April 2012 - Popular Music

Tori Amos

• From the Choirgirl Hotel
• To Venus and Back (studio disc)
• Scarlet's Walk
• American Doll Posse
• Night of Hunters
• Scarlet's Hidden Treasures

Melanie C - Northern Star
Crowded House - Temple of Low Men
Gotye - Like Drawing Blood
Gotye - Making Mirrors
Patty Griffin - Flaming Red
Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection
Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

April was the month that I jumped on the Gotye bandwagon.

Well, that's not strictly true, in the sense that I've had Like Drawing Blood for nearly 3 years.  So April was the month that I jumped on the bandwagon created by the massive success of his single, 'Somebody That I Used to Know' - as manifested by buying the album that it's on.

I'd been meaning to at least investigate the album for quite a while, but it just hadn't happened.  It was the news that he'd reached the number 1 spot in America (a very rare achievement for Australian artists) that finally prompted me to think, "why on earth have I still not listened?"

The first very pleasant surprise was discovering that Gotye has basically put the entire Making Mirrors album up on Youtube.  I'm not sure if I've said it here on this blog, but I'm saying it now: letting people hear your music can gain you sales, not lose them.  Because the second pleasant surprise I got was that the new album is not just good, it's better than its predecessor.  Making Mirrors plays an awful lot like Like Drawing Blood, structurally speaking, but everything is tighter and more secure.  The album has lots of interest and variety but it doesn't meander. To me it basically demonstrates the increased maturity of Gotye's musical judgement while sticking to his essential methods.

And they're very interesting methods.  The 'limited' edition of the album (which as far as I can tell is the only edition you can actually buy in Australian stores at the moment!) includes a DVD which gives a lot of insight into the way he collects and samples sounds and builds songs out of the ones that interest him the most.  It was genuinely worth watching. Whether it's whacking a musical fence and making a bass line from the available notes, sampling tiny fragments of Brazilian and Taiwanese records, or singing an entire song on one note before using technology to shove the notes into the 'correct' positions, this is a man whose techniques are at least as interesting as his results.

March 2012 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S. - Christ lag in Todesbaden (Christ lay in Death's bonds)
Bach, J.S. - Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (For you, Lord, I long)
Beethoven - Piano Sonatas 5 to 8
Faure - Piano Quintets 1 & 2
Faure - Cello Sonata No. 1
Haydn - 6 String Quartets, Op.76 (the 'Erdődy' quartets)
Holmboe - Symphony No. 9
Vivaldi - Stabat Mater

The data recording kept going, even though the writing didn't.  (Meanwhile, what the heck has Blogger done to the look of the area I compose posts in?! Aargh!)

I didn't get my hands on the new purchase I hinted at in the February Classical post until the very last day of the month.  It was a 10-CD box of Bach cantatas - specifically, the first 10 of the chronological series still being created by Masaaki Susuki and the Bach Collegium Japan.  I had a lovely walk to the post office on a nice sunny day...

Oh, right, the music.  Well, this entry covers a mere two cantatas, but the early signs were good!  It's still strange to me that I'm suddenly listening to a lot more vocal Classical music.  Dealing with the different languages is still something of a challenge, and often it's better if I just switch off and hear it purely as music.  I also re-started on some Vivaldi, wrestled my box set into some vague resemblance of chronological and thematic groups and began with the Stabat Mater (probably the earliest of his vocal works to have survived).

The main 'event' of the month was probably listening to the Haydn Op.76 for the first time in several years.  I cannot recall for certain whether my cassette copies of these were the first classical music I ever bought for myself (around the age of 16 or 17), but if not the first they were very close to it.  And there's still so much to enjoy in there.  They're the last complete set of quartets from the first master of quartet writing.

I also tackled Holmboe's Symphony No. 9 with a vengeance.  It's one of his tougher works, but once I pulled it apart and put it back together, yet again I found it very rewarding and a clear example of the way this composer writes across movements.  The second movement on its own sounds like... well, nothing much. A lot of soft whimperings and scratchings.  But once you've grasped that there's a little melodic fragment in it that's carried over from the first movement, suddenly it's like the music is holding its breath for 4 minutes before unleashing in the third movement.

I know that's all rather brief and not terribly insightful, but I do have some catching up to do...