The Listening Guide
🎶 The listening guide: five albums, released during the past twelve months, chosen around a weekly theme 🎶
This week, we highlight five albums that harness a minimalist approach to composition and arrangement. Sometimes employing drones and repetitive motifs, with subtle shifts in texture and dynamics, the albums can have a calming and centring effect, whilst providing plenty of musical detail for the intent listener to break down. Contours’ ‘Balafon Sketches’ features some of Manchester’s finest musicians and benefits some great causes, whilst the Australian Art Orchestra’s ‘Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger Than Space’ is a creative elegy to the victims of the first world war, with compositions looking at the knock-on effect of grief, the youth of many soldiers involved, and the stories of several women whose lives were changed in different ways. Support each great project on Bandcamp.
Australian Art Orchestra – Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger Than Space
Album of the Week
Our NQ Jazz album of the week is Montreal-based vocalist and bandleader Ayelet Rose Gottlieb’s thirteen-part lunar song cycle. Subtitled ‘Summoning the Witches’, 13 Lunar Meditations harnesses the writing, voices and perspectives of women from around the world, with celebrated jazz vocalist Jay Clayton co-leading alongside Gottlieb, plus a range of featured guest vocalists and a chorus conducted by DB Boyko also contributing. Support the project on Bandcamp, where a range of merch bundles are available.
Classic Album
This week’s classic album selection is a boundary-crossing collaboration between two late giants of Afro-Cuban music. Vocalist Celia Cruz and percussionist Tito Puente first worked together in the mid-to-late-sixties, and released Alma Con Alma with the musical backing of Puente’s orchestra in 1970.