First studio album by The Notwist in seven years Featuring Saya (Tenniscoats), Ben LaMar Gay, Angel Bat Dawid and Juana Molina. Their music has long been open-minded and exploratory, but from its engrossing structure, through its combination of melancholy pop, clangorous electronics, hypnotic Krautrock and driftwork ballads, to its international musical guests, Vertigo Days is both a new step for The Notwist, and a reminder of just how singular they've always been.
This new release is a vast leap into an ocean of space and sound, a quantum leap into cybernetics, biology, anti-gravity, time travel, dream speech and transfiguration. A seriously next step release!
Young French jazz-fusion ensemble Ghost Rhythms arrive at TPA Towers hitherto unknown to me with their third album, a two-hour long instrumental tribute to the movie Vertigo. Intrigued by the oft-quoted synchronicity between Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and the movie The Wizard Oz, the band’s composers-in-residence Camille Petit and Xavier Gélard set out to make a synchronous alternate soundtrack to the legendary Hitchcock film. The results are as gloriously expansive and darkly cinematic as you would expect given the subject matter.
Dominique Pifarély—violinist and former co-leader of clarinetist Louis Sclavis’s acclaimed Acoustic Quartet—and pianist François Couturier—who since Anouar Brahem’s Khomsa has recorded a string of varied albums for ECM—team up for this unique collaboration. The resulting admixture of folk and modern classical influences finds the duo charting waters that might have otherwise remained glassy and still without the cut of their oars. The image is no mere metaphor, for the album’s title comes from French philosopher Sarah Kofman, who characterizes the concept in precisely these oceanic terms: a path through aquatic expanse that is just as vulnerable to erasure as it is to discovery. Its trailblazing implications rest on a blade of uncertainty, and therein lies their beauty.
They say that good things come in small packages, and this CD would seem to be the musical proof of that statement – certainly there are few more unassuming releases in Bernard Herrmann's output. Joy in the Morning is one of the more obscure movies ever scored by Herrmann and, as is pointed out in the notes by Christopher Husted, it was also the composer's last successfully completed major studio project, coming just ahead of the calamity that attended his work for Alfred Hitchcock on Torn Curtain. It has fallen between the cracks across the years, principally because the movie itself was a good deal less stellar than most of the Hitchcock projects (or, for that matter, the Ray Harryhausen projects) with which Herrmann distinguished himself in the early/mid-'60s. This CD is astonishingly good, however, being not only a close cousin to Herrmann's music for Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) but also containing thematic material in common with his clarinet quintet Souvenirs du Voyage, and string writing that also recalls his work for Vertigo and even Psycho, as well as writing for the reeds and winds that have echoes as far back as Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Contains music from the soundtracks to The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, Marnie, Torn Curtain, and other films scored by Bernard Herrmann. Performed by The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Paul Bateman/quote]