Ensemble Nimbus is a Swedish quartet (keyboards, clarinet, viola and percussions) that belongs to the tradition of Scandinavia's orchestral-grade progressive-rock with a touch of Univers Zero. A very modern and lively twist on the Zamla/RIO/Zeuhl type sound, but high-tech and very very lively, featuring Hasse Bruniusson (ex-Zamla Mammaz Manna) on drums. Bruniusson is also a member of the better known Roine Stolt's Flower Kings where he is the bands percussionist. Within Ensemble Nimbus he also plays acoustic & electric drums as well as adding the percussion. This band, yet another Swedish band, is described as the "second generation of European… RIO. "Garmonbozia" is their 3rd studio album.
If this scorching live set is anything to go by, the November tour by Germany's NDR Big Band playing Colin Towns' arrangements of Frank Zappa classics will be unmissable. One-time rock keyboardist Towns (who worked for Deep Purple star Ian Gillan) became a film and TV composer, then a jazz bandleader, and the founder and funder of creative indie label Provocateur Records. His writing for big jazz ensembles mixes rock, improv, postbop and a slashing Stravinskyesque melodic wildness - but the result often comes at you with a visceral energy of such heat that it melts the edges.
Contains the albums All That Noise (CD 1) plus alternate versions, mixes, instrumentals, demos, bonus unreleased live tracks, and an interview recorded in 1990 (CD 2), Melomania (CD 3), the Mayhem to Meditate EP & (dub) remixes (CD 4), the Lunar Surf EP & the Jukebox at Munsters 45, the previously unreleased lost third album & demos (CD 5).
Complete retail studio album discography by US Jam-Rock band Phish. As bonus you get "A Live One" and the DVD "Specimens Of Beauty", a documentary about the recording of Undermind, that came in a limited version with the first copies of the album.
While Chantal's three previous solo albums were immaculately produced by two luminaries of the so-called "post-classical" scene (Nils Frahm, Peter Broderick and Phill Brown respectively), Saturday Moon is a more feral child and is all the stronger for it. The album spins and turns and upends preconceptions throughout its length. There are sonic surprises like Alan from Low's guitar synth on "Disappear," a song that ends in a tornado of electricity and also features backing vocals from Low bandmate Mimi. Atmospheric guitar legend Bill Frisell delicately converses with two tracks. Shahzad Ismaily of Tom Waits and Marc Ribot fame plays haunted six string fractures on one of the album's darkest songs "Conflict of Minds", together with Borgar Magnason (Sigur Rós, Björk). There are eighteen musicians in total on the album. Strings, horns, contrabass and piano are also woven into the kaleidoscopic, eclectic mesh. It is a human-all-too-human balance of things. Clarity and randomness. Anger and elation. Loss and awakening. The personal and the communal.
Between 1810 and 1812 Rossini composed these five one-act "farces" for the Teatro San Moise in Venice. They may be formulaic–even in their plots, most of which concern a young couple fooling an older suitor, or a young couple trying to find happiness, or a Canadian suitor away from his home turf(!)–but each has something to recommend it and none outstays its welcome. And the last of the group, Il Signor Bruschino, is famous for its overture, in which Rossini asks the violinists to tap their bows against their stands–witty, unusual, and apparently annoying to the conservative Venetians.–Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com
Pieces by nine very different composers make up this fascinating collection of works for string quartet entitled Short Stories, performed by the Kronos Quartet. Elliott Sharp's Digital (1986) is a hard-edged rhythmic study using the instrument bodies as drums, with objects inserted in the strings to create rattling, shaker, and tambourine-like sounds. Steve Mackey's arrangement (1989) of the classic Chicago blues tune "Spoonful" (1960), by the prolific Willie Dixon, exaggerates the gestures of the song and employs complex harmonies and modernistic devices like string crunches, etc. John Oswald's Spectre (1990) opens with the naive sound of the quartet tuning up.