PRODUCTORA Coproducción México-USA

GÉNERO Drama. Fantástico | Película de culto. Surrealismo

Coloquio con Alejandro Jodorowsky y Diego Moldes, escritor y autor de la tesis doctoral La imaginación simbólica en la obra cinematográfica de Alejandro Jodorowsky.

"Jodorowsky afirmó que "La montaña sagrada es una enciclopedia de símbolos" (Cobb), no obstante, llegado al final, parece hastiado de ellos. La vida importa más que el cine y que los símbolos. Eso explica su idea de filmar en orden cronológico, para reflejar las vivencias y evoluciones de los personajes-actores, sólo podía ser así, documentando sus propias peripecias vitales durante su filmación. En este punto el genio vitalista emergió y anuló al cineasta, no obstante, en contra de lo que se pueda creer, en esa decisión hallamos la coherencia con su pensamiento psicomágico, que es una coherencia absoluta." (Diego Moldes) Cortesía de ABKCO Music and Records

info |

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071615/

http://www.filmaffinity.com/es/film229503.html 

Fando y Lis, A. Jodorowsky (1968)

Int.: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal, María Teresa Rivas. México. 97'.

Road movie Pánica en la que el impotente Fando y la paralítica Lis, que mantienen una relación sadomasoquista de mutua dependencia, se dirigen a la inalcanzable y simbólica ciudad de Tarr. Inspirada en una obra teatral de Fernando Arrabal, se rodó al margen de la autorización sindical y, tras proyectarse en el Festival de Acapulco, Jodorowsky tuvo que huir para no ser linchado. Polanski defendió la película ante los medios.

info |

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061643/