The MacAlba

Having managed to get a reliable digital TV signal, I’ve been looking at the additional content that’s now available to me. One show that’s available on the ABC’s digital only channel, ABC2, is music program Dig TV. A segment that I caught was an interview with South Australian band “The Audreysâ€?. This band is described, on their web site, as being “alt-country popâ€?. It’s not a genre that I could say that I’m intimately familiar with, but after listening to them performing a single piece, “Banjo & violinâ€?, I’m hooked.

A couple of days later I nipped into the ABC Centre in town at lunchtime and purchased the only copy of The Audrey’s CD that was there (to be honest I was surprised to find that they had a copy at all - given that there’s not a huge selection of music available in that particular bookshop in the first place).

As inadequate as my music vocabulary and reviewer experience is, that’s not going to stop me having a go at writing a mini-rewiew.

Now, having had the opportunity to listen to all the tracks several times, I’d class this CD as having a higher than average number of tracks that I rate highly (compared the other CDs in my collection).

Taasha Coates’s voice is described as being “smokyâ€?. Personally, I think “smokyâ€? has connotations of roughness and stinging - I’d suggest that “mellowâ€? and “sultryâ€? would be better adjectives (albeit not on every track). Perhaps the banjo of Tristan Goodall has swung the sound towards alt-country (and/or bluegrassy?) - I’m not one for rigorously classifying music into genres, though, I just like what I like. My musical taste is quite eclectic as a result.

The CD is called “Between Last Night and Us�, and my favourite tracks, thus far, would have to be “You & Steve McQueen�, and “Banjo and violin�. The former and a few other tracks can be sampled on their web sites. Why are they my favourite tracks? No idea. I enjoy music based on the total sound rather than, say, what the lyrics are saying to me.

The Audreys are currently on a European tour, then they’re off to Canada. They tour Australia during July/August/September 2006.

The booklet that accompanies the CD has some very nice, quirky, faux-1960’s(?)-Australia photography accompanying it (I’d suggest that may not have been photographer Wend Lear’s goal though, just how I interpret the style).

Resources:

• ABC2
• Dig TV
• The Audreys
• Banjo and violin (Real player, broadband only, perhaps only for 7 days after broadcast)
• The Audreys infoblog (low signal to noise ratio)
• The CD “Between Last Night and Usâ€? at the ABC Shop, and at Amazon

I bought this CD, “Snafu”, after discovering that the tracks had been remastered, and the CD re-issued. The group, “East of Eden” and the album, “Snafu”, date back to the early 1970’s.

The music is of sentimental value to me in that a couple of the tracks, “Jig-a-Jig” and “Marcus Junior”, were amongst the very first vinyl singles I purchased as a youth. I still have that the vinyl, but, given that such things aren’t as conveniently played as ripped CDs, I haven’t touched it for years.

Some of the other tracks on the CD were new to me. Some are somewhat “strange”, perhaps “psychedelic”, and most certainly belong in the ’70s.

The band has been classified as 70’s rock but to me there are also elements of jazz, blues and electric folk.

I seem to have been discovering new and exciting music every week recently. I’ve just ordered two CDs from Fraser Fifield - a sort of “Folk/Balkan/Jazz” fusion. I recently heard some tracks from the Fraser Fifield Trio on the BBC Radio Scotland Be-Bop to Hip-Hop programme and was quite taken with them.

More on those in a few weeks time.

Over the past few days I’ve been re-ripping a few hundred CDs at a higher bit rate. I’m also taking advantage of iTunes new feature whereby individual movements of classical pieces can be aggregated, or joined, to a single track. This latter feature makes per-track shuffling a more practical proposition.

The CD that I’ve just finished listening to, and re-discovering, is “World Fusion“, a Magnatune compilation. The compilation is a selection of works by musicians in Magnatune’s “World” genre.

Of the fifteen tracks there was only one track that I felt slighly disinterested in to begin with, but then it grew on me.

I think it’s the unusual (to me) mix of old and new, traditional and modern, that is most refreshing:

• Beth Quist: electro-Balkan/Indian meets New Age
• Curandero: Flamenco guitar meets Indian Tabla
• Falik: middle-eastern infused with electronica

A few months ago I heard an interview on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Pipeline” program with Thomas Zöller, a German student of the Scottish bagpipes. Indeed, Zöller was about to graduate with a BA degree in Piping (I forget the exact name of the degree) from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

Zöller mentioned that he played with a German early music group, “ESTAMPIE”. A track composed by Zöller, “Sine Nomine”, was played. I was hooked. I ordered the CD “Signum” from Amazon (I’ve given up trying to order anything even slightly unusual in Armidale).

The CD duly arrived, having been supplied to Amazon by ISOTANK MUSIC in Philadelphia. [Aside: A German CD, ordered from Australia, sourced in the USA, couriered (presumably) to Hong Kong, then parcel-posted to me from HK].

The CD contains a selection of sung and instrumental pieces. Most are from the 11th to 13 centuries. A time when man in Europe lived in fear of the end of the world, and the Church was all powerful. I was put in mind of pieces from a similar period in time, a time when many made Pilgrimage. The songs and chants from the “Red Book of Montserrat“, for example.

More on Thomas Zöller can be found here, and information about “Estampie” here.

A few snippets of Thomas Zöller’s performances can be found here. I look forward to hearing more from Zöller in time.

Once upon a time, long, long ago when I was knee high to a grasshopper, etc, I used to sing soprano in the church choir. The assembled group sat high above the congregation in the organ loft. I spent many an idle moment trying to work out just how the organist could possibly remain seated in one spot given that he had no solid grounding - both arms and legs would flail around, operating the multiple keyboards and organ stops. I wondered how much pressure was required to generate the volume of air that must be piped through the seemingly miles of organ pipes.

I had forgotten those days until I recently read a description by “but she’s a girl” of her recent attendance at a concert at Lichfield Cathedral. The remark that made me smile the most was the description of the work being “prefaced by a thunderous introduction”, by the use of the organ stop marked Armageddon with Knobs On. I could just imagine myself up there in that organ loft all those years ago.

Some people say the most daft things.

BBC Radio 3 recently broadcast all the works of Beethoven and then made all nine symphonies available as MP3 downloads. The latter were performed by the BBC’s own Philharmonic.

In an article in The Independent, the Managing Director of the Naxos record label says something which I can only assume he later regretted. He said that by making these works freely available as downloadable MP3 files, “You are also leading the public to think that it is fine to download and own these files for nothing.”

Given that the BBC owns the recording and performance rights of a non-copyrighted work, and that it can decide what it can do with its own property, then it is fine to download and it is OK to own those files for nothing. The BBC has its own term and conditions attached, and the MP3 file quality was limited (to minimise file size and download time). I hardly think that record labels have anything to fear.

I can only assume that the record labels mentioned in the article are short-sightedly worried about their own company’s short-term profits rather than the promotion of Classical Music to an as yet untapped potential audience in the longer term.