Brute Flute

Excellent addition to any prog-rock music collection
A perfectly well-crafted and eclectic album of art pop music - nowhere near as dull as most critics call it. The ingredients are simple, but thanks to a good sense of melody and arrangement the whole thing becomes really tasty after all.

Like their West Coast contemporaries in Death Cab for Cutie, Rilo Kiley steadily gained traction in indie pop circles throughout the late '90s and early 2000s before the record industry (and public at large) officially took note. Led by former child actors Jenny Lewis (vocals, guitar, keyboards) and Blake Sennett (guitar, vocals), the L.A.-based quartet held its first practice in 1998. Bassist Pierre de Reeder and drummer Dave Brock (later replaced by ex-Foundation Lassie member Jason Boesel) completed the lineup, and a weekly residency at the Spaceland nightclub in Silverlake allowed Rilo Kiley to hone its mix of classic pop, country, torch song, and folk. Collection includes: Take Offs and Landings (2001); The Execution of All Things (2002); More Adventurous (2004); Under the Blacklight (2007).

Mr. Xenakis, for to achieve complete victory in his "struggle for existence", would have to create something so different that to anybody else it would be totally meaningless.
Even he has not gone that far, though he has regularly traveled a long way into the desert of incoherence, often by calculating his music so as to maximize disorder. This is the main thrust of his mathematical techniques: his spinning numbers, like John Cage's coin tossings, insure that notes are chosen and ordered by blind chance, or according to processes of change that have little to do with conventional musical perception.
…..
Mr. Xenakis so often equates beauty with savagery: in his fascination with weapons and armor, for instance, with the sea or with the bulls of the Camargue. In his music virtually the whole elaborate machinery of Western composition is set aside, and we are left with a brute vocabulary of other modernists - Stravinsky, Varèse, Harrison Birtwistle - avoidance of the immediate past leads to imagined contact with the archaic.

Paul Griffiths, The New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 1997

Ping Machine - Encore - Live Au Petit Faucheux (2013) {Neuklang Records NCD4072}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 438 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 169 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 43 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2013 Neuklang Records | NCD4072
Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / Modern Big Band

Realizing his new album ENCORE live at the Petit Faucheux on 22 & 23 March 2013, Ping Machine is betting live music: raw, passionate and uncompromising. At the head of this great set of 15 musicians, Frédéric Maurin says its risk appetite and unveils new licked compositions on stage, demanding all of twists and nuances. The musicians play on the wire and excel on these bespoke writing scores. Facing the audience, the material appears in this its most savage and more urgent. Pleasure, sharing and emotion is perceived.

More highly melodic progressive rock, this time built around longer songs and extended instrumental passages – among the latter, "Munich," which was alternately titled "Munich 1938: Appeasement Was the Cry; Munich 1970: Mine to Do or Die," was surprisingly accessible at nine minutes and change, built on Peter Jennings' extended organ cadenzas embellished with John Culley's crisp electric guitar flourishes, all wrapped around a pleasing array of melodies that easily carry the song's length. The three extended numbers that comprised the original LP's side two also make for fascinating listening, Angus Cullen's McCartneyesque vocals calling to mind the Moody Blues in their prime, while the band's hard, at times slightly jazzy, instrumental attack evokes echoes of Caravan with, perhaps, a touch of the most energetic of Deep Purple's Jon Lord-spawned classical experiments.