Random Spirit Lover

Between about 2006 and 2014 I occasionally participated in CD-R music swaps, where one would make a mix CD and post it out to a group of randomly-assigned recipients, who, in turn, would mail you their mixes. The highlight, for me, of one CD I received in this fashion (ca. 2008) was the bizarre and wonderful song 'Up On Your Leopard, Upon The End Of Your Feral Days' by Sunset Rubdown. I hastened to buy the album from which it was taken.

Sunset Rubdown are among the many brainchildren of Spencer Krug, some of whose music, it turned out, I already knew: his songs being my favourite parts of the 2005 album Apologies to the Queen Mary by Wolf Parade. On Random Spirit Lover, however, he is squarely and idiosycratically in the spotlight. To quote from two reviewers' assessments, the album is "part lo-fi bedroom project and part hi-fi tribute to the excesses of '70s art rock" and "like The Chronicles of Narnia re-written entirely from memory by Guillermo Del Toro".

I'm typically more one for music than for lyrics. but it's the words that really shine here, and the trebly tunes - while also very good - are secondary. If it were on vinyl I'd have a preference for side A over side B, with the former containing the aforementioned 'Up On Your Leopard...' and also 'The Mending of the Gown' and 'The Courtesan has Sung', my other two favourite tracks on the disc.

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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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