Innova Recordings was founded in 1982 by an organization called the American Composers Forum so that composers, that most embattled and consistently maligned species of contemporary music makers, would be able to record the forward-thinking, fresh and visceral music they were making. This was music that had a firm foothold in no markets — not pop, not rock, not even traditional classical. This is music that defines itself by all of the things it isn’t, or only sort of is: classical, but not old; modern, but not Modernist; melodic, but not Pop. It slips through or under every classification crack there is. When you are faced with a lack of labels as severe as this, you can almost start to understand why people go around calling it ridiculous things like “art music” or “serious music” — anything to give it a name and to draw people’s attention to it.

The American Composers Forum just called it “music” — and recorded it in volume. When it began, the Saint Paul, Minnesota-based group had a very narrow, pragmatic focus: It recorded Minnesota composers who had been awarded the prestigious McKnight Fellowship. Since 1994, however, as its purview has grown, it has matured into a label that documents all the thrilling stuff happening at the fringes of the American contemporary scene. Well, guess what:now they’ve put the most vital swath of their catalogue on sale, and this sampler, right here, is free: That means you don’t have even the slightest excuse anymore not to be clued into this music. The sampler will whet your appetite, I guarantee it: once that happens, and you want to go exploring further, here’s a list of recordings on sale that I am a big fan of. The complete list of Innova records on sale can be found at eMusic’s Steals and Deals page.

Jayson’s Personal Innova Faves:
Terry Riley’s In C: Remixed
Harry Partch – Delusion of the Fury
Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project – Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Maya Beiser – Provenance

Whether it’s the fiery iconoclast cellist Maya Beiser, who has worked with Brian Eno, played with Bang on A Can, and recently performed Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” for 12 cellos; the conductor Gil Rose and his inimitable Boston Modern Orchestra Project ensemble, which continually and fearlessly tackles music no one else is playing; or Harry Partch, the musical hermit who had to invent his own instruments and tuning system to write the music he heard in his head, the musicians recorded on Innova are some of the smartest, most vital artists that you probably know nothing about. Fix that.

Last night at Carnegie Hall, I attended the U.S. premiere of La Commedia, a 100-minute opera about Hell. There were tumbling jazzy episodes; passages of stringent, chilly modernism; bursts of propulsive minimalism; a children’s choir; and a rambling spoken monologue by a racist, cranky old man. It was, to put it mildly, a bit of a kitchen-sink affair.

It was also awesome. The work was by Louis Andriessen, a revered European composer who seems serenely divorced from the musical and stylistic politics most composers have to wrestle with. He is neither a capital-M Modernist nor a (lower-case m?) minimalist: he is simply Andriessen, a composer who borrows whatever he wants. He has managed to combine a magpie musical ear with an Olympian sense of craft: when he’s done assimilating all the disparate, often conflicting strands of music he loves into his art, what you are left with is something like a polished spacecraft with no visible entry or exit — it simply is, majestic and utterly unique.

Such was definitely the case with La Commedia. As might be guessed from the title and subject matter, the massive, evening-length work — presented at Carnegie in its concert version, stripped of the Hal Hartley film that accompanied its world premiere — takes Dante’s The Divine Comedy as its inspiration. But as do all things when they pass through Andriessen’s singular sensibility, Dante Alighieri’s epic poem, in this work, came out compellingly scrambled. For much of the journey, the character of Dante is voiced by a woman — in this case, soprano, jazz singer, and composer Cristina Zavalloni, who embraced the role with, um, gusto. Bugging out her eyes, frazzling her hair, and dancing like a broken marionette to the score, she inhabited the Dante character with a fearless lack of inhibition, navigating us through the lower, boiled-pitch depths of Hell with vicious glee, at times recalling nothing so much (cheap pop-culture reference alert) as the batshit, feral-avenging-mother Claire from LOST.

