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Hector Zazou died in early September at the age of 60. ..quote from the French journalist Jean-Fran?ois Bizot: ?In England they have Peter Gabriel, in America they have David Byrne, in France we have Hector Zazou.?...Zazou was an eager cross-cultural collaborator. It seems right that his final album should be a cross-cultural collaboration. For Mirrors, he travelled to India where he worked with a core group consisting of three Indians and an Uzbek. The guest musicians come from Spain, Hungary, and Norway. There is an oud, a violin, a Gaelic-sounding pipe. Zazou was never timid in his choice of instruments. He liked music that flowed and engulfed: swimmy washes of sound, veils and curtains of it, miasma like scented candlesmoke...House of Mirrors is India-themed. The swimmy washes have a raga sound, but declassicalised and shortened. The spaciousness of this music is an Indian spaciousness, the sound of notes plucked and left to linger and be contemplated. The first noise we hear is the sound of slide guitar strings being struck...In the House of Mirrors is a roomy, enveloping, generous work. This is probably the way he would have imagined his last album sounding, if he had thought at all, years and years ago, of death-if he had imagined that he would have to stop making music as regrettably soon as he did.
Brandi Carlile "Story" album she has a newer one ought now I believe......first time I heard her was live at the Gruene Hall in Gruene, TX. amazing live performance and venue for her and her band.
It took several years for Legendary Pink Dots bassist and one-man-band dubmeister Ryan Moore to release a follow-up to his weird and wonderful Dub Project album of 2004, but the second installment is well worth the wait....featuring contributions from the great drummer Style Scott, this one also finds Moore working with the even more legendary Sly Dunbar on a few more rockers-oriented tracks. There are shreds of vocal performances by the likes of Big Youth, Michael Rose, and Jah Stitch, but the rhythms are king here and the rhythms are ? there's no other word for it ? monstrous. "Guns in the Street" features a two-ton bassline whose corrosive blackness is enough to rearrange your DNA; the same is true of "Dervish," the bassline to which is hard to even define ? it's a massive bass tone that slowly judders down in pitch while snatches of dubwise vocal fly away in terror. "Prehistoric Dub" is lighter, but only relatively so; "Greatest Genius" starts out with a calypso-flavored beat before suddenly lapsing into a sort of postmodern ska. "The End" juxtaposes Gregorian chant, sci-fi guitar warbles, sardonic handclaps, and an off-kilter drum part to create a more minimalist and almost (but not quite) contemplative mood.
Among the grasslands of the Sahel and the shifting dunes of the Sahara desert, two legendary nomadic peoples, the Wodaabe and Tuareg, are joined together in the raunchy guitars and haunting voices of Etran Finatawa. As the winds of change cast uncertainty over their nomadic lifestyle, both cultures are at a crossroads. Etran Finatawa reflect on their roots, with a nostalgia and warmth that mirrors the majesty of their desert home. ..Desert Crossroads is an album of North African blues, underpinned by acoustic percussion, traditional Wodaabe vocals, fused with electric guitar and Tuareg rhythms. The combination of Wodaabe vocals and Tuareg rhythms and arrangements is quite unique. The songs are nostalgic reflections on their people and the desert. ?Kel Tamasheck' (The Tuareg People) reminds how important the Tuareg culture is and not to abandon the desert
Laszlo Gardony is a superior jazz improviser who infuses his post-bop music with references to his Hungarian folk roots. He studied at the B?la Bart?k Conservatory in Budapest, graduating in 1979. Gardony recorded five albums on European labels, toured throughout Europe, and then in 1983 emigrated to the U.S. to attend Berklee. He performed with the group Forward Motion, recording two albums for Hep. Since graduating from Berklee, Gardony joined their faculty on a part-time basis, played with John Abercrombie, and recorded as a leader for Antilles, Sunnyside, and Avenue Jazz. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide
Quebecer Charles-Emile Beullac created wonderful lush and evocative electronic soundtracks using a rhetoric close to that used by the likes of Boards Of Canada or Isan. His new offering is quite different. Primarily based on acoustic sound sources, ranging from flute, kalimba, xylophone and tablas to darbouka, udus, and tamboa, most of which were collected during a trip to Indonesia, the original recordings were made during a three-day jam session with friend and percussionist Rapha?l Simard, with sole purpose to catalogue sounds rather than traditional use of these instruments...Faux World was inspired by the vague souvenir that Beullac retained of Indonesia as he fell victim of the side effects of the anti malaria tablets he took prior to the trip. Nightmares, irrational fears and a state of self-alienation pushed Beullac, who was travelling alone, to the brink of a serious breakdown. ..Faux World is a much more tormented and distorted affaire, where rhythmic patterns appear distorted and instruments are processed into asynchronous and uneven loops to form slightly disconcerting combinations. Beullac?s densely packed soundscapes appear to form and dissipate with insistent regularity throughout. More than once does a melody or a theme arise which sounds almost identical to one that has been heard earlier, yet when going back to find said sequence, it turns out entirely different.
Violinist Gerszewski developed an individual form of notation to create his "ordinary music", bringing his musical work together with his work as a visual artist. Ordinary music can be described as a continuation of abstract visual thinking by means of sound, a kind of sound painting; music appearing in terms of sound spaces, sound surfaces, sound layers, or sound objects.
