Sunday, 9 August 2015

The Listening Club - 9th August 2015

Hey all!

Well well, a glorious weekend here in Amsterdam, so with a fine breakfast and bloody mary combo swimming around in my stomach and the sound of Terry Riley's "Rainbow In Curved Air" and Arvo Part's "Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten" floating out of Radio 6 (good work Tom Service), it's time for a bit of tapping before a sitting out and relaxing session in the sunshine. Hoping there's no late disturbances like last week, kudos to @thejayarr for whipping a new treat out of the bag once he discovered his original selection had already been chosen last year by @eastvanhalen. For future reference, the list of albums we've already had is now here (thanks @akx, and ironically @thejayarr for the work) - a quick ctrl-f on that page if you're selecting and think you could be risking a repeat wouldn't go amiss! Also, stat fans, the track selections for the end-of-the-month vortexes are here, may prove handy if you're new and wondering what all this #vortex business is about...

So yes, @thejayarr turned it around in storming speed last week zooming back with "3rd Eye Vision" by Hieroglyphics, which did the job rather nicely indeed. Many thanks to him for the double effort, and for flipping the frisbee across to @faberfedor for this week's selection. And here he comes...

"Hi-de-ho, LC!

While listening to last week's excellent selection by @thejayarr, 
I kept thinking a good counterpoint would be $ALBUM by $BAND. Surprisingly, I don't own a copy of $ALBUM. I went to the local CD store but they didn't have a copy. Seeing how I don't want to encourage Apple's iTunes business, I looked around for an alternative.

I came up with this week's selection.

I find the background to this album to be very interesting. You may or may not. This band was a moderately successful soft country rock band in the early 70's (think early Eagles). They came across a musical tradition (which is the title of the album) which was very non-commercial. Their record company didn't want to do it but the band was adamant ("were adamant" for our Brish friends). They harassed their record company until the record company said "Fine! Here's some money. Go away!"

It became their most popular album and spawned a series of albums in the same vein with similar titles by other artists. Interestingly enough, you never hear anything from the band members themselves as they played as session musicians to the artists you'll be hearing.

During the opening strains, I expect to read a lot of "@faberfedor Are you freaking serious?!" or "I hate this style of music!" Keep listening. These were the best artists of their time in this 
genre. Not the stars. Not the headliners. The best musicians.

See you at 8 PM BST."

Indeedy. Download is here, and the mixcloud (*sacrifices goat*) shalt be here. So mote it be.




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