"Double-tracked with a ghostly haze of background fuzz, Hedvig’s lightning-rod guitar blazes a trail that comes in the wake of the heaviest guitar giants – there’s Hendrix, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and Led Zep’s Jimmy Page swirling around the cauldron, but also the exploratory, disciplined freeplay of Pete Cosey, John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana buzzing out of her fingertips. Born in the Norwegian town of Ålesund in the early 80s, Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen has been steeped in the guitar since fooling around with her mother’s nylon-strung acoustic at the age of ten."
This 98-minute documentary, written, produced, and directed by Adele Schmidt and José Zegarra Holder of the Washington, D.C. area's Zeitgeist Media, begins and ends at the 2011 Rock in Opposition festival in Carmaux, France, and between those two bookends tells the story of this idiosyncratic movement – or style, or whatever you want to call it – that was birthed in the late '70s and has against all odds persisted on and off to the present day…
Nonesuch Records releases the first recordings of Steve Reich’s Runner (2016) and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra (2018), performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conducted by Susanna Mälkki.
Once we are aware that certain music has been written for film, it’s easy to wax poetic about said music’s visual associations. Yet I believe that one needn’t be aware of Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou’s filmic motivations in order to feel it in the same way, for hers imagines, recites, and sings the lament of a zeitgeist in decay. Karaindrou’s themes are potent yet familiar, even (if not especially) to those who’ve never heard them before. Brimming with tragedy and triumph alike, this is music not only for the fictional, but also for real strangers crossing paths in a world of mist and shadows.