Reviews by kuvien

I love the musical swings from something rather parade-like and festive to something discordant and experimental in a Zappa-eqsue way, and then on to something with a strong folk rock sound. An unknown gem to be sure right here! Gruff vocals leading into a beautiful Greek rendition of "All Along the Watchtower". Some incredible lyrical and non-lyrical vocal work here, with a delightful underpinning of more traditional-sounding percussion. Savvopoulos wields ethereal melody as proficiently as he uses off-kilter discordance.

The World of Darkness concept of Nature and Demeanor, in music form. The way you behave when you meet others, when you interact socially, when you engage with the world outside yourself. And the way you are, unchanging and unchangeable, deep down in the psyche. The festivities are over. The lights have all been turned off, and night has fallen, so the only landscape you can see is the internal one, in that gloaming where myth meets Man.

An album chock full of weird curve-ball tracks that cannot be predicted because they don't proceed from anything that came before them. It's like he's dreamwalking through the music and among the people, and there are moments where he wakes up, just for a moment, speaks, and then slips back into his dream, wherein he weaves together in a bizarre tapestry everything he's ever heard. This is a monumental work of artistic genius and vision, and I am stunned.

Though going hoarse from screaming and no one listening has been the pastime of prophets for millennia, I don’t hear any desperate cries here. Instead I hear the Grecian equivalent of Appalachian hillfolk music, or rather Appalachian folk would be the equivalent of this, since this musical tradition came first, rooted in the forested crags of central Greece. The world-weary, grizzled, old farmer on the album cover is the personification of the music found within.

The melancholy, gypsy-like strings, or the crickets who sing only when Papakonstantinou doesn't, or the dirty, lazy horns, or the straight-up soft rock sounds, or the stripped-down acoustic guitar with a slight post-rock metallic whine in the background...this album mixes psych rock with Greek folk very well without being tryhard about it. It's got an easy, admirable confidence about it.

This is the soundtrack to a 1983 film called Ρεμπέτικο, which translates to "rembetiko", literally the genre this album is. I've not seen the film and probably never will, but it'd be like naming a movie "The Blues" and then making a soundtrack to the film and calling it "The Blues", too, and then RYM would have it categorized as Blues genre. All righty then. So now we know what it is... very manly, very traditional, full of pathos. Music from another time and another place (I say ethnocentrically.) That Mediterranean swift-strumming of the bouzouki is just magical, evoking memory of a thing you cannot remember, stimulating longing for an experience you've never had. That deliberate plodding of the accordion, its rhythms punctuated and accented by the finger cymbals, is a light stomp inviting you to dance along.

The ballad is music based on the poems of Ιάκωβος Καμπανέλλης (Iakovos Kambanellis), a concentration camp survivor who wrote about the Holocaust, the music itself being composed/conducted by Mikis Theodorakis, the vocals passionately performed by Maria Farantouri. The other six songs, renamed the Farantouri Cycle later in honor of the singer, are leftist, poetic defiance of military tyranny.

An archive-digging, sheet-music-reading new mother decided to make an album of lullabies for her baby daughter, and since she was able to find not only forgotten lullabies but songs without complete notation, Yannatou found herself in the delightful position of being able to bring some originality and personal expression to the arrangement of these pieces. The musicians are simply exquisite on this album, keeping everything beautiful and subdued despite the use of a wide variety of instruments, including panpipes, kanun, bağlama, and cümbüş.

It's the 1960s. People are sitting down and paying closer attention to musicians and what they're singing about, so intimate, poetic, melancholic, finger-picking, acoustic music like this thrived, not only in the United States with its famous Greenwich Village scene but all over the world. On this album, Arleta eschews the orchestral pop of her country of origin for something you need to shut up and listen to: one woman and her guitar, right at the center of the blossoming Neo Kyma movement.

This is a nice little out-of-the-way prog rock album, one of those solitary releases in my collection. It’s not some mind-blowing piece, but it’s certainly interesting enough to fit into my [List673602] niche. There’s quite a mix of influences at work here: prog, kraut, and space rock (as if you couldn’t tell from the cover art).

I love music that has a mythological bent, especially when such mystical content is supported by traditional folk music. Add in a touch of folk metal, and you have a recipe for perfection. The counterpoint of the high female vocals to the moaning fiddles and tribal drumming complete the foreboding atmosphere of this album. Anyway, what is it with Polish women and their maniacal laughing? I love it.

