Faux Lives

This exemplary four-disc box takes the high road, attempting nothing less than an honest reconstruction of the Who's stormy, adventurous, uneven pilgrimage. While offering an evenhanded cross-section of single hits and classic album tracks, 30 Years garnishes the expected high points with B-sides, alternate and live versions of familiar tracks, and the quartet's earliest singles as the High Numbers…

The original Who's Better, Who's Best: The Videos was a handy laserdisc consisting of 17 videos, an inordinate number of them overlapping at least in part with material from the movie The Kids Are Alright – which was OK, as the latter was never widely available as a laserdisc…

Echoes is a double-CD collection of some of Pink Floyd's best songs. It's also a fascinating document of the band's history. They began life as Syd Barrett's phantasmagoric plaything before clasping the wings of Icarus and ascending toward the sun on an epic space-rock odyssey, eventually turning left once they reached the dark side of the moon and burning up on reentry, crash-landing on every earthlings' home hi-fi. And it's all here–30 years of the Floyd's awesome back catalog trimmed down to two handsome CDs.

Sun Ra & His Arkestra - The Stranger: A Radio Play (2019) {Enterplanetary Koncepts rec 1968}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44kHz - Official Digital Download (bandcamp.com) -> 94 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 66 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 1968, 2019 Enterplanetary Koncepts
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Progressive Jazz / Piano / Stage & Screen / Incidental Music

"The Stranger," a radio play with musical accompaniment by Sun Ra & His Arkestra, premiered over the Pacifica radio network in the late 1960s, on a program called Mind’s Eye Theater. The exact date is unknown, but 1968 is a consensus guess (as noted in The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra). Ra’s incidental music, which is tight and atmospheric, surfaces sporadically beneath the dialog, but at no time is featured. Ra is named in the closing credits, and the additional personnel were identified by Ra discographer Robert L. Campbell.

The young mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet joins Alpha for several projects. In 2017 she received the Prize of the Verbier Festival Academy. While she has already attracted attention in the opera house, Adèle Charvet is also passionately interested in the song repertory. For her first album, she has devised a very personal programme, deriving in part from her musical partnership and friendship with the pianist Susan Manoff. Both of them have drawn on their New York childhoods: ‘Long Time Ago’ weaves together the threads of our lives’ says Susan. Adèle continues: ‘The musical journey is immense, from the central repertory of American music – Barber, Copland, Ives – to cabaret songs (Heggie and Bolcom), with a detour by way of England: Britten, Vaughan Williams … For example, Jake Heggie’s Amor describes the journey across the city of faux-naif sex maniac. The police, the ice cream vendor, the gospel choir all shout “AMORI” when they see him. Samuel Barber’s Solitary Hotel is like an Edward Hopper painting in music, Aaron Copland’s At the River invites pilgrims to the church meeting: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river” … The programme unfolds like a wheel, a cycle that traverses the cardinal points of life.’

The collaborative LP from Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett feels like an overheard discussion between two existential misfits. They sing songs about writing songs, covering each other in the process.