Ever had your mind blown by some thrilling, strange new sound and wondered, “Where on earth can I find more music like that!?” Look no further. The following Modern Classical Masters, all recorded for the flagship classical label Deutsche Grammophon, are some of the most influential musicians you may have never heard of; together, they have served as muse to the likes of Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Michael Stipe and Lou Reed and made explosively creative music that appeals to every palette.

Felt goosebumps on your arm from an eerie avant-garde film score? Meet Gyorgy Ligeti. Hugged a speaker at a rave? Get lost in the mazelike patterns of Steve Reich‘s Drumming or Philip Glass‘s hypnotic repetitions. Had your heart broken by South American gypsy songs? Get mesmerized by Osvaldo Golijov.

If “classical music” still means “powdered wigs and dinner parties” to you, than we’re jealous — you’re in for a wild ride, one that features 20 handpicked DG records, most of which are just $4.99 for the next two weeks!

Go to the Sale HERE.

Man, I don’t know where to begin. One of the most best labels ever. Nonesuch is the home to most of my favorite classical recordings of all time, and most of them came in with today’s new haul. The Kronos Quartet, John Adams, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Arvo Part, Louis Andriessen… we got quite a treasure trove today, folks. Below, just a few of what I consider to be the essentials.

Steve Reich:
The Bach Figure of minimalism, the guy who got it so resoundingly right that he’s become a sort of demigod to people who followed him. His music will never sound dated.

Steve Reich, Phases – A wonderful place to start. If you are ready to deep-dive into Steve Reich’s music, this is an ideal starting point; no matter what you hear here, you’re hearing a masterpiece. If you only want to use a couple credits, get Music for 18 Musicians and Electric Counterpoint. You’ll be back.

Steve Reich, Double Sextet/2×5 – The one that won the Pulitzer Price. It’s a great piece, but not the place to start. I like the other piece here, 2×5, more — it sounds like Explosions in the Sky stuck in some endless purgatorial loop.

The Kronos Quartet:
One of the most celebrated names in modern music, trailblazers with some of the last half-century’s most influential and beloved masterworks under their belt. A few faves:

Lyric Suite – Kronos renders this work, a flickering-candlelight portrait of fevered longing by Alban Berg, with ardency and a light touch in the work’s quieter sections. A gorgeous portrait of late-Romantic delirium.

Terry Riley: Requiem for Adam – A devastating piece that the Kronos commissioned to commemorate the death of Adam Harrington, the 16-year-old son of Kronos co-founder David Harrington. Classical music so often fills the void when words fail, and Riley produces a work of gently redemptive beauty. A high point in the Kronos discography.

Black Angels – A haunting cycle of works about the brutality and inescapability of war. Not feel-good stuff, but essential.

John Adams
The quiet, tweedy New Englander who has ascended to a sort of unofficial Composer Laureate status in America. I’ve referred to him as the Elvis Costello of Minimalism before, but it seems only I have the slightest inkling what that might mean.

A Flowering Tree – Adams takes on Mozart’s joyful, bawdy, slightly mysterious A Magic Flute. Adams’ version is more sorrowful, chilly, and foreboding, but it contains some of his most gloriously melodic and colorful writing.

Nixon In China – Not my favorite of his operas, but that’s a personal quirk of mine; it is the favorite of most, and this is a fantastic, must-have recording.

Son Of Chamber Symphony/String Quartet – One of Adams more bracing, madcap works.

Philip Glass – He’s Philip Glass. He doesn’t really need me to introduce him to you.

A Nonesuch Retrospective – Like Steve Reich’s Phases box set, this is the most comprehensive look at Glass’s accomplishments that I know of. The guy is insanely prolific, and this is a massive slab of Glass. If you’re looking for shards, try Koyaanisqatsi or Einstein on the Beach.

More Classics:
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Sings Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs – This one has a special place in my heart. The legendary, late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson had one of the most heart-stopping, throat-catchingly human voices in the world; this work was written by her husband, Peter Lieberson, and it is one of the most searingly personal documents of love and loss you’ve ever heard.

Gidon Kremer, Tracing Astor – Kremer performs the tangos of Astor Piazzola with startling bravura — the scratches, scrapes, and dissonances in the corners of the piece make this the earthiest recording of these works you’ve heard, with all blood and sweat still shining on the surface.