To keep us on our toes, Andriessen scrambles things even further: his Commedia spends nearly three-quarters of the work in Hell. (Anyone who’s waded through the Divine Comedy in college can attest to the sound entertainment wisdom of this decision: once Dante leaves hell, much of the color drains out of the tale.) The libretto mixes in Dutch, Latin, and English alongside Italian, and occasionally outside texts butt their way in. Despite all this, however, the work doesn’t feel schizophrenic. Andriessen’s incredible ear for texture and sound color unites everything. Despite the lack of Hal Hartley’s film, La Commedia bristled with theatrical energy, almost all of it contained in Andriessen’s vivid, darkly coiled score. When the nightmarish plunge into Hell begins, the score registers the shock with an endless, unanchored harmonic descent down a chromatic rabbit hole. When Zavalloni (as Dante) sings the line “And then, over the turbid waves there came a terrifying noise,” a disturbing, almost gastrointestinal honk erupts from an electric bass and a bass clarinet while strings float freely in a haze above.

As the work transitioned from Hell to Purgatory to Heaven, we were treated to an endless parade of new sounds — a harp, a hammered cimbalom, earthy brass and woodwinds, stumbling rock drums. There were snatches of overt Bernstein quotations that got honest-to-god chuckles rippling through the audience. Even as it ascended to the Heavens, however, the piece never stopped veering leftward; witness that aforementioned monologue from Dante’s racist great-great-great grandfather, who quite literally interrupts the proceedings (“excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry,” he grumbles as he steps around the children’s choir and orchestra players’ seats) just as things are supposed to be winding to a dewy-eyed, transcendent close. Then, who gets the final word? That children’s choir, which offers the following slightly disturbing closing sentiment: “These are all my notes for you/and if you do not get it/you won’t get the Last Judgment/you will never get it, ever.” The “you will never get it, ever” has a slightly singsong, “nyah-nyah” quality that almost feels like an act of nose-thumbing. Those closing lines could serve as the epigram to the ever-elusive Andriessen’s career. If you haven’t yet discovered his work for yourself, do yourself a favor and start here.

We got this a month ago, but I am somehow just getting around to listening to it now and, oh my god, the new Sigh record is throwing me into all kinds of ridiculous, excited spasms.

I mean, good god, where the hell do I even start with this thing? By saying it just knocked Beach House out of my personal “Best of the Year So Far” top slot? By talking about how every time I play it I need to physically calm myself down, because I am overcome by how completely fucking awesome it is? By talking about how I am a hairsbreadth away from physically forcing people to sit and listen to this with me? How I may have actually just done that to a fellow eMusic employee?

OK, lemme start over:

Sigh are a Japanese metal band who skew theatrical. How theatrical? Every song is fully orchestrated — not just strings, man, oboes, trumpets, flutes. You thought you knew bombast? Friend, you do not know bombast until you listen to Sigh. “The Soul Grave” opens with an organ flourish, then divebombs into rotary-saw black metal riffs before, good god, a full-on orchestral fanfare kicks in, sounding like a Dead Pirate’s Imperial March — stern, determined, swooping upward and downward while vocalist Mirai Kawashima does the full-on black metal demonic growl over top. There are two songs with “Funeral” in the title — “The Red Funeral” is the lemmings-marching-toward-the-cliff soldier death dance, complete with processional snare while “The Summer Funeral,” belying the sunniness of the title, creeps and crawls, stomping horns crashing down like anvils and, two minutes in, a Hitchcock-movie piano arrives to signal the beginning of your end. It’s like, say you went to high school in hell, and it was time for your Spring Concert — this is what you’d be playing.

It’s pompous and puff-chested and a tiny bit ridiculous — but ridiculous in the best way possible. It’s forward-thinking and inventive and surprising, and there hasn’t been a second over the last 24 hours I haven’t felt like listening to it. And if all that’s not enough, I quote the following bit of trivia from Sputnik Music’s 5-star review of the record:

Scenes from Hell continues the band’s enigmatic nature with the addition of Dr. Mikannibal. A real life Ph.D currently working at the US National Laboratory, Dr. Mikannibal is also known for her propensity on the (alto) saxophone, her bellowing growl and her peculiar habits, which include recording topless and casually dining on everything from bull penis to cockroaches.

Download now, thank me later.

