Released to highly positive reviews in 2007, Slope was the debut album from Steve Jansen (Japan / Rain Tree Crow). Exhibiting a bold combination of inventive rhythms, intricate programming and emotive vocal performances, the album features guest contributions from an impressive line-up including David Sylvian, Tim Elsenburg (Sweet Billy Pilgrim), Joan Wasser (Joan As Policewoman), Thomas Feiner, Anja Garbarek, Nina Kinert, and Theo Travis. As Jansen explains, "With Slope, I approached composition attempting to avoid chord and song structures and the usual familiar building blocks. Instead, in an attempt to deviate from my own trappings as a musician, I wanted to piece together unrelated sounds, music samples, rhythms and 'events'."
Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit are two new recordings that present compelling examples of Nyman's vibrant approach to word-setting, song structure and subject matter. Six Celan Songs/The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi couples two of Michael Nyman's major vocal pieces of 1991 and 2001 and two favoured singers of the composer, Hilary Summers and Sarah Leonard. Six Celan Songs is Michael Nyman's most profound song cycle, composed in 1990 for Ute Lemper. Nyman selected six of Paul Celan's less hermetic texts, accidentally, perhaps, all featuring flower symbolism in a kind of 'negative theology', representing Celan's attempt as a poet to come to terms with the impossibility, according to Adorno, of writing poetry 'after Auschwitz'.
L.A. Guns is the name of a hard rock group formed in Los Angeles, California, of which two rival incarnations currently exist due to numerous line-up changes. The first incarnation of the group was formed, by Tracii Guns, in 1983 but disbanded in 1985 following its merger with fellow Los Angeles group Hollywood Rose, becoming the first lineup of Guns N' Roses.
Allen Ginsberg understood as well as anyone that, in the latter half of the 20th century, rock & roll would be the medium through which poetry and social commentary would reach the young and hungry masses. He eagerly hopped a ride on the bandwagon, collaborating with Dylan, the Clash, and Cornershop; setting William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to music; and teaching "Eleanor Rigby" to his English classes at Brooklyn College…