#3816 Erik Hall - Music for 18 Musicians

3.5/5 probably better, as pleasant listening goes, than most performances. So let's be glad it exists. But the thrill was always undeniably in the insidious madness of the physical playing - it's hard to recommend this _too enthusiastically

#3618 Sergei Rachmaninoff / Berliner Philharmoniker / Lorin Maazel (1984) - Symphonic Dances, Op.45; Intermezzo "Aleko"; Vocalise, Op.34

3.5/5 the fuck do I know what to do with classical. It does move, gesture to motion. Lyrical, evocative, sprightly, alive, but only as alive a most excellent oil painting can be, in 2019. Goes decent with basketball, actually, though

#3401 Steve Reich - Reich: Drumming; Six Pianos; Music for Mallet Instruments

3.5/5 The first drumming track's what I want the rest to be: pure drums without any overt melodic contribution, letting the music come out of all those reverberations and overlaps. The others bring in pianos and vibes and chimes and sure, conjure all these extra harmonics etc, and it was all very groundbreaking at the time, but in retrospect that first track's the most adventurous and most interesting, making for a weirdly-paced listen

#3399 VA - re:works

3.5/5 Pleasant, flowing armchair electronic, spanning atmospheric, thumping, and bleepbloopy styles. Each artist takes things pretty far into their respective direction, leaving only the barest skeleton of the classical inspiration, but better that than another run at Switched on Bach

#3253 Keith Keniff - Branches

Shimmering, twinkling soundtrackery, pianos and bells and strings all plinking and popping endlessly, the glitchy Booksian hestitations bringing the most interesting moments. Uncertain of whether to be peaceful or ominous, never finding a structure that supports both 3/5

#2558 Philip Glass - Glassworks

With only a passing glimpse of the critical impression of Philip Glass, I know I'm wandering into well-trod territory. The intelligencia's been all through here, tamed the beasts, beat down the grasses. And I can only retrace the fact that the repetition entrances, that the imperfection becomes figure to its ground, that every thing is in its right place, that the chords rise and fall until your breath follows suit.

It's fucking perfect. It coaxes meaning from the moment of listening.

It's the kind of album that makes me lament this project, the forward passage of time - what better words might I have spilled about Dan Deacon, Beck, Basinski, Atticus Ross, to say nothing of the just-reviewed Sontag Shogun and Cornelius, a dozen others (but especially Dan Deacon, jesus).

What's the the Mint Chicks said? You're bored because you're boring.

I try to keep a finger on the scale around here, to check whether something's actually worth listening to, pretension and reputation aside. I feel like these 10-seconds-stretched-to-7-minute stemwinders could be called boring. But with only the barest inclination to dig into the details, I think you'll find ever-increasing layers of doubt, tipping over into violent disagrement with the idea that there's anything boring about any of this -- there's near-infinite details to dig into, if you have even the most basic inclination. Consider yourself encouraged to find it 4.5/5

#2438 Valgeir Sigurðsson - Dissonance

You know how Moby had that map of every chord and how it affects the human heart? And how he'd chart a course to the exact emotional space he demanded you arrive at?

Sigrosson's music sounds like it was mapped on the forbidden section, a sweeping line across the regions marked Here Be Dragons. Every anxious moment builds on the last, an ever-climbing Jenga tower of simmering tension. But Beautiful. And that's how he seduces you, spurring you to stack the tower of your own inevitable topping brick by brick.

And I evoke Moby because for the first 45 minutes, it's all a bit clinical. The best bit is the third of the three suites, 1875 really pulling out the stops and kicking your legs out, finding some move beyond a pummeling of the book of chords, some movement that leaves a pit in your heart that you scramble to explain.

This's a challenging pile of strings, stacked the the sky against you, a series of sounds designed to take you down in increments, and to keep you complicit in the process; a real act of musical emotional abuse. Admirable, in its way. But it cannot be recommended in good conscience 3/5

#2164 Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music for Piano, Harpsichord and Strings

Fact I learned: the Bosendorfer piano has an extra set of low strings that add richness to its sound, not so much because the performer necessarily hits the extra keys, but because the strings incidentally vibrate slightly as the piano is played, adding subtle harmonics and tones.

There's probably no purer demonstration of this effect than Strumming for Bosendorfer Piano. Palestine wangs on the piano repetitively, slowly shifting his technique and focus, until you loose track of the notes, and the singing, ethereal tones of the major and minor vibrations of every string on the piano slowly coalesce and shift.

This's perilously close to being wanky process music, where the concept is a substitute for anything interesting about the sound itself, but there's three important points here:
1) the sound itself is just straight up more beautiful than most. So rich and layed and otherworldly, never quite the same over the course of its hour
2) there's a human element here. I love Andy Battaglia's description of Palestine's physical coaxing of the notes from the piano. This is not just wailing on a piano by rote: there's a real sense of interaction, interplay, seduction.
3) you can feel the piano, know the piano. I've long thought of repetitive music having a physicality, and here's a sonar map of the piano itself. You come to feel hammers, strings, fiber, wood. It's intimate.

A gorgeous, subtly fascinating recording.

The other two tracks are less effective on all three counts: the sounds simply aren't as beautiful, Palestine's absence as performer is noticeable, and the instruments' physicality isn't as thoroughly embodied.

The harpsichord succeeds somewhat, because Harpsichords are weird. You can start to see the physical/sonic relationship of their little picks as the notes bloom and blend - but without the same ability to reverberate the entire object, the same sense of wholeness never arrives.

Same goes for the strings. Being played repetitively and constantly is kinda their thing already, and no new sense of them arrives - it's just arty classical music.

But the piano piece is plenty: an hour's worth of truly successful experimental music that's essential for anyone with the patience for such nonsense 4.5/5

#2035 Terry Riley - Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector

I love Riley's minimalism when it hypnotizes, and the title track finds that stride from time to time. But the grounded instrumentation of the Kronos Quartet dispels all magic, the majority of the recording sounding like a showy wank. I'm impressed they strung this all together, but I am not overwhelmed.

Philistine doubledown: I straight don't like the sounds of these instruments on their own. Maybe its the production, maybe or my tin ears, but the cadenzas interspersed through Cadenza on the Night Plain were a gauntlet to be endured 2.5/5

#1747 Hugo Montenegro - Montenegro in Italy

Latin-tinged orchestral trifle, romantic and sprightly in broad strokes. It's fine. I don't know why I'm listening to this kind of stuff lately 2.5/5

#1367 Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

Burgeoning trumpet great John Cross introduced me to Reich's minimalism years ago, but it's got a lot more backdoors to get its hooks in me in 2014. The way notes melt into texture on this hourlong song, the way you get those buzzes and surges that I reach for via electronics, achieved via the sheer culmination of decisively analog sounds, the emotional switches flipped by the abstract.

It's an experience, somehow soothing and tense, changing drastically depending on how closely you listen. Vital, easy, difficult, slippery stuff - been on my mind since first listen 4/5