Smith & Burrouws

The Flaming Lips have announced Where The Viaduct Looms, an album of Nick Cave covers sung by the 14-year-old musician Nell Smith. A fan who first met Wayne Coyne while attending a Flaming Lips show with her family in 2018, Smith stayed in contact as she started learning guitar and writing her own songs. When a planned trip to record with the band in Oklahoma had to be cancelled due to COVID, Coyne suggested that they collaborate remotely.

The sounds of bird song, singing bowls and water rippling invite us to Peradam, which takes as its entry point René Daumal’s early 1930s novel Mount Analogue: a Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, in which the French writer, critic and poet mapped a metaphysical journey to “the ultimate symbolic mountain” in search of meaning. In it, Daumal introduced the idea of the “peradam”, a rare, crystalline stone – harbouring profound truths – that is only visible to seekers on a true spiritual path.

Stuart Saunders Smith - A River Rose: Music for Violin - Airi Yoshioka (2014) {New World Records 80754-2}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 272 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 161 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 24 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2014 New World Records | 80754-2
Classical / Modern Classical / Experimental / Avant-Garde

Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) describes himself as "a confessional composer who focuses on revealing in his music the most personal aspects of his life, in the belief that the revelations of the particular speak to the universal." These six works feature the violin, unaccompanied and in a chamber context, and span four decades of compositional activity.

Buster Smith - The Legendary Buster Smith (1959) {2012 Japan Jazz Best Collection 1000 Series WPCR-27172}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 277 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 92 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 193 Mb | 5% repair rar | 24-bit remaster
© 1959, 2012 Atlantic / Warner Japan / WEA / Rhino | WPCR-27172
Jazz / Bop / Jazz Blues / Saxophone

Features 24 bit remastering and comes with a mini-description. Alto sax player, arranger, and composer Buster Smith recorded sparingly during his career and this seven-track set, recorded in a single session on June 7, 1959 and released by Atlantic Records a month or two later, was the only album Smith did as a bandleader. It's a low key, pleasant affair featuring five original Smith compositions, including the lightly swinging "Buster's Tune" and the odd, wonderfully disjointed "King Alcohol," as well as versions of Kurt Weill's "September Song" and Will Hudson's "Organ Grinder's Swing."

The first major blues and jazz singer on record and one of the most powerful of all time, Bessie Smith rightly earned the title of "The Empress of the Blues." Even on her first records in 1923, her passionate voice overcame the primitive recording quality of the day and still communicates easily to today's listeners (which is not true of any other singer from that early period). At a time when the blues were in and most vocalists (particularly vaudevillians) were being dubbed "blues singers," Bessie Smith simply had no competition.