As far as I can tell, Zorn doesn't actually play on this recording. Yes, of course, he is the composer, but the music itself is performed by three excellent guitarists, Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, and Gyan Riley (they all performed Zorn's 2019 Nove cantici per Francesco d'Assisi). I've also heard Lage and Riley on Zorn's 2018 The Book Beri'ah epic. This is amazing work, of course, but it's not super engaging. I wonder if Zorn intentionally wrote the music for three and only three musicians, perhaps to reflect the triune nature of the Divinity?

Out of the 11 "parts" of this project, I have kept eight. Those three missing parts are just not my thing, but that's okay. It's not like I'm cutting tracks. I'm removing whole sections--pretty much albums--done by different artists. Anyway, this isn't an album. It's a compendium of music bound together like a massive tome. Obviously not something one is going to listen to in a single sitting. All this stuff is composed by John Zorn but performed by the following:

So, chapter one is Keter, a nueva canción latinoamericana and klezmer work by Sofía Rei & JC Maillard. This is a strange and intoxicating mix of disparate influences blended expertly together. Sometimes a dance through a dream, sometimes an off-balanced tip-toeing, especially with the layered vocal sampling.

Chapter three is Binah, experimental big band by Spike Orchestra. It has all the meandering, dirty brass joy you'd expect from that genre tag.

Chapter four is Chesed, free improvisation by Julian Lage & Gyan Riley. Sophisticated, complicated acoustic guitar work that sometimes doesn't sound improvisational at all, but then the rulebook gets thrown out the window and everything breaks down so wonderfully.

Chapter six is Tiferet, a klezmer album by a Mexican band known as Klezmerson. The gypsy punk feeling of this mixed with some pronounced Latin rhythms doesn't fail to get me moving.

Chapter seven is Netzach, chamber jazz performed by Gnostic Trio. The vibraphone and harp are a wonderful combination, giving the music a dreamlike quality. There are some really beautiful shimmering guitar moments here. This is my favorite of the bunch.

Chapter eight is Hod, jazz-rock performed by Zion80. Zorn himself pops onto this album to play saxophone. This one feels like it's the most fun to have performed. A real party atmosphere. Amid all those heavy metal guitars the saxophone really sounds like it's crying for help, like it's been surrounded and cannot escape.

Chapter nine, Yesod, is a beautiful jazz-fusion garden of delights performed by Banquet of the Spirits. Their handling of the material is wild and tribal at times as well as embracing the serenity of open, minimal soundscapes. Wonderful.

Chapter ten is Malkhut, an experimental rock exploration by Secret Chiefs 3 with all the technical playfulness of an avant-prog romp. Sometimes this one has a kind of ineffable open-road feel to the guitars.

Zorn is back once again conducting Frisell, Lage, and Riley (three excellent guitarists) through his compositions that are, I guess?, supposed to be about a 16th-century Spanish mystic. This ends Zorn's trilogy dedicated to Christian mysticism, the other entries I think being Nove cantici per Francesco d'Assisi and Virtue, if I had to guess.

Guess I'm a John Zorn dilettante.

For the most part this is beautiful and easy-to-follow lyric-less guitar folk, but there are unexpected and more complicated moments of avant work, too.

This is downright beautiful, so full of imagination and confidence, smooth and easy one moment, berserk the next. At least on the alto sax. There's such an attractive, understated, passionate groove being assembled here.

New interpretations and improvisations from the Masada songbook, this collection of tracks has that Zorn sax grit we're used to but dialed back a bit, the overall textures of the compositions soothing, groovy, and hypnotic.

The theme song for a popular show is playing, and some idiot child is standing in front of the TV set dancing and foaming at the mouth. You're not sure if you're enjoying the theme song or the child's antics more. Change the channel! An Italian drama? Car chases and shootouts? No matter. That fucking kid is back spazzing out in front of the TV. Sod it. I'm out for a walk! Oh look. A swinging jazz club. Let's pop in here and see what's happening....wtf. That kid is up on the bandstand picking up all the horns and slobbering into them! Maybe we should just give him free rein for a minute, let him get it out of his system. Yeah, that didn't work. I know: how about a honky tonk. No idiot children allowed in there, right? Wrong. And he brought along his absconded saxophone. Bollocks to all this...it's back home for some afternoon spaghetti westerns and perhaps a touch of James Bond.

Conducted improvisation: I'm going to go take a dump, so y'all just play whatever you want, and when I get back we'll get into more of this "jazz".