Circumambulation

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 Teeth'. The songs seem simple, and minimal, with drummer Slim TX showing admirable restraint in his straight-ahead backbeats. Other favourite tracks of mine on the album are 'S:H:S' and 'Numb Hand'.

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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...

Onslow

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Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

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