Threshold Livedelica

Sparsely appointed and gently played, Burning the Threshold marks a return to the pastoral folk and American Primitive styles for Ben Chasny and his long-tenured Six Organs of Admittance project. Since the early part of the decade, much of Chasny's attention has been devoted to the development and implementation of the hexadic system, a chance-based compositional method involving a set of playing cards which dictates the tonal, rhythmic, chordal, and even lyrical approach of the music. The two albums he released using this method, 2015's Hexadic and Hexadic, Vol. 2, were aesthetic wildcards whose dissonant clamor was at times thrilling, but ultimately difficult to absorb.

Dweller at the Threshold in its original incarnation, was a synthesizer trio. The members were Dave Fulton, Paul Ellis, and Jeff Vasey. No Boundary Condition is their debut CD, and it has a firm foothold in the Berlin school of electronic music. The trio surrounds micro-atmospheres with heavy sequences and waves of synthesizer riffs. While this CD has all the elements of early electronica, it has enough experimental textures to lift it a notch or two. Indeed, this disc could be the logical follow-up to The Forbidden Planet by Bebe and Louis Barron from 1956. (That album is often recognized as the first all electronic album. It won an Oscar for best soundtrack that year as well.) But DATT is neither primitive nor primal. They are immersed - totally - in the technology of the new millennium.

THRESHOLD returns with their 12th full-length album Dividing Lines, which is set to be released on November 18th via Nuclear Blast Records. Dividing Lines marks the second album since the return of former vocalist Glynn Morgan, who reunited with the band on their previous effort Legends Of The Shires (2017). A darker album than Legends Of The Shires, the band has described it as “Legends’ darker, moodier older brother”. Richard West comments on the song: “‘Silenced’ is about how we seem to be heading towards fewer voices, fewer artists, fewer venues, and fewer platforms where everyone can be heard. People seem so scared to speak out or debate anything anymore. I know I sound old but I miss the good old days! When freedom of speech goes then society is lost.”

In Search of The Lost Chord (1968). "In Search of the Lost Chord" is the album on which the Moody Blues discovered drugs and mysticism as a basis for songwriting and came up with a compelling psychedelic creation, filled with songs about Timothy Leary and the astral plane and other psychedelic-era concerns. They dumped the orchestra this time out in favor of Mike Pinder's Mellotron, which was a more than adequate substitute, and the rest of the band joined in with flutes, sitar, tablas, and cellos, the playing of which was mostly learned on the spot. The whole album was one big experiment to see how far the group could go with any instruments they could find, thus making this album a rather close cousin to the Beatles' records of the same era…

Pianist Rochelle Sennet says in her introduction that this third volume of Bach to Black: Suites for Piano, represents her continuing interest in performing suites and multi-movement works by Black composers in combination with the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach. This volume contains world premiere recordings of suites by Adolphus Hailstork and James Lee III as well as Black women composers Margaret Bonds, Montague Ring, Nkeiru Okoye, and Betty Jackson King, as well as a suite by William Grant Still. Dr. Sennet has established herself as a well-known performer, teacher, and scholar, with solo performances around the United States as well as in Russia. She studied at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Michigan, Texas Christian University, and the University of Illinois. She is on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.