La fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) is an opéra comique in two acts by Gaetano Donizetti, set to a French libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François Bayard. It was first performed on 11 February 1840 by the Paris Opéra-Comique at the Salle de la Bourse.
The world down under produced some of the most ferocious and provocative sounds to have emerged from the 1960s. Crammed full of fuzz, distortion, feedback, phasing, and wild dementia, this uncompromising sound was the precursor to punk rock. Buried Alive!! conjures up a superb collection of rampant amphetamine fury, jammed tight with the most vile and repulsive '60s delinquency ever put together. This six-disc anthology culls together 150 long lost sounds of toxic, teenage rebellion from Australasia. Professionally re-mastered original sound; includes previously unreleased recordings. Buried Alive!!
The performances on this lovely album of vocal and instrumental music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier make it a recording that should delight the composer's fans and anyone who loves the music of the Baroque. Listeners should be warned that the packaging and even the composer's titles create expectations of music of a very different character from what is actually presented. The three Leçons de Ténèbres of the title, scored for bass and chamber orchestra, refer to baleful texts taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah describing the fall and abasement of Jerusalem, and were written for services on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week, the darkest days in the Christian liturgical calendar.
“Fear is a theme that comes up pretty quickly if you try to understand the strange mood of our society,” says GET WELL SOON’s Konstantin Gropper about his stylistic volte-face from LOVE to THE HORROR. “It seems to be a big common denominator.” Inevitable then, but also entirely in keeping with an artist who has already made an album about the apocalypse – 2012’s grandiose The Scarlet Beast O’Seven Heads – and writes songs titled ‘I Sold My Hands For Food So Please Feed Me’ and ‘We Are Safe Inside While They Burn Down Our House’.
Like everything else he does, musical iconoclast David Sylvian's idea of a retrospective compilation is very different from the norm. Sleepwalkers is a 16-track, hour-plus collection focused on his many collaborations during the previous decade. Included are alternate takes from his own albums, remixes, reworked material and his contributions to the albums of others. There is one new cut, pointing to the future: "Five Lines" with Japanese composer Dai Fujikura, is a complex art song with a string quartet. (According to Sylvian, Fujikura is working with him on a completely new, orchestral version of Manofon.) This new piece is one of the many highlights.
Girl with Basket of Fruit is the upcoming eleventh album by American experimental band Xiu Xiu, set to be released on February 8, 2019. It follows the band's 2017 album Forget, and was co-produced by member Angela Seo and Deerhoof's Greg Saunier. The record is said to feature "themes and references" of and to "ritual, mythology, mundane and divergent belief, film, music, and resurrected motifs from preceding Xiu Xiu videos". It was also noted to be "imbued with the agitation, tension, sorrow and anger that has permeated the daily lives of so many over the last few years".