Auteur: bruno

yes! yes! yes! i’ve appreciated steve martland ever since i saw him perform as an opening act to michael nyman in london a few years ago. re-mix was one of the funniest ‘classical’ performances i’ve ever seen. his music is very eclectic and experimental (in a good sense !), strong, and also humorous at times

alas! it’s not that easy to come by an steve martland album: the bmg 2 disc set of babi yar and crossing the border seemed to be the only one currently available. but all that has changed with the blackbox release of ‘horses of instruction’, featuring fairly recent work from the nineties (with the exception of principia and re-mix). re-mix appears to be in a slightly up-beat tempo from what’s on the bmg discs, giving it just the energetic ‘schwung’ i remember it had when i saw steve martland conducting it in london

go get it @ the blackboxmusic site

i am really rediscovering my sources. only recently somebody asked me about a (very) hard to find greenaway catalogue. where else could i direct them than to “shipley – specialist art booksellers”. if you’ve never heard of shipley do go and visit their site -if you’re looking for a hard to find art(ist) book, don’t hesitate. ian shipley has helped me quite a bit in the past, when i was trying to find all those greenaway editions i thought were impossible to get by.

http://www.artbook.co.uk/

btw -if you’ve seen 84 charing cross road (with anne bancroft and anthony hopkins), you’d be delighted to learn that shipley is located just there (in the same street, albeit in nr 70), and that the (atmosphere in the) store is just similar to the one in the movie

just found a very interesting site: Kyle Gann’s Home Page. i got there via a search on ‘michael nyman’, which brought me to a column he (kyle gann) wrote about his getting on the internet, and on which the Michael Nyman website (back in its netpoint incarnation) is favourably mentioned. which of course made me look beyond that page.

gann is a composer, music critic, assistant professor and author of (a.o.) a book on American Music in the 20th Century (Schirmer Books, 1997). he seems like such a dynamic and entertaining writer -the book immediately went on my wish list

also, check out his on-line writings, e.g. A Forest from the Seeds of Minimalism An Essay on Postminimal and Totalist Music (4 jan 1999), Breaking the Chain Letter An Essay on Downtown Music (18 apr 1998)

recommended.

it’s been a while since i ordered cds through the internet. the difference in price and choice wasn’t all that different from what the local stores had to offer, so i mostly got what i wanted from the fnac (compares to your average virgin megastore), and i gathered they got all that i needed (they carried everything e.g. amazon or cdnow carries)

until, recently, some of you pointed out that i had missed some serious nyman, glass and bryars albums, and i stumbled on materiali sonori and black box. i had orderd from them before (i.e. two years ago), but i discovered i had missed quite a few good albums.

so i ordered from black box last week, and i got ‘frame’ by simon haram in my mailbox today. don’t miss out on this –there’s a link to their site in the sidebar; and i’m already browsing the site to see what i can order next.

meaning? that there are a lot of good albums out there, and you should look beyond the obvious. i already knew that, and most likely you do too… but we need to be reminded sometimes …i know i do