Gidon Kremer, Mozart: The Complete Violin Concertos – Kremer never recorded a masterwork he didn’t audibly blow the dust and cobwebs off of — he’s one of the most gratifyingly visceral soloists out there. Hearing him play, you remember that the violin strings used to be made out of cat guts; they sound like it here. In the wrong hands, Mozart’s music becomes insidiously dull parlor music. In the right hands, like Kremer’s, it becomes thrilling, haunting, grip-your-seat music again, flush with all the emotions of the world.

Jonny GreenTwood, Norwegian Wood OST – The guitarist for Radiohead also composers tearingly vicious, vividly beautiful orchestral music, coursing with the spirit of Ligeti and Arvo Part, two of modern classical’s current stylistic lodestars. The pieces he wrote for the Norwegian Wood OST are narcotically beautiful and black as pitch.

This is a tip-of-the-iceberg situation, of course; I’m going to stop here. But there are dozens more. What are your favorites?

A wonderful composer. His most famous piece is undoubtedly his Symphony No. 3, the highest-selling piece of contemporary classical ever. It is simple and moving, and if you know it and love it, you should hear more of his work. He was 76. He will be missed.

Download:
Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3
Symphony No. 2
Miserere

I’ve been going on and on about this record for awhile now; it’s crazy and overblown and beautiful. It’s art-rock; it’s classical; it’s proggy. I love it. As I initially put it to my friends, “it sounds like Todd Rundgren, Ariel Pink, and Owen Pallett trying to make American Idiot.” I mostly got blank stares. I loved it so much, in fact, that I interviewed William and his cohorts about it last week at Le Poisson Rouge. Here is what Brittelle and co. had to say about it. Read on!

About the Album: William Brittelle’s Television Landscape

By Jayson Greene

What happens when a bunch of classical nerds get together and try to build an AOR-Rock Masterpiece? It sounds like the setup to a rather obscure joke, and the scenario might sound deeply unpromising. But this is exactly what composer William Brittelle set out to do. His new record, Television Landscape, out on New Amsterdam Records, is the result of an overwhelmingly cerebral attempt to make visceral, anthemic rock music as Brittelle knows and loves it from his youth. Brittelle, a dropout from the Graduate Center program in New York for Composition, couldn’t bring himself to do this in the more intuitive way other bands might. His Epic Rock Album, perhaps unlike most others, began with a scaled, computer model with every single guitar lick, drum fill, and interlude completely notated.

This might seem like trying to build a particle accelerator in order to grill a hamburger, but the shocking thing about Television Landscape is that it worked. Television Landscape is all the things one expects from an epic art-rock album: expansive, anthemic, all-encompassing, shot through with raw emotion. The warm, analog production feels bathed in cathode rays, and songs veer fluidly and seemingly unselfconsciously from AM-radio power-ballads to sustained passages of string writing that recall French composers like Faure and Debussy. And back again. “The idea was basically that I should just do everything that I think is awesome, all at the same time, all on one record, instead of compartmentalizing things,” Brittelle laughs. Recently, he sat down with eMusic’s Jayson Greene along with Lawson White, the record’s engineer; Marc Danzigers, the guitarist on the record and a member of the NOW Ensemble; and several other players on the record to discuss learning to embrace pop culture, trying not be weirder than Kid A, and finding your secret music.

On learning to stop worrying and just make a damn rock record already:


William Brittelle: I always tried to fit in at music school. I moved up here for graduate school, and I ended up dropping out, just because I could never fully engage with that way of thinking. I always felt like I railed against it. I grew up with classical music playing in the house, and then did classical piano competition and did that thing, and then went to Vanderbilt for undergrad and The Graduate Center in New York. While I was in grad school I made this rule for myself that I was only “allowed” to listen to jazz and classical music. So there was almost this religious approach to so-called “high” music, and then an ensuing allure to “low” music. But then I had this teacher David Del Tredici, and his whole thing was about, “Do what you wanna do.” He was about helping people discover their secret music. And, well, this is mine. Right before making Television Landscape, I was listening to Dark Side of the Moon and Purple Rain and all these anthemic concept albums that defined my youth — things like Thriller — and I just finally said, “What is the point of not trying to do this?”

