This is a Recording

The Colorblind James Experience , that is, the debut album by the band of the same name, was the first record I bought via ebay. I'd resisted the allure of on-line auctions until about 2007, but afterwards became a frequent bidder and buyer. I ordered the record as I really wanted to hear my favourite song from it again, namely 'A Different Bob', and, at that time, I couldn't find it anywhere on-line. I bought it on vinyl as that was all I could find for sale. This was plainly a low-budget production, as the LP cover and the quality of the recording both testify. According to Wikipedia "the band scraped together enough money to press 1000 copies of its debut self-titled LP in 1987 [and] sent one copy abroad, specifically to BBC Radio's John Peel." It was via Peel (or his colleague Andy Kershaw) that I first heard the song 'Considering a Move to Memphis', which delighted me, as it still does now. I bought a copy of the album on cassette the follow...

Naxos' CD packaging nearly always looks more utilitarian than appealing, though there is certainly something to be said for spelling out all the pertinent details in prominent high-contrast text on the cover. This one is a relatively recent aquisition, bought last year from on-line classical specialists Europadisc. On it are Paul Hindemith's second and third string quartets - written in 1918 and '20 respectively - performed by the Amar Quartet, a Zürich-based group whose name comes from the Quartet of which Hindemith himself was a member from 1921. Hindemith was by all accounts an extraordinarlly versatile multi-instrumentalist, and accomplished enough as a violinist and violist that he could have elected to follow a career as a concert soloist had he so desired. As a composer he was likewise versatile in the instrumentation he wrote for. And he wrote a great deal: it's too bad that most of what I've heard of it leaves me cold. I fell for his 'Viola Sonata no. 4...

I would have heard 'Louie Louie' as a child: certainly I was familar with The Kinks' version of it from an early age. At which point it became clear to me that The Kingsmen's version was the definitive one, I don't recall. I wouldn't have spared the song much thought until reading Lester Bangs' remarks about it in one of the pieces included in the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , ca. 1987. A year or two after that, while still at university, I bought a compilation album on cassette called Frat Rock which began with the irresistible one-two combination of 'Woolly Bully' and 'Louie Louie'. I ended up giving that tape away to a friend of my mother's who was enamoured of it and had asked if I might copy for her. Last year I found it on 7" vinyl in a charity shop: it cost me a pound. The Old Gold reissue label had first re-released it in 1980, with this a later-'80s example, judging by the barcode on the label. The back...

I first encountered Oliver Nelson's name when I began more systematically exploring '50s & '60s jazz about 10-12 years ago. His album The Blues and the Abstract Truth was frequently mentioned as among the best of that era, and it is undoubtedly an excellent record, as are the other albums he recorded with Eric Dolphy I discovered soon afterwards: Screamin' The Blues and Straight Ahead . I had, however, unknowingly heard his handiwork long before that, in his capacity as composer of the theme to the '70s TV sensation The Six Million Dollar Man . More recently I looked up some of his later albums on YouTube and very much enjoyed what I heard, though it was disheartening that most of them seemed difficult or expensive to obtain. Being particularly keen to get hold of his 1966 album Sound Pieces , I paid up something approaching £20 (a high price for a CD by my miserly standards) for a copy from an ebay seller. It's a recording that showcases several of Nelson...

This CD's title refers not to the year 1700 itself, but to the settecento - the eighteenth century - in general. It brings together instrumental works by eight different composers from the various Italian nations and from different parts of that century. The composers range from the famous (Vivaldi) through the less well-known (Geminiani, Locatelli, Galuppi) to the obscure (Mascitti, Pugnani). With that period not having been a prosperous one in Italy, many of them had travelled or emigrated elsewhere in Europe, introducing a variety of un-Italian influences to their music. Rinaldo Alessandrini's Concerto Italiano here comprises seven musicians, including Alessandrini himself at the harpsichord. The disc is a sequel to a similarly-conceived album 1600 by the same group, which, alas, I haven't heard. Some of the pieces are sonatas which originally would have been intended for small groups; while others (such as Vivaldi's 'Concerto In D major: op.12 no.3') are...

