In 2002, Mark Lanegan was looking to make some changes in how he approached his music – the Screaming Trees had finally collapsed at the end of the '90s, he'd found a new fan base as a frequent guest vocalist with Queens of the Stone Age, and the spare, blues-leaning solo efforts Lanegan cut for Sub Pop were no longer side projects but the first chapters of a new career. As Lanegan was strategizing his next move, he went to Houston, Texas and in five days recorded a dozen songs with a handful of talented local musicians, including guitarist Ian Moore and longtime Willie Nelson sideman Mickey Raphael on harmonica, with Justice Records founder Randall Jamail as producer. While the sessions were meant to be demos for a stack of songs Lanegan had written for Jamail's publishing house, the finished product sounded good enough to be an album, and in 2015 Lanegan finally released the material under the title Houston: Publishing Demos 2002. The jolly irony is that while these are supposed to be demos, in many respects the performances sound more polished and "commercial" than most of Lanegan's early solo efforts, capturing a laid-back but buoyant mood that's informed by country and blues as much as rock, and Lanegan seems comfortable singing with the group, rather than simply laying his vocals over the top.
This album represents the culmination of what leading British baritone Roderick Williams described as ‘a dream come true’. It features premiere recordings of his orchestrations of songs by Vaughan Williams and other composers associated with him and is released to commemorate those who perished in WWI.
2014 collection from the Alt-Rock/Indie singer/songwriter and former Screaming Trees frontman including 12 unreleased tracks. As one of America's great modern day vocalists and songwriters, Mark Lanegan has much in common with the timeless work of such legends as Fred Neil, Tim Hardin and Karen Dalton. Collecting Lanegan's solo material for Sub Pop, Beggars and more plus 12 unreleased tracks, this is the archive treatment Mark has long deserved. The 32 tracks shine a light on Mark's rare talent, and span the singer's entire career, from 1990's debut album The Winding Sheet to a treasure trove of recent unreleased gems and feature such guests as PJ Harvey, Josh Home and J Masks. His is a sound of grizzled vocals and dark melody, its lyrics chiseled out of late night thoughts and dark humor.
Mark Dwane is unquestionably one of the masters of guitar synthesis. Dwane weaves imaginative landscapes, emotional crescendos, and breathless wonder through his instruments. It all becomes the soundtrack to a journey inside another world. Cinematic music that paints the sky in electronic colors. Dwane is creating truly modern music, born of technology and draped around imagery of possible futures and past mythologies. After listening to Mark Dwane's compositions, you feel like you've really been somewhere.
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…
Sonate a Quattro are the brilliant compositions from Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, written during the summer of 1804 at the young age of 12. These works, at the time, were commonly performed by wind quartet and it wasn’t until 1954 when the original manuscripts were discovered in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. showing their original arrangement for string quartet.
Mark Viner’s survey of the complete solo piano music of Alkan continues to turn up discoveries and reveal previously little-known or misunderstood sides of a protean figure in late French romanticism. Viner himself regards Alkan as ‘the most enigmatic figure in the history of music as a whole’.