John Moulder - Bifröst

Yesterday was eMusic-refresh-day for me - 50 virgin downloads waiting to be used on all kinds of hitherto unknown musical delights.

One of those unexpected pleasures is this album by John Moulder - I found via a list of ECM albums, which lead to be searching for albums by bassist Arild Andersen, this was in the list of albums he was on, I liked the cover, had a listen and loved it.

I know very little about John Moulder - his own website is pretty crappy, his record label site is even worse... Maybe you know him - if so, let me know interesting things about him below.

I also can't find any proper full track previews of his music (duh!), so the ones on eMusic will have to do til he gets smart and lets us actually hear his music...

Anyway, it's fab, worth a listen and dropping a few downloads on.

via emusic.com

 

Silje Nergaard with Pat Metheny - Tell Me Where You're Going

Ahhhh. 

I've been finally reunited with my not unsubstantial vinyl collection. Well, most of it - some of it is with a friend who was supposed to be selling it for me about 2 years ago, and hasn't as yet, so I'll have to get that back too. But the rest of it is in our hallway. It's only here til I can get rid of it - sell it, donate it to charity shops, swap it for cakes or cruelty-free nail varnish. Whatever. 

But it does mean that I'm being reminded of both the good and the bad music I bought back in my vinyl-addiction days. 

And one of the best records I ever bought was the 12" single of this - Tell Me Where You're Going. I bought it cos it was about 50p and had Pat Metheny's name on the cover. But once I got it I played it, and played it, and played it. It's a beautiful song, and makes me yearn for Pat to do more work with pop singers. 

It's also worth noting that it's five and a half minutes long - people don't generally write or play five and a half minute pop songs these days. Perhaps because they don't write songs that deserve that amount of exploration. Or celebration. 

Whatever, this is outstanding. Enjoy. 

Free music from Steve Coleman

Over the last couple of days, I've been checking out some music from Steve Coleman. He's someone I've heard a lot about over the years, but hadn't actually listened to til now. 

He's recently made a massive amount of his back catalogue free to download from his site. There's a load of really incredible music in there! (thanks to @philwbass for the tip-off!)

Check it out at http://www.m-base.com/download.html - as well as his essay about why he's making it available for free at http://www.m-base.com/give_away.html 

I hope Steve discovers BandCamp soon - it's perfect for what he's doing here, and would give us the chance to send him something for the music if we want to. Which would be nice. As well as the much higher res files without him carrying the bandwidth costs... (the files on Steve's site are 128K MP3s) 

Anyway, get 'em, they're amazing. 

The Nels Cline Singers – Draw Breath

I do from, time to time, go on obsessive binges on the music of one artist. Over the years, I've got nuts over Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Bill Frisell, Iona, Yes, Eric Roche, Jonatha Brooke...

One of the more recent ones is Nels Cline - an incredibly diverse and creative musician, whose music is impossible to describe beyond the instrumentation and the injunction to listen to lots of it before making up your own mind about what it is that he does... I'll post a few tracks here, but here's a favourite of mine, from his album 'Draw Breath' - the track's called Confection, and I loves it :)

via last.fm

Rob Ickes - I Can't Make You Love Me

So, stumbling through a few links from a tweet, to a site to a list of artists to one I knew cos I'd seen him live...

..brought me to this page - http://robickes.argoarts.com/ 

And I clicked on the 'play' button for 'I Can't Make You Love Me', and within about a minute had tears in my eyes. 

It's truly outstanding. Listened the the other two tracks, both beautiful. 

Scoured the usual haunts looking for the highest res download I could find (the first link only has 3 tracks, I wanted to whole album). Ended up with Amazon (256k VBR) for about seven quid. Bargain. Bought it, am listening now, it's outstanding. 

I saw Rob Ickes play in 2004 - Evil Harv and I were in Nashville and went to see my friend Dave Pomeroy play with his new trio, which featured Rob on Dobro and Andy Leftwich on mandolin. It was, of course, mind-blowingly brilliant. The other three people in the audience thought so too. Yup, there were 5 people there. For that.

They did an album, under the name 'Three Ring Circle' - go and get that too :) 

Jeff Schmidt - Outre

This album's been out for a few years now, but is one of the few solo bass records that I come back to time and time again to listen to. 

As I've said before, I don't like most solo bass playing. Jeff's a massive exception to that rule. His music is amazing. 

He also did an amazing podcast about the making of the album, and continues to blog smart musical things at beautiful-bass.com

Here's the album, listen, then download it, it's amazing:

http://jeffschmidt.bandcamp.com/album/outre">From Under The Weight of Knowing by Jeff Schmidt http://jeffschmidt.bandcamp.com/album/outre">From Under The Weight of Knowing by Jeff Schmidt

Nail - Galvanized. Awesome Fusion Goodness

OK, so this is my third post here about Nail/Neil Alexander. I know, I'm sounding a bit obsessive. But he's awesome. They are awesome. 

And this, dear friends, is the magic of the internets - Neil doesn't need to be 'famous' to validate how great he is. He doesn't need adverts, he just needs to let people hear it, and take it from there. 

The music reminds me of the best of what Herbie Hancock did in his electric phase, but with a whole load more cinematic textural stuff going on. Everything that was great about when fusion was a really exciting thing in the 70s, without any of the stuff that made it awful for most of the 80s and early 90s. 

Neil's still finishing off his BandCamp page, but here's the Nail album, Galvanized, for your listening pleasure. If you like it, grab the download. 

I'm a fan!

http://nailmusic.bandcamp.com/album/galvanized">Rain Road by Neil Alexander & NAIL http://nailmusic.bandcamp.com/album/galvanized">Rain Road by Neil Alexander & NAIL

Starlight Casts No Shadow - Neil Alexander And Nail

OK, tell me this fab tune doesn't remind you of the theme tune to the TV version of Hitch-hikers Guide To the Galaxy? :) 

Been listening to loads of Neil Alexander's music of late - he's @nailmusic on twitter, and he's fab. Check him out - 

http://nailmusic.bandcamp.com/track/starlight-casts-no-shadow">Starlight Casts No Shadow by Neil Alexander & NAIL http://nailmusic.bandcamp.com/track/starlight-casts-no-shadow">Starlight Casts No Shadow by Neil Alexander & NAIL