Boulevard De L'Indépendance

Chances are I would have bought Boulevard De L'Indépendance via an Amazon order within a few months of its release in 2006. I've scarcely dipped much more than a tentative toe or two into the deep pool of African music, but having acquired and enjoyed In the Heart of the Moon (Toumani Diabaté's collaboration with Ali Farka Touré) the year before, I was curious to hear this album too. I would likely have learned of its release via The Word magazine, which I routinely read in the mid-'00s.

This was during my time in Sweden. I did still shop for CDs from the 'Rocks' record shop down the road, a soulless little place (akin to an 'Our Price' shop in the UK), but for even slightly more obscure stuff I went on-line to buy. The bigger and better 'Skivlagret' stores would have already closed by then, what with the simultaneous rise of e-commerce and file-sharing.

The music: an all-star band fused into a well-oiled machine after a lengthy club residency in downtown Bamako, performing a selection of their varied repertoire. Unsurprisingly, it sounds wonderful. My favorite track is 'Africa Challenge' (aka 'Salsa'). On first hearing it I was surprised at the Spanish lyrics & Latin rhythms therein, having been unaware of the influence of Cuban music on artists in Mali: it's a heady and a joyous blend!

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

This is a Recording

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