A deeply weird and haunting clusterfuck of an avant-garde record came into eMusic on Friday. It is filed under Jazz, but the only distant relation it bears to Jazz is the fact that it is completely improvised. Otherwise, it lays about thirty miles safely outside of any genre borders. It is called The Songs, and it sounds sort of like standing outside of a row of adjacent practice rooms in a conservatory: in one, a drummer is working on his fills; in the next, a couple of wobbly-voiced female singers attempt to nail the harmonies on their English madrigal, and in next two rooms, a fidgety nine-year-old restlessly plucks his violin and a high-schooler learns how to make a sound on a trumpet. Oh, and then the hippie dude wanders in from the campus green and starts hitting his damn bongoes.

What The Songs is: a collaboration recorded in 1967 by the poet Alan Sondheim and the improvisatory free-jazz collective Ritual All 770. Nurse With Wound, the freaky Krautrock/free-jazz/industrial/whatever project of Steven Stapleton, cited this album in its “list of seminal experimental recordings” in the sleeve of their first album, which solidified its status as a cult collector’s item. And, 40 years later, like a piece of recently unearthed, rotting hominid skull, here it is: a group of 60s hippies sitting around attempting to “reject the notion the notion that avant garde music was solely the realm of isolated academia” — via one long, loooong completely improvised jam session.

Sound completely excruciating? It might be, if these guys weren’t fabulous musicians on top of being stoned out of their minds. But the fact that free of the haze of psychotropics, they were probably top-shelf players gives this session a weird, appealing, loose-tightness. Everything is always falling apart, but it never does so completely — they are listening to each other, and you can tell. The session is broken up into ten digestible chunks, but I recommend putting the whole thing and, in the words of Officer Lou, proud member of the Springfield Police Dept., let the mellow yellow get you by the brain banana.

My friend Ben’s obsession with the perfect-spring-music pop album that Phoenix is about to release (I am late on the Phoenix train by at least three years, but hoo boy I’m on board now) led him to Google the term “Lisztomania,” the title of the first track off of the upcoming Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Lisztomania, we discovered, is the name of a deeply insane 1975 film directed by the exuberant nutbar English director Ken Russell, who also made the Ann-Margaret-swims-around-in-a-pile-of-baked-beans, Jack Nicholson-sings-”Go To the Mirror Boy” cult fiasco that is the film version of Tommy. That movie starred Roger Daltrey as Tommy, and is generally considered a useful document of a certain kind of sit-around-and-giggle-while-stoned movie genre.

As we read more about Lisztomania, we became morbidly fascinated by the sheer absurdity of its details. After a little sniffing around the Internet, Ben produced a torrent file, and last night, we sat down to watch. I have to say: Lisztomania is a small masterpiece of what Patton Oswalt has dubbed the “is-this-happening?” film genre (You can tell of movie of this genre by the number of times you ask that question aloud during its running time.) Roger Daltrey plays the 19th-century Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, taking the notion of Liszt as one of music’s first flamboyant superstar virtuosos to its logical extreme and playing Liszt basically as Roger Daltrey. Which is best, after all – Daltrey is excellent at stomping, and he’s REALLY good at bellowing, but his range is an actor is, shall we say, limited.

Liszt’s foe in the film is Richard Wagner, who shows up at the beginning inexplicably wearing a sailor suit. It is later revealed that he is also a vampire. Suffice to say that classical-music historian Richard Taruskin probably was not extensively consulted by Russell as he was writing the screenplay.

And more: Rick Wakeman, of Yes, composed the soundtrack, which blends original songs with synthesizer arrangements of works by Liszt and Wagner. He also plays Thor, god of Thunder. Ringo Starr makes an appearance as the Pope. There are more papier-mache phalluses in this film than….well, actually, I am struggling to find a proper comparison in this regard. Anyone who EVER sat through a History of Western Music course should see this film; there’s a great naughty-schoolboy quality to how thoroughly Russell desecrates the great composers, and while after awhile your face hurts from the strain of maintaining your incredulous smile, I have to say that Russell shows a demented genius for finding ways to continually top himself.

The trailer does a decent job of capturing the aesthetic at work here.

Hello!!
So. My name is Jayson Greene, and I’m the “new Todd,” in eMusic office parlance. If you Google my name, (…..not like I’ve done that — ever) you will find that there is a lead singer of a “screamo” (scare quotes firmly in place) band called The Panthers with my name, even with my unnecessarily vowel-heavy spelling. I am not this guy. I swear.

