The Listening Club - 20th April 2014

Hey there,

I've got family visiting over the holiday weekend, so today was all about enjoying stuff like this:

Yep, The Netherlands is truly in bloom, so it was off to Keukenhof to see many many many flowers. Lovely.

Back on home turf, next weekend sees many of you #dambusters arriving here for King's day, so next week's #swearyvortex (urm...) is going to be quite special. Not exactly sure yet where we'll be gathering for it, but it's going to be fun whatever happens. In the meantime, get yer sweary tunes into the usual address ASAP and we'll see how many eyebrows we can raise next Sunday...

Last week, @nessiest took her debut in the chair and presented us with a bunch of finest Kiwis in the form of the movie soundtrack for"Topless Women Talk About Their Lives", which went down pretty damn well - big thanks to her for the pick and for flipping the frisbee across to @mrhig, and here he is with this week's intro...

"In my list of genres in my musical library, I have entries for both "Chamber Pop" and "Baroque Pop". There's only one artist in each genre. They're both the same artist, actually, for different albums, and that artist is not the artist you'll be hearing tonight, but it's a useful demonstration that my musical tastes sometimes favour those who don't easily fit into obvious genres; those that straddle several, a lot of the time.

Tonight's artist is no exception. Here's the thing; I was going to go a bit easy on us all. I had something picked that was nice and upbeat, even dancey, and it evoked in me feelings that reminded me of Spring, so it was quite apropos, too. But Listening Club offers the opportunity of both exposing yourself to new things, and in my case, tonight, challenging an audience and showing them something you love.

So I chose this.

You don't get dancey. You don't get Spring. You don't get "nice" and "upbeat", either. You don't even get "easy". Or to be more accurate, you get all of those things at times… it's just not the whole package. Our artist contradicts himself. He is large. He contains multitudes.

So you get love. You get death. You get betrayal, breakups, betrayal, you get Art, you get God, you get aliens, you get the end of the world. I hope you like brass, strings, and a bit of electronica. Even if you don't, it'll be an experience. Just wait for that last track. I hope it blows your head off like it did with me, and still does."

Reety-ho! Download is here and the Mixcloud stream (which may reveal the song titles, you have been warned)  is here!

Search #listeningclub to see what's going on, and follow @listeningclub for the admin.

Hope to see you tonight at 8pm BST (GMT+1)!