If the prices on Discogs are anything to go by, 'New Rose' by The Damned is by far the most valuable record I own, with their median selling price currently at £250. Presumably this must be due to its being a first pressing of the first British punk rock release. It was one of a batch of six singles I bought at the local charity shop last summer for £2, the others being 'Lucky Number' by Lene Lovich, 'Denis' by Blondie, Talking Heads' 'Love Goes To Building On Fire', Stiff Little Fingers' 'Alternative Ulster' and 'United' by Throbbing Gristle. That was a lucky day's shopping, but it could have been luckier still had I decided to also buy the copy of the 'Capital Radio' EP by The Clash they had, for which the Discogs median value is £165. "Who wants to listen to a record with band interview clips on it?" I thought. Having belatedly realised what I'd missed out on, I returned to the shop a couple of hours l...

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

When I was eight years old, The Very Best of Fats Domino , aka Play It Again, Fats , was my favourite album. Of all my parents' records it was the one I liked best. Nostalgia prompted me to buy CD compilations of Domino's hits in the '90s and '00s, but none of them sounded quite right, and what I came to realize was that I wanted to hear those specific songs, in that order, and on vinyl. Luckily it must have been a popular compilation, as I've found a few copies in charity shops over the past decade, buying one for myself, and another, with a different cover (the latter the same as my Dad's old copy) for my sister, who remembered the album no less fondly than I did. This is glorious music that I dearly love. My Dad maintains that Fats invented rock'n'roll, and he certainly had a claim worth staking, with the supercharged boogie of the opening track 'The Fat Man', dating back to December '49 (if it's not rock'n'roll then it's...

Despite never having been a fan of classic early '70s prog-rock, there's plenty of more recent music that bears its influence I do enjoy. The Hare and Hoofe is a case in point. It's the debut album (and so far the only one) by the band of the same name, and is decidedly proggy in spirit throughout, only with less of an emphasis on po-faced virtuosity and with more in the way of plain old fun than some of the original exponents of the genre. I first heard them via Marc Riley's show on BBC 6 Music. The Hare and The Hoofe are nicknames for two of the band-members, with the remaining three going under the soubriquets of The Maide of Kente, The Master and The Wanderer. For their first release, they took the bold step of issuing a double LP in a limited edition run of 500 copies. I bought mine via Bandcamp. Regrettably, both records arrived warped, but, after each disc had spent a couple of months pressed under the weight of a 12kg Olympia SG1 typewriter atop a Max Ernst art...

My Dad was an Eurythmics fan. I don't know how it is he took a shine to their music, but not to that of any of the other synth-pop duos of the day, but there it is. He had copies of the Sweet Dreams and Revenge LPs. I'd been a fan too, since falling for their song 'The Walk', which I'd long assumed had been the lead single from Sweet Dreams , but no, wikipedia tells me it came out after 'This is the House'. It's hard to believe in retrospect that the immediately seductive 'Love is a Stranger' was only the third single from the album (only to be re-issued anew in the wake of the great success of 'Sweet Dreams' (the song)). It sounds fantastic given the room to breathe on a 12" single. I've always loved the video for the song, too. Of the two tracks on the B side, the first 'Let's Just Close Our Eyes' is a synth-heavy reworking of 'The Walk' which I like much less than the original. The second track, 'Mon...

With recordings of Chopin's music, very often (too often for my liking) one gets series of pieces of the same type lumped together: all of the Waltzes, for example; or all four Ballades one after another. While this can work fairly well - with the Nocturnes, for instance, where there is a certain unity of purpose but also a sufficient variety of execution; in other cases it can easily become monotonous - such as hearing dozens and dozens of the Mazurkas without any kind of intermission: who really wants that? To my mind, well-thought-out recital programmes comprising a variety of different kinds of piece are the ideal way to experience the composer's work. This Piano Music Vol. 2 LP adopts both approaches. On side 1 are the four Impromptus arranged in order of publication, and the Berceuse; whereas on side 2 there are the Barcarolle, one of the Nocturnes and the 3rd Scherzo. Fortunately, the improvisatory nature of the Impromptus means that they don't suffer much from be...

