A Guide to the Birdsong of Western Africa is an album of music inspired by endangered birdsong. Each featured artist was challenged to make an original track using and inspired by the song of an endangered bird from their country. The album aims to raise awareness about the plight of these birds while raising funds for organisations that are working to protect them.
Parallel Times. Dizzying constellations of notes netted within the soundboard of the harpsichord, quill-plucked and sent spinning in darting arcs and ascending steps. . . Harmonic fog adrift from which notes slip out in silvery streaks, gleaming with passion, while some, disconsolate, fall into dark silence snuffing out their glow. . . Cymbals sizzle and resonate, ceding space to the crackle of shells shaken. Wood, skin, clay all brushed, touched and tamped, honed into accents and beats, breathing between the firefly flurries criss-crossing through their time…
Following the critical acclaim and enthusiastic response to Heavy Sugar: The Pure Essence of New Orleans R&B, compiler Stuart Colman has dug deep into the city’s unique recording legacy to bring about a sumptuous second helping. In addition to the requisite sourcings, the net has been cast wider still in order to focus on material gleaned from such picayune outlets as Rustone, Pontchartrain, Athens, Winner and Spinett. There is a very good reason for this.
2008 eight CD box set. Cherry Red Records marks it's 30th Anniversary in style with this lavish 185 track boxset. I'll Give You My Heart chronologically plots 61 single/EP a and B-sides from 1978 to 1983. Features 24 tracks from the U.K. Top 50 Indie chart including 12 Top 20 and two #1 hits. Includes cuts from Dead Kennedys, the Monochrome Set, Eyeless in Gaza, the Runaways, Marc Bolan, Everything But the Girl, Robert Wyatt and many more. A comprehensive 78 page booklet plots the story of Cherry Red Records and details many rare 7" and 12" picture sleeves. Features extensive interviews conducted by Alex Ogg with 'fly-on-the-wall' accounts from label founders and band members. Cherry Red.
The most ambitious work by 20th-century French master Olivier Messiaen, Saint Francis is also his most all-embracing. He spent nearly a decade creating the opera, which not only encapsulates the composer's abiding Catholic faith but draws on a lifetime of musical discovery and brings together the elements of Messiaen's far-ranging, rich vocabulary: birdsong and nature as a source for music, Eastern modes, complex rhythms derived from ancient Greek poetry and Hindu talas, plainsong, and percussive gamelan-like sonorities, to list a few of the most salient. Messiaen chose Francis for operatic representation as the saint "most like Christ" and wrote his own libretto, using the gentle poetry of the Fioretti.
The reference is to the Casimir effect, a mysterious force in quantum physics that draws elements together. I see it as a metaphor for the spontaneous energy created by musicians interacting intuitively when playing together. Cause and Effect is a journey through the influence of childhood experiences. The music sometimes reflects a mood, sometimes evokes a half forgotten memory, combining the sensibility of classical music with the instinctive spontaneity of jazz improvisation.