Music
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I don't have any idea at all where I got the mp3 of this song, or rather track–it's not exactly a song, but a combination of droning and mechanical sounds and percussion. I found it haunting. And I don't remember how I figured out that the voice might or must be that of Robert Oppenheimer,…
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That's a line from an Al Stewart song, "On the Border," the second hit single from his very successful 1976 album (and extremely successful single by the same name), Year of the Cat. It's one of the little cultural fragments that are always bouncing around in my head, and it probably shows up once a…
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I wonder how many hours have been entertainingly wasted in arguments about the nature of certain pop music sub-genres (not to mention sub-sub and so on), and about whether this or that band belongs in this or that category. Shoegaze seems to me one of the more difficult to pin down, in part because it…
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I recently decided that I wanted to get to know Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier (Das wohltemperierte Clavier). I have a recording, a two-box set of LPs given to me fifteen years or so ago by a friend who didn't want them. (He's mainly a jazz fan, and I got the impression that he had bought…
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Dead Can Dance is a two-person group comprised of Lisa Gerrard (of the amazing voice) and Brendan Perry. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Gerrard's solo album The Mirror Pool led me to this one. Or, I should say, back to it, because although I have it I had not listened to it…
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If you weren't there, it may be difficult for you to grasp the effect that "The Girl From Ipanema" had on a young man of the mid-'60s. You needed only her voice to convince you that she was the girl from Ipanema, and to strike in you the deep chord of longing which the song describes…
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Listening to Mary Fahl made me think of this artist, another of those who helped make the name of the 4AD label revered for many years. Lisa Gerrard was one half of the duo Dead Can Dance who released a number of albums on that label in the '80s and into the mid-'90s. I'm familiar…
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I've been casting a cold eye on my CD shelves with the intention or at least hope of getting rid of a few discs. There isn't enough room for all of them, and there are at least a dozen that just sort of sit around here and there. A certain number aren't even really mine,…
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By “fans” I mean fanatics, or near-fanatics–the kind of person who likes the work enough to know all (or at least many) of the most highly-regarded recordings and can discuss in detail the strengths, weaknesses, and nuances of each. I am not such a person with reference to any piece of music. The number of…
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This is the piece (and performance) which Craig mentioned in a comment on my recent post about the young composer Caroline Shaw. It's a setting of a few sentences from Psalm 84. I was not able to figure out exactly which translation she uses, but another performance includes the text as: How beloved is your…
Light On Dark Water 