Now and again, with something of a heavy heart, I'll watch and listen to some YouTube clips featuring the late Billy Mackenzie: with Associates performing ' Party Fears Two ' on Top of the Pops ; with Yello on ' The Rhythm Divine ', the song he wrote for Shirley Bassey; ' Wild and Lonely ' performed solo; his spine-tingling version of ' Wild is the Wind '... and so on. 'Party Fears Two' was the first song if his that caught my ear. I hated it at first and it was only after I'd heard it on the radio a dozen or more times that I acquired a taste for it. Having done so, it didn't take anything like as long for me to grow to love the follow-up, 'Club Country'. Simple nostalgia led me to buy the latter on 7" when I found a copy in a charity shop a few years ago. On the B-side is an instrumental track 'A.G. It's You Again', a remixed version of  'Arrogance Gave Him Up' - a reminder that, while Billy's ...

Browsing the music at amazon.co.jp in 2007, I happened upon a thumbnail of a CD cover depicting some brightly-coloured giraffes. Impulsively, I ordered it, despite knowing nothing about Kazumasa Hashimoto, the composer and multi-instrumentalist behind it. Happily, it's a wonderful record, though not an easy one to describe. The genre labels attached to it at Discogs are "Modern Classical, IDM, Ambient" which barely seems helpful at all. Hashimoto was linked at one point to the putative genre of "childish music", which perhaps gives a slightly better sense of its flavour. "Warmtronica" is another label that has been affixed to his work. The instrumentation includes violin, cello, piano, clarinet & glockenspiel, but it doesn't strike me as having all that much overlap with classical. Though there are also significant servings of acoustic guitar and mellotron, and a smattering of bass & drums - it definitely isn't rock'n'roll. The...

Luigi Boccherini wrote in excess of a hundred string quintets, nearly a hundred string quartets, and sixty-odd string trios. Not to mention all his piano trios, piano quintets, flute quintets, guitar quintets and assorted sonatas; nor the dozen cello concertos & thirty symphonies. He wasn't shy about reusing and recycling sections of earlier works in later ones, but even so, he turned out a prodigious quantity of music, which makes its consistently high quality all the more impressive. The present disc includes four of his last string trios, written in Madrid in 1796. The default string trio line-up is violin, viola and cello, but these pieces were composed for two violins and cello, played here by the group La Real Cámera comprising Emilio Moreno and Enrico Gatti (violins) plus Wouter Möller (cello). Moreno is also responsible for the booklet notes in which he characterises trios written for this instrumentation as "a difficult, arid and obsolete form ... a remnant of the...

Glassworks was among the first few dozen CDs I bought while still living in Rome in '97. I'd previously heard a few snippets of Glass's music on TV and on the radio - such as 'Floe' (from this album) and 'Freezing' (one of the Songs from Liquid Days ) - but here was my first proper exposure to it. I was much enamoured of the disc, which prompted me to buy another couple of his albums: the Glassmasters compilation and Music in Twelve Parts , but I found those both contained more music I disliked than I enjoyed. My feelings about Glass have been mixed ever since: I've bought a good deal of his output over the years, ultimately discarding two or three albums for every one retained. Then again, those keepers are cherished favourites. I gave away my Glassworks CD too, though not because I'd taken any kind of dislike for it, rather because a friend was a fan and I'd impulsively made a gift of it to her. I thought the backup I'd made on minidisc ...

Another week, another album valled Vertigo . This one combines selections of 18th-century pieces for harpsichord composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Pancrace Royer, and performed by Jean Rondeau. It's one of several CDs of harpsichord works I bought in 2019 having resolved to expand my hitherto very limited knowledge of 'Baroque' music a little.   It's a wonderful album, with spirited playing and vivid recorded sound. Rondeau was apprently only twenty-two at the time of the recording , with his beard yet to attain its subsequent grandeur . I enjoy it all, with the dramatic title track and 'La Marche des Scythes' (both by Royer) among the highlights. Rondeau contributes a lyrical essay to the CD booklet, outlining his rationale for selecting and ordering the various pieces as he did. There's also a short piece by Philippe Charles about the renowned antique instrument used, and about the Château d'Assas, the venue for the recording. As is commonplace on...

