Yves Allegrat

Safe in the Hands of Love marked the vanguard arrival of Yves Tumor. Unclassified and unannounced, the release received widespread acclaim and cemented itself as a landmark in the hallowed Warp catalog. The experimentalist voiced a new generation, creating a surreal pop stratosphere for outsiders and the masses alike. Heaven To A Tortured Mind is the next step in that searing trajectory. A mindfully crafted studio album, gracefully blending genre into alternative bliss. Effortless and inspired, Heaven To A Tortured Mind is an album for lovers, losers and the unconcerned.

Along with Wit's Naxos recording, this is one of the best versions of Messiaen's phantasmagoric Turangalîla-Symphonie available, and it's very different: swifter, more obviously virtuosic in concept, perhaps a touch less warm in consequence, and engineered with greater “in your face” immediacy. The playing of the Concertgebouw, always a wonderful Messiaen orchestra, is stunning throughout. Chailly revels in the music's weirdness. The Ondes Martinot, for example, is particularly well captured. It's interesting how earlier performances tended to minimize its presence, perhaps for fear that is would sound silly, which of course it does, redeemed by the composer's utter seriousness and obliviousness to anything that smacks of humor. In any case, it's not all noise and bluster. The Garden of Love's Sleep is gorgeous, hypnotic, but happily still flowing, while the three Turangalîla rhythmic studies have remarkable clarity. Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays the solo piano part magnificently, really as well as anyone else ever has.

Those people aware of one of Quebec's seminal group Contraction (which came from Frank Dervieux's heritage), should be aware of bassist Laferrière's important role in the group. While not the only person carrying the group, he was actually a bit surprising that he would be the only ex-Contraction member to release solo albums (there is a second one dating from the 80's), but this solo album is much worthy of the proghead's ear.
Graced with a star-studded guest (from Harmonium to Orchestre Sympathique and from Pollen to Conventum), the album develops a JR/F that is not that far from what Contraction was doing. This feeling is reinforced with ex-Contraction vocalist Monique Fauteux laying out her vocals generously throughout the album…

Known for his scientific explorations of timbre and his innovative syntheses of acoustic and electronic techniques, Tristan Murail is regarded as a composer of the "spectral school." He accepts untempered sound as the basis for his expansive musical language, far removed from tonality, serialism, and aleatoric procedures. Gondwana was developed from electronic music concepts, and its expanding and contracting bands of complex sounds are analogous to those generated through a synthesizer. Shimmering clusters, washes of color, and massed, low sonorities evoke the slow shifting of continents. The Orchestre National de France, directed by Yves Prin, delivers this work with primordial grandeur and astonishing depth. Because of its smaller forces, Désintégrations is more focused and intense than Gondwana, though no less cosmic in its implications. The Ensemble de l'Itinéraire blends effectively with the electronic tape, so it is difficult to distinguish acoustic from synthetic sounds. Time and Again is a departure from the familiar practice of slowly unfolding processes, for its chopped-up material is jumbled, as if sequential events were reordered in a time machine.

Six long years have passed since Pierre-Yves Macé's last album on John Zorn's prestigious Composer Series.

Chabrier’s extraordinary, if incomplete, opera is surely a precursor to Salome and approaches even that most lurid work in the gloriously opulent sensuality of its music. Performed at the Edinburgh Festival by some of the greatest singers of the day and recorded live by Hyperion, this thrilling performance stunned critics and public alike. A genuinely wonderful discovery.