September CD Giveaway

Wednesday, August 31st, was the fifth anniversary of our first arrival into Sweden. To mark this event, I will give away some stuff this month, beginning with a fourth batch of fifteen CDs. Peruse the list of CDs below. If you’d like one of them, check the comments to see whether your choice has already been claimed or not: if not, then leave a comment stating which of the CDs you want. Once you have laid claim to the disc of your choice, send me an e-mail (to mr.h@spamula.net) which contains your snail-mail address. In a few days’ time, I’ll sort through the requests, and will decide who gets what: in most cases, it’ll simply happen that the first person to claim a CD will be the one who receives it. I’ll mail out the discs within a week or so. I’m limiting the offer to two CDs per recipient.

1. Antonio Vivaldi’s Works for Lute, performed by Jakob Lindberg, Nils-Erik Sparf, Tullo Galli, Monica Huggett, and the Drottningholms Barockensemble. I picked this disc up at a second-hand book-store in the town where I live. It is eminently pleasant music, very well recorded, but is a disc I have only ever listened through a handful of times.

2. Georg Frederic Händel’s Suites for Keyboard, performed by Keith Jarrett. This is another disc bought cheaply at the same second-hand place as the one above, and which has suffered the same unfortunate neglect while in my care, despite the elegance of the music and the fine quality of its playing.

3. The Concerto Project, volume I, featuring a pair of fairly recent compositions by Philip Glass. Julian Lloyd Webber is the soloist for the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, while Evelyn Glennie and Jonathan Haas take the lead parts in the Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra. The orchestra, In both cases, is the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gerard Schwarz. For every CD of Glass’s music that I buy & love, it seems there must be another than I can’t bing myself to enjoy—this disc falls into the latter category.

4. Berlin Cabaret Songs, by various composers, sung (in German) by Ute Lemper, accompanied by the Matrix Ensemble. I bought this CD of at least five years ago—I forget from where—it’s a selection of 1920s night-club standards, many of them satirical or suggestive, which were later designated as Entartete Musik (‘Degenerate Music’) by the Nazi government. I used to listen to this quite often, but have all but ignored it for the past few years.

5. The Carl Stalling Project: ‘Music From Warner Bros.Cartoons, 1936-1958.’ This is a collection of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies soundtracks minus the voices and sound-effects, some presented singly, others grouped into extended medleys, which, while fascinating to hear once, isn’t something I feel like revisting.

6. Sun Ra and his Arkestra’s Greatest Hits. I wasn’t aware that they’d had any hits, as such, but I was curious to hear some of this eccentric band’s music, having been intrigued by the odd snippet I’d read or heard about it here and there. Alas, I have a bit of a tin ear as regards jazz, which has frustrated most of my efforts at broadening my musical horizons in that direction—and this disc, like most of my jazz-dabblings, just left me a bit cold.

7. Seven Days of Falling, by the Esbjörn Svesson Trio. One notable exception to my bad experiences with jazz, was my discovery of the music of the contemporary trio The Bad Plus. At Amazon and elsewhere I saw recommendations which suggested that if I liked The Bad Plus, I would probably also enjoy this acclaimed Swedish trio. In my case, however, this did not apply…

8. Let it Die, by Leslie Feist. Having admired Ms. Feist’s contributions to the Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People, I was interested to hear this widely-praised solo album. At the crunch, though, I found I disliked some ‘congested’ quality in her voice: it’s as though she we singing through a head-cold.

9. Bee Hives is a B-sides and rarities compilation by Broken Social Scene, whose other two albums were among my most-played discs earlier this year, following my overdue discovery of this fine Canadian band. As it happens, I’m just not quite enough of a fan to merit keeping a hold of this item. I’m looking forward to their new, eponymously-titled effort due for release next month, however.

10. The Arcade Fire E.P.: I enjoyed Funeral almost as much as the next weblogger, but wasn’t so taken with this, their recently-reissued and remastered début E.P.

11. Get Behind Me Satan by The White Stripes. I didn’t like this disc nearly as much as White Blood Cells and Elephant. I still didn’t hear their first two albums: are they any good?

12. Camper van Beethoven’s New Roman Times made me feel old. I loved CvB when they were first on the go, and keenly regret that I narrowly missed seeing them in concert in London, a matter of weeks before they broke up. While this new release has a lot of the same eclectic spirit as their earlier work, the sense of fun that was one of their most endearing characteristics just doesn’t seem to have survived their regrouping. Or it could just be me, getting old.

13. Susumu Yokota’s Sakura. In the MeFi CD swap earlier this year I received a CD including two delightful tracks of Yokota’s. To follow this up, I ordered Sakura from Amazon, but found the tracks thereupon didn’t grab me in the same way as those others, the names of which I forget.

14. Handwriting, by Khonnor. I’ve seen a few reviews claim that Khonnor will be the next big thing, and, indeed he is a talented artist with a knack for atmospherically blending electronic and acoustic instrumentation. Sadly for me, as with #8 above, I couldn’t get past the ‘blocked-up’ quality of Khonnor’s voice, which put me right off his music.

15. Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding by The Venetian Snares. Although I was quite impressed by this disc of shinily elaborate electronic compositions, I didn’t really warm to it, and reckon, like all the other CDs above, it could find a better home elsewhere.