I've always frowned on the practice of including two mixes of the same song on a 7" single; or worse, multiple versions on a 12" one. It's hardly ever happened that I want to listen to multiple arrangements of the same tune in succession. 'Manchild', Neneh Cherry's second 45 release, has 'Manchild (The Original Mix)' as its B-side. Not that it really matters, as I bought the record second-hand and very cheaply, and because I've always liked the song. Apparently one of Cherry's first attempts at songwriting, it's a poignant ballad with a memorable melody. Some voices have a certain something in their timbre which just sit right somehow in one's ear, and for me, hers is such a one. The lyrics, a sketched portrait of the titular character, fall in a way that leads me to try to puzzle out a narrative from them when I listen to the track. Jean-Baptiste Mondino's video for the song is also a delight. My copy has a worn & torn pic...

Allo Darlin' were a London-based indie-pop band active in the first half of the last decade. I only came to hear of them towards the end of their career, with this the only one of their songs to properly catch my ear. It was released in 2014 as part of a "Jukebox 45s Single Club" series on the Fortuna POP! label, at a time when it was presumably still possible to release records with a degree of spontaneity & not have to wait many months to get them pressed. It's on clear vinyl. The song has nothing to do with the famous Art Garfunkel hit, or with Conor Oberst's band. It's a charmingly upbeat number with the vocals a duet between songwriter Elizabeth Morris and guitarist Paul Rains. Her voice is the stronger, but they combine well. The lyrics are hopeful & optimistic - perhaps naively so - though none the worse for that. The music, while eminently conventional, serves the song well: a nicely-judged arrangement of guitar, bass & drums, with Morris...

This is an album of classical lullabies, berceuses , wiegenlieder performed by the French pianist Bertrand Chamayou. My copy is on vinyl, and was a Christmas gift - specifically for the strange Christmas of 2020. Its sixteen tracks include such old chestnuts as Brahms's 'Wiegenlied' (as transcribed for solo piano by Max Reger) and Chopin's op. 57 'Berceuse'. Besides these familiar melodies there are some delightful pieces plucked from the dustier corners of the repertoire composed by the likes of Janáček, Lyapunov, Villa-Lobos, Busoni, Martinů, Balakirev and Alkan; but only a single very short work by a female composer: 'La Toute Petite s'endort' ("The Little Girl Falls Asleep") by Mel Bonis. There's also a single piece of mid-20th-Century atonality in the shape of Helmut Lachenmann's 'Wiegenmusik', which, while it doesn't blend quite seamlessly with the pieces of honeyed romanticism either side of it; neither does it f...

Between the chaotic noise of Boredoms' earlier material, and the percussive 'tribal' grooves that followed, lies the band's remarkable 1998 album Super Ae . I didn't find my way to it until about 2006. I would have ordered the CD from Amazon: it's a repress of the US release on Birdman Records. It seems that none of the Boredoms albums have ever been issued on vinyl. The CD booklet is decorated with colourful childlike drawings which include some handwritten snippets of text - in English, more or less - such as 'They said "SUPER æ "'; 'We RAH THE ☼'; 'WE CAN SUN' and 'HUMAN is BIRD / TO THE SUN / WiTH / PYRAMID / ACTION'. The CD itself is bright pink, with a stylized rising (or setting) sun motif in yellow. Of the music, the 25-minute stretch including the third and fourth tracks 'Super Going' and 'Super Coming' is my favourite part of the proceedings. The gear-change at the 8-minute mark of the former nu...

A 2013 post at MetaFilter alerted me to the existence of the Dallas-based trio True Widow: "a collaboration between a woodworker, a screenprinter, and a makeup artist". The post characterized their style as "a bone-crunching slab of murky distortion" and "heavy, hypnotic, jam-based music that takes as much from slowcore and shoegaze as it does from stoner rock." I liked what I heard and ordered their then-latest album Circumambulation on CD. This was only a few months after my wife had died. I was a new widower, struggling through the fog of grief, and this slow, sombre and heavy music was a consolation. These were dark songs that seemed fitting for a painful time. There's something of a 'goth' sensibility at play, though not in a way that much resembles the older goth bands. Guitarist D.H. Phillips does most of the singing, with bassist Nicole Estill providing lead vocals on a couple of the tracks, including the hypnotic highlight 'Four ...

