Wednesday, February 20, 2013

more sketches




Musik of the week: I've been listening to several Radiohead concerts from the 1990s and 2000s on YouTube... Back in the 90s I wasn't listening so much to pop/rock, I was mostly into noise and experimental music, Japanese easy listening, cosmo-pop and electronic music, so I missed a lot of the mainstream music of the time. It's only a couple of years ago that I discovered Radiohead and some  of their songs are pure masterpieces - though listening to a whole album or concert is difficult since Thom Yorke's voice is a little bit monotonous - like Björk's (I also just discovered Portishead and Massive Attack, that I love now)... I also start to listen to Radiohead's more recent stuff and I'm about to be convinced...

Monday, February 18, 2013

miscellaneous


1.2.

1. So, I finally reinstalled my workbench and I little by little start to work again on my pedal enclosures.

2. I've been offered today a Hardwire Supernatural reverb - a fine piece of electronics. I will practice with it for a few days and record a demo, but I can tell already that it's a very promising pedal...

3. I was doing some computer maintenance and I found a piece that I made a few years ago when I was learning how to use music softwares - it's been uploaded on MySpace just before they sabotage themselves, and I forgot about it, it might interest someone...

3.

Monday, February 11, 2013

more sketches

























Musik of the week: I just received a CD of György Ligeti's studies for piano and I could just listen to it once today but I really love this music, and Ligeti is one of my favorite composers. 
And I keep listening to Cult of Luna's Eternal Kingdom - I thought I would mostly watch the concert DVD because I often prefer live than studio recordings, but the CD is quite good - and it's great to discover a new band and listen to recent music!


Thursday, February 7, 2013

more sketches





Music of the week: I just discovered the Swedish band Cult of Luna through a series of YouTube videos extracted from their live DVD (I ordered it right away to enjoy better sound). It's like I found something I was looking for for a while, that is partly in Archive, partly in Black Angels, partly in Metallica + Lou Reed, but that Cult of Luna makes perfectly: long, deep, violent, hypnotic, intense, progressive guitar-based songs... 
I need top see this band on stage, but though they are currently touring eastern Europe, they seem to  be avoiding Vienna! And I need to start a new band soon...

Monday, February 4, 2013

CD review: Dirty Primitives











If you follow this blog you already heard of Dirty Primitives - the band's guitarist is a old friend and collaborator of mines, and I built the planckaster for him. I received their first CD a few days ago and I've been happily listening to it several times, and enjoy its many qualities.

It is great to listen to fuzzy guitar-based music that is not just an accumulation of clichés or a laborious effort to sound like the great ancients of some rock golden age. Don't get me wrong, Dirty Primitives' music is rooted in blues - the harsh kind -, but they take it, together with the listeners, somewhere else. The references that come to mind are Captain Beefheart, the Gun Club, John Spencer or the Drones, but Dirty Primitives sound more southern and more cosmopolitan, if you see what I mean...

That's actually what I like in this album, that it constantly mixes contradictory things - dirty blues sounds and avant-garde textures, raging riffs and dissonant solos, ballads and noisy walls of sounds, hypnotic beats and elaborated arrangements, banjo and mellotron (there are not only guitars)... It's both simple and elaborate, unpretentious and ambitious, raw and elegant - like all music should be! The two guitars are truly complementary (I pay attention to this since I read Keith Richards' book and his description of dual guitars composition), and the voice is more elaborated than you'd expect for this kind of music, sometimes playing with complex harmonies and effects - I like this better that the emotional roughness you're supposed to display in 'authentic' rock or blues...

I hope that this band will find the audience it deserves, what they do is rare and valuable.






Saturday, February 2, 2013

more sketches











Music of the week: Erik Satie's piano solo works - you know, these things so classic that you don't really listen anymore, or don't think you should own them because you will always hear them on the radio, until you figure out that you need to listen very carefully, at home, in a quiet atmosphere... 
I also bought the Gymnopedies scores, for the piano players at home (everybody but me...)   


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