On notating every single note and drum fill of a ’70s art-rock record without making it sound stilted:


WB: You get the right people to play it. That’s really all there is to it. Also, you have to use the right font. [Laughs]. There’s a good ’70s font that you have to use.

Marc Dancigers: I have to jump in here and say that I want to give Bill a lot of credit for writing really idiomatic rock music. I have a lot of experience with this as an electric guitarist who reads a lot of music, and what I’ve learned, from having premiered fifty or sixty pieces with NOW Ensemble, is that it’s really hard to notate idiomatic guitar music. It sounds obvious, but it’s true. You just have to get that guitar impulse somehow in there, in the notation. Bill’s music is conceived in a way that makes sense, and that’s actually pretty tricky to pull off. The only moment he didn’t completely write out is the “Pegasus” solo, which is an entirely improvised moment on the record .But Bill really took the role of producer in the studio and had me do take after take after take after take, not because there were mistakes in them, but because he had something really specific in mind in terms of feel and emotional content and arc.

On intentionally setting out to make a Defining Statement:


WB: I made a to-scale computer model using synthesizers and samplers and all that, for the whole record, and that took almost three years, to do that. I chose amps and actually notated all the drum fills, which turned out to be a ridiculous waste of time, but oh well. The computer model, though, was really the key, instead of pencil and paper, which I’ve always done until now.

It’s sort of ridiculous, I guess, when you think about it. I was sitting there in Los Angeles by myself, in this apartment, writing of as what I’m thinking of as the “new Dark Side of the Moon.” It’s kind of crazy to do that, but at the same time, I felt like I just needed to put myself in that mindset and try to do something that was some sort of defining statement for myself at least, and to sound the way the records I loved sounded.

On the Ur-Concept Album that spurred Television Landscape:


I think there would be four or five, really, and they would be Purple Rain, Dark Side of the Moon, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, for some of the more sonic textures, and Pet Sounds. There’s just a lot of raw emotion and raw energy in Purple Rain that I really love, and a lot of honesty. There’s an emotional current through it. It’s not clearly programmatic, but at the same time, there are strains that run throughout it. Just the sense of power and drama in the title track: it’s the same kind of thing I was trying to go for with “Sheena Easton,” when the choir comes in. It’s not that it’s complex, it’s just powerful. It’s a simple, powerful emotional statement. Dark Side of the Moon has a sound world that is consistent throughout the record and you feel like you’re inside it.

I feel like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is sort of a “sonic landscape” album. You get this backdrop of sonic fuzz in a lot of the record, and I wanted that at moments. Part of it was nostalgic; Lawson [White, the record's engineer] and I didn’t want it to sound like an “indie” record. We wanted it to sound like a big, dramatic rock record, a broad, expansive record.

On the record’s intentionally analog sound:


WB: It was great having worked with Lawson before, and knowing that he would know what I was looking for. We’re both Steely Dan fans, and Lawson would, like, A-B the record back and forth with Steely Dan. We wanted to make sure that this record, even though it’s fully notated and has classical instrumentation, had that theme to it and had that pop, AM-radio warmth to it, but also had the clarity of classical music, so you could really hear everything that was happening all the time.

On being true to yourself:


One of the things that I did with this record was I made a rule for myself that “it couldn’t get weirder than Kid A. That’s the weirdest, great, insanely popular record that I know, so I’m not going to get weirder than that.” And it was hard! I haven’t written songs in a long time, and I never considered myself really good at writing songs, so I’m like, that’s my bookend.

Lawson White: I feel like, when I’m approaching this, it’s like I know where I’m going, because we are — if I can include myself in that — trying to do something that is not like jumping between the lines but sort of getting there and staying there. It makes sense not because we’re trying to do something different, but because it’s a logical extension of who we are and the music that we like, and listen to, and know how to make. I guess there is a mission statement of sorts, a flag of sorts to be waved…

WB: I think it’s a flag of personal honesty, or at least that’s how I try to think about it. It’s about trying to be honest about who you are and what you like, and not allowing fears or any of that stuff to enter in. Just: if you were on a desert island, and you had this group of amazing musicians, and some money and a great recording studio, what would you make that you would want to listen to for the next twenty years?

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.