When the shops re-opened for a time in the summer of 2020, I picked up - somewhere in Chepstow - a 4 CD box set of music from the soundtracks of Alfred Hitchcock's films. I was spooked by Oskar Sala's surprisingly abrasive & avant-garde electronic score to The Birds ; I very much enjoyed Miklós Rósza's music for Spellbound ; but most of all I loved Bernard Herrmann's cues for North by Northwest (which, in places, put me oddly in mind of some of Philip Glass's symphonic works) and, of course, Vertigo . When the next lockdown came along, I treated myself to a vinyl copy of the Vertigo soundtrack (ordered via ebay) in the shape of the remastered pressing of it put out by Varèse Sarabande in 2019. Both the music and the packaging are wonderful, but the record itself wasn't in the very best of condition for a new LP, with some audible clicks and pops coming from it even when it was freshly unwrapped. I'm not altogether sure I've ever even watched the mo...

I'd only heard a few of Françoise Hardy's songs before stumbling upon this 1970 double-LP 'Best Of'' in my local charity shop. This was back when albums there were appealingly priced at £1 each (or three for £2) so it was inexpensive. Not that it would have been too costly when it was new either, having been issued on the Marble Arch label, whose releases were apparently priced at less than half the going rate of equivalents put out on their parent label Pye Records.  The album comprises twenty tracks, where English songs alternate with French ones throughout. Her breakthrough single and most famous song 'Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles' is the closing number, while the lacklustre English-language version of the same ('Find Me a Boy') is, somewhat superfluously, the final track on side 3. I think it's the only instance of the same melody being included twice. While I could have done without the latter, disc two also contains my favourite tracks on...

"File under JAZZ: Soloist Led Groups (Modern)" advises a note on the top right hand corner of the back of the sleeve. My record collection is modest enough that such elaborate categorisation is unnecessary, so I'm content to file my two LPs by Smith, ('The Incredible') Jimmy between Sinatra, Nancy and Smithereens, The . The two albums are a mismatched pair of compilations on the Verve label: this Greatest Hits and a Best Of, Vol. 2 . I tend not to think of jazz artists in terms of 'hits' but there were numerous singles and EPs of Smith's tunes, some of which must have sold well enough. The recordings included here all date between '62 and '66. On most of them Smith is accompanied by a big band using arrangements by the likes of Oliver Nelson and Lalo Schifrin. There's only a single trio performance, that of 'The Organ Gringer's Swing' where Smith is ably assisted Kenny Burrell on guitar and Grady Tate on drums. Alun Morgan...

My mother made the mistake of giving my sister and I her old Dansette-style record player and her collection of 7" singles as playthings when we were still quite young. Alas we didn't treat them with any respect at all. Among these doomed 45s was a copy of The Byrds' version of 'Mr. Tambourine Man',  which provided me (along with my Dad's Hollies Sing Dylan LP), with my first introduction to Bob Dylan as a songwriter. I don't recall when I first heard the man himself singing, but in my early years I was unimpressed: belonging to that sizeable subset of the listening population who, while they may have admired Dylan's lyrics, didn't appreciate them when delivered in Dylan's voice. A college friend was a big Dylan fan, and had practically all of his albums up to Knocked Out Loaded on cassette. It was through his influence that I eventually became a fan myself, with Bringing It All Back Home the album which set my conversion in motion. For all I...

Classical albums often have unimaginative and unwieldy titles merely listing the pieces they contain. This one labours under the title String Quartet No. 3, Two Pieces For String Octet, Piano Quintet , these all being compositions by Dmitri Shostakvich, performed here by the Borodin Quartet, who are joined by the Prokofiev Quartet for the 'Two Pieces' and by pianist Sviatoslav Richter for the Quintet. I had heard this version of the Quintet via a download some time ago, and had subsequently bought a different performance of it on CD which hadn't quite hit the spot in the same way, hence my eventually buying this disc. I'd been slightly reluctant to acquire it as I already owned a performace of the String Quartet No. 3 by The Borodin Quartet, and, shelf-space being limited, I prefer not to have duplicates. On the other hand, the perfomance I already had was recorded in the '60s by the Quartet's original line-up, whereas this one dates from 1983, by which time Mik...

