Khgruangbin -Records In My Life

They all love buying the records - crate digging with Khgruangbin -

Khruangbin on Records In My Life (2018 interview)

Behind The Record: Khruangbin 'Con Todo El Mundo'

Still Warm Ahead

So , still above normal for us ,and something that climate change deniers need to contemplate upon.

Got It In One

Records For Sale

More items for sale here - if interested PM me first.

An Extra Friday Five For The Weekend

How do you handle greedy people?

Do you put people on speaker phone? How do you feel about being put on one?


Have you ever found something 'odd' in your food, be it at home or in a restaurant?

How did you react?

Did you ever go back to that restaurant or have that particular dish again?

Jazz Sunday

Time for some music i think -


Vienna Art Orchestra - Vexations 1611

Bill Evans & Jim Hall - I Hear A Rhapsody

David Murray - Ming

Jaga Jazzist - Suomi Finland

Enjoy.

Coates Symphony No.15

Wire magazine lead me to the music of Gloria Caotes.

Gloria Coates: Symphony No.15, "Homage to Mozart

Gloria Coates (*1938): Symphony No.15, "Homage to Mozart", per grande orchestra (2004/2005).

1. Iridescenses
2. Puzzle Canon
3. What Are Stars?

Radio Symphonie Orchester Wien diretta da Michael Boder.
Registrazione live effettuata a Vienna il 16.6.2006.

Symphony no.15:

"A commission for the Passau Festival the Mozart year, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Ave Verum Corpus is one of my favorite Mozart melodies, which I used in the second movement. It is played backwards and then heard canonically towards towards the end of Movement 2.
Mozart died shortly after composing Ave Verum Corpus. This tragedy is expressed in Movement 3."
(Gloria Coates).

Cover image: fortepiano Erard, primi '800.

Thomas Adès - Catch

Another modern composer-

Thomas Adès - Catch Opus 4

Women Rule ..

Jim O'Rourke - Women Of The World

Giacinto Scelsi

More avant garde classical- by a composer that should be better known.

Giacinto Scelsi - I Riti: Ritual March, "The Funeral of Achilles"

"Giacinto Scelsi, a prominent Italian composer of experimental music, is known for his compositional exploration of sound, specifically his acute approach to individual tones. Where Scelsi usually focuses on the single tones of melodic instruments, he approaches I Riti: Ritual March, "The Funeral of Achilles," with a focus on rhythmically thematic material. As the rhythmic material repeats throughout the piece, the dynamic constant in each instrument gradually changes, creating continuous shifts of timbre, while maintaining the rhythmic structure. This compositional approach is unique to Scelsi, as this is his only work for percussion ensemble."

This performance by Ensemble 64.8 took place on Nov. 21st, 2009, in the Davis Concert Hall of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.


( More music here )

Enjoy.

Book 47 - Mikhail Bulgakov "The Heart of a Dog"

Mikhail Bulgakov "The Heart of a Dog" (Vintage)




This is really funny. Not quite on the level of Master and Margarita, but still pretty good.

A Soviet-era doctor, a cross between Pavlov, Lysenko, and Frankenstein, takes in a stray dog and transplants some 'vital human organs' into him. Much to his surprise, the dog begins to transform into a human being. The dog turns out to be a perfect scoundrel, tears up the furniture, swears a lot, hates manners, and promptly joins the animal control section of the local Communist Party, where he kills cats.

There is some deeper satire here about the whole Soviet apparatus, and their attempts to transform humanity, and all that.

A Frankenstein fable that’s as funny as it is terrifying, The Heart of a Dog has also been read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution. It was rejected for publication by the censors in 1925, and circulated in samizdat for years until Michael Glenny translated it into English in 1968—long before it was allowed to be officially published in the Soviet Union. That happened only in 1987, although till this day the book remains one of Mikhail Bulgakov’s most controversial novels in his native country.
But this is really funny. I can imagine the original Russian is even better.

Master and Margarita is still my favourite Bulgakov, but this is fine, too.

Book 48 - Stacy Schiff "The Witches"

Stacy Schiff "The Witches Salem 1692 :A History" (Orion Books)






In 1692, during the bitter cold of winter, a minister’s daughter complains that she is being tormented. The diagnosis? A witch must be afflicting her. Soon other girls are complaining of being pinched and poked. They writhe in agony and scream in horror as shades and specters swirl around them. Soon accusations begin to fly against neighbors, spouses, parents, and children. The prisons swell as witches are arrested and held for trial. In an odd twist, confessed witches are allowed to live while those who refuse to admit their guilt are hanged. As panic spreads, the accusations increase. Before a year has gone by, the madness has ended, but not before twenty people lost their lives.

The notorious Salem witch trials are brought to life once again under the vibrant pen of Stacy Schiff. I think people who typically find history books boring would be pleasantly surprised. Schiff writes this almost like a thriller, very taut and full of suspense. The account is also very straightforward, and describes the politics of the era very thoroughly so that readers can understand the jockeying for power that accompanied the trial.

What the biography does not do – and perhaps what it never could do – is enlighten the reader about the personalities of the possessed girls or the accused witches. Trial transcripts tend to be spotty and subject to distortion, as the men who recorded the events were not bound to be impartial or journalistic in their approach. New England records from the time are also curiously sparse. Women were rarely prominent in the records before and after 1692, so other than a few notes in family genealogies and church records very little is known about their lives. Since there’s no way to know what set these women off or what they thought of the events afterwards, the events always remain somewhat distant.

The great question of “Why did this happen?” is never definitively answered, either. Several explanations that have been proposed over the years are presented, and it’s possible that all of these things were contributing factors to the Salem events. My conclusion, which I assume was Schiff’s as well, is that it’s impossible to know. Too much information was never recorded, or has been lost in the centuries since the witch trials.