En el Nombre de la Hija In The Name of The Girl (2011)

Gerry & the Pacemakers are fated to eternal comparisons to the Beatles, their onetime Merseybeat rivals who rapidly eclipsed the quartet in popularity and accomplishment, leaving them as something of a pop culture punchline. In the wake of the Beatles, it was hard to look back at Gerry Marsden and his irrepressibly cheerful music and think it was in the same league as the Fab Four, or any of the British Invasion groups that followed. That may be true, but Gerry & the Pacemakers shouldn't be judged against such R&B-schooled rockers as the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Kinks but rather against the stiff, starched rock & roll of pre-Beatles Britain. Compared to this prim, proper pop, the skiffle beats and bouncy melodies of Gerry & the Pacemakers seem fresh, almost serving as a bridge between formative English rock and the bright blast of the Beatles…

Formed in London in 1980, the Legendary Pink Dots moved to Amsterdam in the middle of the decade. Members throughout the band's career have been Edward Ka-Spel (vocals, keyboards) and Phil Knight (keyboards), also known as the Silver Man, with a shifting supporting cast over the years. The Dots' music is by turns melodic pop and exotic psychedelia, with classical influences, sampling, and relentlessly dark, violent, apocalyptic lyrics…

Shortly after the excellent album “La Caída De Harmigón”, Ron Boots releases “Ante Oculos”. Ante Oculos is an expression from art. The biggest part of this album contains the music that “Big Ron” and his friends Eric van der Heijden (synthesizers), Harold van der Heijden (drums), Frank Dorittke (FD Project, guitar) and (new friend) Jamie O’Callaghan (electric violin and synthesizers) played at a concert in the planetarium of the German city Bochum. This music is somewhat more “spacey” than we are accustomed of by Ron. The theme of the album is 2012, the year we are living in and the year in which (according the Mayans and Nostradamus) the end of the world will come.
With “Ante Oculos” Ron proves that is also very well at home in spacemusic. The album asks for more concerts in a special place like a planetarium. Ron remains the best and most important electronic musician from the Netherlands.

It is a familiar fact that Antonio Vivaldi was a prime mover in the creation of the solo concerto, but what is less well known is that he also was the leading exponent of the older concerto a quattro – music in four parts, with several players to a part, intended for what we nowadays would call a string orchestra with continuo. As Vivaldi expert Michael Talbot explains in his informative liner notes, these works are notable not only for their beauty, but also for their experimental character and for providing the most important examples of fugal writing in Vivaldi’s instrumental music. It is not known when Vivaldi started to write them, but most of the almost fifty concertos probably originate from the 1720s and 1730s. .