Since starting at eMusic (almost a month ago) I have been gorging myself on new music with a voraciousness that would stun these guys. I hardly know where to begin — I’ve listened to Opeth, Mahler, Guided By Voices, and Jerry Lee Lewis in equal measure. It’s been a pretty crazy, heady time, and these are just some thoughts that have been floating through my fevered brain while other people do things like mind incoming traffic:

Hippie minimalist Lou Harrison was a beautiful man. He wrote pieces for gamelan ensembles, string quartets, and other groups of instruments, and they all radiate a contemplative peacefulness that only seems more right when you discover that Lou Harrison, in person, was a perfect combination of Robert Wyatt and Santa Claus.

Consider:

Robert Wyatt
+

Santa
=
Lou! (the guy at the top of the post)

A collection of his string quartets and gamelan pieces that we have on eMusic is currently on repeat in my brain — I recommend them/it highly.

I don’t ask for much. All I wanted last night was for Goldie to win Maestro and for British Sea Power or Burial to win the Mercury. But the Mercury judges clearly don’t care for my views and gave the prize to Elbow for The Seldom Seen Kid. Curses. But my Mercury choices never win, so I’m used to that.

Maestro, for those of you outside the UK, was a celebrity reality show where a selection of newsreaders, comedians etc competed against one another to be the best conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra. Normally the words ‘celebrity’ and ‘reality’ make me run a mile, but this one was really rather interesting. Not having had any formal musical training I had no real idea of what conductors do and, more importantly, how the greatly the conductor can change the sound and style of a piece of music. Maestro blew away some of the mystery and actually made the whole process look bloody difficult. Goldie, who did come second, was mesmeric. Not being able to read music he committed all of his pieces to memory. He had passion, he had power. The judges gushed over him. The phone vote went to comedian Sue Perkins. For those of you who can access BBC iPlayer click here to see Goldie conduct a wonderful Carmina Burana.

Huh prizes, who needs them anyway?

In my early 20s I shared a large mouldering Victorian house in Crouch End, north London. The four of us were all broke and underemployed: there was a half-finished art installation in the hallway and there were mice in the kitchen. We spent a lot of time drinking cheap wine and playing music. Jack, studying music at Goldsmiths, was going through a Mahler period and I always associate Mahler’s symphonies with that time and especially with drunkenly sliding down the banisters to the blaring of the First Symphony’s climax, swooping and wiping out on the hallway floor to a fanfare.

I’ve been getting Mahler-ed up this week in a more sedate fashion, as Radio 3 have been broadcasting the London Symphony Orchestra’s cycle of Mahler’s Symphonies. You can find the studio recordings of this cycle here on eMusic. They’re great recordings and make me regret the lack of stairs and banisters in my current flat.

There’s a cover version I’ve been loving recently, but from none of the usual sources. BBC4 have been running a series of documentaries, cookery programmes, dramas etc all of which attempt to “get inside the Medieval mind.” Most of them have been excellent, but it’s the idents created to advertise it that I’ve been loving. They feature art work from illuminated manuscripts treated as pyschedelic patterns and a brilliant, brilliant cover of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ played on Medieval  instruments. It works so well. You can check the whole thing out here.

If there are any music theory types out there who can tell me just why this combination works so well then I’d love to know.

Whether you agree with it or not, the New York Philharmonic will be undertaking one of the most important cultural exchanges between the United States and North Korea in more than 50 years tomorrow when they take the stage at the East Pyongyang Grand Theatre. Among others, eMusic writer John Schaefer will be there on assignment for another publication.

But, for most of us, we’ll simply have to sit back and watch on our local PBS affiliates on Tuesday evening, when they show the concert on “Great Performances.” To get in the mood, I’ve been listening to some of the music that’s due to be played. We’ve got an excellent Telarc recording of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Eugene List playing “An American in Paris,” a number of recordings of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” and a stirring rendition of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

In reading about the arrival of the orchestra, I also saw that a possible encore is being planned: a Korean folk song called “Arirang.” We’ve got that one too.