Utopia Complete

Barb Wired Tour Vol. 2 is the second of two volumes of Empress Valley’s ambitious nine disc compilation of important tapes from Ron Wood’s New Barbarians side project in support of his solo album Gimme Some Neck. Picking up where The Drug Dealer Tapes Vol. 1 (Empress Valley EVSD 196/200) leaves off, Vol. 2 contains four discs with another hour of the tour rehearsal tape along with two complete shows…

Released in October 1984, Them or Us is Frank Zappa's last studio rock album (unless one counts Thing-Fish). It contains a little of everything for everyone, but most of all it has that cold and dry early-'80s feel that made this and other albums like The Man From Utopia and Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention sound dated pretty quickly. The record begins and ends with covers. "The Closer You Are" is one of those '50s R&B tunes the man loved so much. As for the Allman Brothers' "Whippin' Post," it answered a request from an audience member in Helsinki back in 1974 (go figure). In between one finds the usual offensive lyrics - the cliché-ridden "In France," the sexually explicit "Baby, Take Your Teeth Out." Crunchy guitars are found in "Ya Hozna" and "Stevie's Spanking" (named after Steve Vai, playing guitar in it, too), arguably one of Zappa's best straightforward rock songs from that period…

Matsuda Seiko (松田聖子) is a Japanese kayokyoku singer-songwriter. She was Japan's prime idol for 15 years before Amuro Namie and Hamasaki Ayumi conquered the Oricon charts. She's had huge influence among today's female artists and is still trying to conquer the stage she once owned with her daughter SAYAKA.

From Here to Eternity is Moroder's quasi-instrumental masterpiece, a continuous mix of banging Eurodisco complete with vocoder effects and this statement on the back cover: "Only electronic keyboards were used on this recording". The metallic beats, high-energy impact, and futuristic effects prove that Moroder was ahead of his time like few artists of the 1970s (Kraftwerk included), and the free-form songwriting on tracks like "Lost Angeles", "First Hand Experience in Second Hand Love", and the title track are priceless.

Released in May 1982, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch marks Frank Zappa's entrance into the 1980s. From this point on, his rock records would focus on single, simple rock songs (the previous year's You Are What You Is had them organized in interconnecting suites) with occasionally more complex instrumental numbers. The recipe would be extended to The Man From Utopia (1983) and Them or Us (1984). Side one features three studio songs that would never be performed on stage. By 1981, Zappa had become a master at manipulating vocal tracks, a technique featured in each of them, but most successfully in "Valley Girl," where daughter Moon Unit (aged 14 at the time) pastiches rich girls from the San Fernando Valley…

Cheap Thrills is designed for the curious listener who has always wanted to explore Frank Zappa but was intimidated by his overwhelming catalog. Of course, so is Strictly Commercial, which contains all of Zappa's most familiar songs, but Cheap Thrills has the advantage of being cheap, plus giving an idea of the weird diversity of Zappa's catalog, since it's filled with cult favorites, live tracks, smutty jokes, and assorted album tracks. It's not necessarily the most accessible introduction to Zappa – again, that would be Strictly Commercial – but it's more accessible than the average album while giving a sense of what the albums feel like. And you can't ask for much more than that from a budget-priced introduction.

Limited numbered four CD box set reissue of the 1982 second album from the British new wave band. The album featured the UK hit singles "Streetplayer (Mechanik)" and "Love Shadow", as well as the tracks "Whitestuff", "Prodigal Son" and "You Only Left Your Picture", which were featured on the show Miami Vice.

Awakenings 2007 Vol. 1: New Worlds (2007). Brendan Pollard donates his awesome twenty-minute 'E-Live 2006 Rehearsal' to get this double CD set underway. The initial sounds are as if vast objects are being hurled into the sea accompanied by all sorts of weird whooshes and twitters. A superb combination of sequences emerge from the aquatic depths. These meld rapid melodic runs as well as bass pulses. It is all underpinned by some wonderful mellotron. In other words Berlin School Heaven. More sequences are added accompanied by a flutey lead line. In the seventh minute things subside to more thick analogue sonic effects, coming out of it with a decidedly 'Ricochet' sounding collage of sounds. Very impressive indeed…

François Bayle - 50 ans d'acousmatique (2012) {15CD Set INA GRM Official Digital Download rel 2015}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44kHz - Official Digital Download (qobuz.com) -> 5.36 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 2.20 Gb
Full Artwork (jpg+pdf) -> 38 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2015 INA GRM | INA G 6033/6047
Classical / Musique Concrète / Avant-Garde Music / Experimental Electronic

Monumental! Lavishly conceived, superlative 15-CD Boxset with 160-page (French, English) booklet, a dream come true!!!! François Bayle's itinerary spans over five decades through which music was able to renovate its material through a sensible use of technology. The terms of Musique Concrète, Electroacoustics or Acousmatics, as conveniently proposed by François Bayle, ultimately explore a similar artistic approach: a creative and expressive work on recorded sound. This last half-century saw many major technical mutations and François Bayle - in the fertile context of the Grm seized the right opportunities, often initiating them through his function as director, so as to renovate and update creativity to serve what he called the Light Speed Sound.