Aryan Peste Noire

Hooking up with regular Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard as the co-producer of this album proved to be just the trick for Ferry. Bete Noire sparkles as the highlight of Ferry's post-Roxy solo career, adding enough energy to make it more than Boys and Girls part two. Here, his trademark well-polished heartache strikes a fine balance between mysterious moodiness and dancefloor energy, and Leonard adds more than a few tricks that keep the pep up. Five out of the nine songs are Ferry/Leonard collaborations; all succeed, from "Limbo"'s opening punch and flow to the cinematic (and unsurprisingly French-tinged) feeling of the title track.

Guitarist Eivind Aarset, one of the most exciting, individual and creative voices from the Norwegian jazz underground, saw "Electronique Noir", his first release as a leader, hailed as "One of the best post Miles electric jazz albums" by none other than the The New York Times as well as America's leading jazz magazine Jazz Times and the UK's Jazzwise. Now Light Extracts, his much anticipated follow up album, is set to establish Eivind as one of the key voices in European Nu-Jazz. Once again his music is a here-and-now reflection of the latest, most exciting sounds to be found in jazz, mixing improvisation with rhythms from European club culture, exploring the potential of a music so new it has not yet set any frontiers or rules and the only limits are the limits of the imagination.

Known for its daring and youthful performances, the ensemble Les Barocudas makes its ATMA Classique recording debut with La Peste, a musical journey that explores the theme of the plague. The members of the Montreal-based trio, Marie Nadeau-Tremblay (violin), Ryan Gallagher (viola da gamba), and Nathan Mondry (harpsichord), have compiled a program in which each piece corresponds with an episode or aspect of this 17th century pandemic. All of the composers selected for this album Schmelzer, Castello, Fontana, Pandolfi, Rossi, Farina were violinists, and all of them were affected by the plague, in some cases, fatally.

The ensemble Aedes began it's musical journey with Poulenc, under the impetus of conductor Mathieu Romano. Here, at the head of Les Siècles, Romano returns to the unclassifiable composer to record two of his major works. In the pious contemplation of the Litanies, here performed in the manuscript version, and the orchestral luxuriance of the Stabat Mater, spirituality is expressed through music that is lively, sensitive and even, at times, sensuous. Sculpting out every phrase and note, always at the service of the text, the ensemble and Mathieu Romano confirm their affinity with the composer's language. As an interlude Mathieu Romano has included a secular piece, O doulx regard, o parler gratieux, by the Renaissance composer Clément Janequin. The boundaries between earthly love and mystical love are thus abolished in favor of pure emotion.

Some works seem to echo one another, resounding across eras with a quasi-mystical correspondence that invites us into a strange voyage. Gathering ‘the last Liszt’ and ‘the last Scriabin’ on the same album struck me as obvious. To me, they both have a marvellously indescribable capacity to allow listeners to hear mystery, to create unique soundscapes, to explore ever further and farther, always to innovate and to extend the limits of a certain ending. Both question the conventions of harmonic language with drawn out chromaticism – one that goes almost to excess, inching close to its own demise – and the obfuscation of tonality, as well as Scriabin’s famous invention, the ‘mystic chord,’ which haunts most of his last works. We can therefore lose ourselves in exploration outside all form, skirting all rules, and necessarily giving ourselves over to the almost hypnotic sensation of getting lost in this extreme.

Master Series is the title of a line of greatest hits albums, released in European countries primarily by PolyGram International, as well as A&M Records, Deram Records, FFRR Records, Mercury Records, and Polydor Records. In addition, some albums were reissued by Universal Music Group under the Universal Masters Collection and Millennium Edition titles.