Music Downloads

If you follow any of my musical musings on this site you’ll know I have what some would refer to as mildly eclectic taste.

Some albums casually insert themselves into your life without you even noticing.

The music chosen by Anderson to help populate his films is like a rich, delicious ramen in a cozy noodle shop full of smiling staff, lustrous woods and the coziest of curiously-patterned seat cushions.

Blame Stephen, again. Swedish singer, organist, and composer Anna von Hausswolff has made some dark magic on her latest album Dead Magic.

Smerz is Norwegian duo Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt. According to Google translate, smerz means smerz in English, which clears up a lot of the questions I had. Have fun is their new EP, released on XL Recordings earlier this month, and you can take that title as invitation or demand, depending on one's preferences in these matters.

Protest music. Some of my favorite music is protest music, both covert and overt. Following on in the great tradition of overt anger from records like Max Roach's scathing hot We Insist! featuring the always memorable Abbey Lincoln, Irreversible Entanglements' eponymous debut features Camae Ayewa on spoken word, regular readers know her as the viscerally frightening Moor Mother, Keir Neuringer on alto sax, Aquiles Navarro on trumpet, Luke Stewart double bass, and Tcheser Holmes drums. They went into the studio together one day and walked away with this fiery gem.

Glass comes very close to the embodiment of a perfect record. Recorded live, in situ, at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto turned Johnson's people who live in glass houses into their instrument:

"...the pair fixed contact mics to its glass walls, which they effectively played as an “instrument”, rubbing it with rubber gong mallets to generate delicate tones which they combined with a sympathetic palette of singing glass bowls, crotales, keyboards and mixers."