Emeryville (2016)

Playing sideman to Rick Braun, Larry Carlton, Gato Barbieri, the Neville Brothers, and many others introduced guitarist/vocalist Steve Oliver to smooth jazz fans, but it was with Steve Reid's band that Oliver found a following. It was 1996 when Reid contacted Oliver at the last minute to fill in for a canceled opening act. Oliver hit the stage as a solo act and Reid was impressed with the guitarist's vocalese skills and summery sound. Oliver had come to vocalese not through King Pleasure or Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, but through Bobby McFerrin and Pat Metheny's work with Richard Bona and David Blamires, who sang along with guitar solos. Being a fan of the earthy Metheny sound, Reid hired Oliver after the gig and featured him in his touring band. Reid's Mysteries and Passion in Paradise albums featured Oliver not only as guitarist but songwriter as well. Oliver struck out on his own in 1999 with his debut, First View, released by Night Vision. The album spawned three hit singles on smooth jazz radio and earned the guitarist a Debut Artist of the Year award from Smooth Jazz News.

With their first records, Ride created a unique Wall of Sound that relied on massive, trembling distortion in the vein of My Bloody Valentine but with a simpler, more direct melodic approach. The shatteringly loud, droning neo-psychedelia the band performed was dubbed shoegazing by the British press because the bandmembers stared at the stage while they performed. Along with their initial influence, My Bloody Valentine, Ride stood apart from the shoegazing pack, primarily because of their keen sense of songcraft and dynamics. For a while, Ride were proclaimed the last great hope of British rock, but they fell from the spotlight nearly as quickly as they entered it.

A pop music band from California in the sunshine pop genre, The Association are known for their tight vocal harmony. In the 1960s the group had numerous hits at or near the top of the Billboard charts…

Christoph Korn - Ich Spreche Diesen Text (2016) {Edition Wandelweiser EWR1606}
XLD rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 20 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 17 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 5 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Edition Wandelweiser Records | EWR 1606
Classical / Modern Classical / Post Modern / Avant-Garde

Two conceptual compositions from Christoph Korn: the first, "Ich Spreche Diesen" (I appeal to this) where spoken word is placed in a loop and then slowly erased by custom software using aleatory procedures; then "Stille" (Silent), a Cage inspired work. The file sizes are not a mistake, as ridiculous as they may seem. Track 1 has many stretches of silence and track 2 is basically pure digital silence the whole way through. FLAC is not constant bit rate encoding so these files sizes are possible with very quiet / silent tracks that are still quite long.

For longtime fans of genre-bending jazz piano trio the Bad Plus, 2016's It's Hard will feel pleasantly familiar. Once again showcasing the talents of pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King, It's Hard finds the Bad Plus reworking a set of well-curated pop covers. In that sense, the album fits nicely next to the group's previous covers albums, all of which helped build their reputation as a maverick, forward-thinking outfit unafraid to recontextualize both modern pop songs and traditional acoustic jazz. Particularly effective here is the trio's languid, impressionistic take on Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over."

This just might be the single greatest side of OTT psych/noise guitar oblivion ever put to wax, a suitably enigmatic nada-information ultra-limited LP w/printed off-set covers featuring a shades-less Mizutani, an enigmatic insert with nothing but a colour ocean-front snap and two ludicrously extended, blown-out takes on primo material from the most legendary Japanese underground group of all time, Les Rallizes Denudes…