Joanna Newsom swam into my field of vision with the release of her second album Ys . Much as I admired that record, I found it to be somewhat indigestible, and I'd seldom listen to the thing right through, more often than not restricting myself to just playing the wonderful opening track 'Emily'. I got along better with the magnificent follow-up Have One On Me , whose sprawling length was conveniently split over three discs that one could approach separately. Only with Divers did Newsom put out an album I could comfortably enjoy in a single sitting. That it doesn't quite measure up to the embarrasment of riches offered up by Have One On Me , does Divers no discredit at all. The latter, meanwhile seems to me the best-produced of her records: the interplay of the instruments and Newsom's voice coming across better than ever. 'Goose Eggs' is my favourite song on the disc (I'm a sucker for a bit of harpsichord) but it's a strong field and I'm very ...

Here is a 3CD album of instrumental and chamber music by the Czech-born composer variously known as Antonín Rejcha, or Anton (or Antoine) Reicha. He was born in the same year as Beethoven, and was an on-and-off friend of Ludwig's: the pair played together in an orchestra in Bonn in their late teens, and were later re-acquainted in Vienna. Unlike his his much more famous contemporary, Reicha's genius did not extend to self-promotion, and he was oftentimes content to leave his compositions unpublished. Although he won renown as a teacher and theorist in his day, posterity mostly forgot about him. The body of work he composed for wind quintet, however, retained a measure of popularity, and prevented his name from falling into complete obscurity. There has been a small-scale revival of interest in his other music over recent decades, with the current album providing an intriguing selection of it. I love half of its contents and feel lukewarm about the remainder. The solo piano piec...

It only ever happened once that I impulse-bought an album because I heard it playing while I was in a record shop. It was at the Virgin Megastore in Cardiff, where, on the first floor of an otherwise open-plan store, there was an enclosed room where the classical and jazz recordings could be found. I was browsing through the classical CDs paying scant attention to the music until I discerned a distinctive melody: a jazz trio version of Aphex Twin's 'Flim'? That caught my ear, and, when it was followed by an impressively manic arrangement of Blondie's 'Heart of Glass' I made my mind up to buy the album, conveniently on display at the counter: These Are the Vistas by The Bad Plus. It was the first time a contemporary jazz record had grabbed me so forcibly. I loved the whole thing, and found there was a third cover version on the disc in the shape of the trio's take on 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. The remaining eight tracks are all original composition...

Somewhere along the way I acquired a disproportionate fondness for Czech classical music, a predilection which has led me to pick up several LPs on the Czech (or, formerly, Czechoslovak) record label Supraphon. Currently I have about a dozen of them. This release of Bedřich Smetana's two string quartets, appropriately performed by Smetana Quartet, seems to have first been issued in 1964, mine being a later (possibly early '70s) export version with English, Russian, German and French text on the back. The text explains that the first quartet, subtitled 'From My Life', and written in 1876, is a kind of autobiography in music, and quotes the composer's own remarks about how the first movement is a statement of "the artistic leanings of my young days" and "romantic feelings music, love and life in general"; that the second depicts his carefree youth as a travelling musician; the third concerns his first love for the woman who would become his wife; a...

There are many great songs about heroin. For years I was unaware that 'Golden Brown' was among them.I recall hearing a radio interview with Hugh Cornwell at the time of the song's release in which he was directly asked about its lyrics' significance, to which he answered that it was all to do with the allure of the exotic (or something of that sort). In any case, there was no mention of strong narcotics. Not that a song need be about only one thing, of course, and Cornwell's original euphemistic explanation still colours my perception of it to this day. I loved it as a 13-year-old, and enjoy hearing it still. It has a sun-baked feeling decidedly different from the bludgeoning menace of much of their earlier material. They'd done tunes in waltz time before but the harpsichord was a new departure. The much later mariachi version of it is a joy too. I have it on a 7" single. The B-side is 'Love 30' a tennis-themed instrumental track I'm not all t...