My friend and collaborator Andre Burke passed away this year on June 30th. Andre has played violin on my most important and personal music since 1993. My last solo record, Shadow Economy, released in 2000, featured Andre on six of the eight tracks. We have been working intermittently since then on a collection of new music which will finally be released this year on December 23rd, which would have been Andre’s 48th birthday. The new record is called X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango, and this is the opening track, Milonga Del Zero.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andre’s violin playing the last few months. Thinking about how I, as a composer, could give Andre a few scrawls on a piece of staff paper, and he would give me back music. Music infused with emotion, with attitude, with life. Composing is often regarded as somehow “above” mere musicianship, a higher form of artistic expression. But with Andre, his violin could always transform a simple, even trite, idea into a rich and seductive landscape. Consider the two-note phrase that opens “Total Harmonic Distortion”, our collaboration from the previous record (which you can hear here): nothing but a simple whole-step up. Two notes played one after the other. Could anything be simpler from a compositional point-of-view? And yet, listen to Andre play those two notes, and it has all the life and emotion one needs from music.

Another two-note example: the minor third played in the end theme from “The Wire” (the track called “The Fall”, which you can hear an excerpt from here). Those two notes, played that way, give you the necessary humanity in the midst of a track which is otherwise mostly machines. I think it’s the violin which makes this track exceptional, and it’s probably the most popular piece of music I’ve ever written.

So there will be no more now. Andre is gone, and I’m left with only the music. A dozen years of violining now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A finite body of work.

Thank you Andre, I miss you.

*****

Andre has a web site with selected examples of his writing and filmmaking here. You can see some of Andre’s films here. Our previous record together, Shadow Economy, is available from Amazon, CD Baby, and the iTunes Music Store.

This is the opening track from Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem’s new record Le voyage de Sahar, just now out on ECM. It sits on my shelf next to the prized Astor Piazzola, Alberto Iglesias, and Dino Saluzzi records. I am captivated by Brahem’s oud; Jean-Louis Matinier’s accordian is sublime and surprising; Francois Couturier’s piano playing is best when it keeps a light touch and stays out of the way - occasionally the tinkly arpeggios remind one of the dreaded New Age beast which hovers in the background of so many otherwise-excellent ECM releases. But like the finest of that crop, this is exquisitely produced and when at it’s best creates a unique, mesmerizing, contemplative space to get lost in.

You can buy Le voyage de Sahar here. The artist has a web site here.

Guitarist/Producer Michael Brook has had a pretty good run of it. He first entered the Eno/Hassel continuum by engineering Hassel’s seminal 1977 work Vernal Equinox. After playing guitar with Martha and The Muffins, he played bass on one of the best records of the late 20th Century: Hassel and Eno’s 1980 Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics. He went on to play guitar and electronics on many records, produced several notable world music fusion projects (Night Song with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan being the best) and now does a fair amount of film scoring.

This track is the closer from Brook’s best solo album, the 1992 Cobalt Blue, which also has a splendid live companion album, Live at the Aquarium: London Zoo 21 May 1992. The two were reissued by 4AD in 1999 as a double CD set. Brook’s solo music inhabits an interesting spot in the spectrum of instrumental music in terms of Eno’s Ignorable/Interesting index; it’s contemplative but not wallpapery, often energetic but not agressive, and deeply technological while remaining very human.

Although all the various Cobalt Blue versions seem to be officially out of print, you can still find a copy of the double CD at places like… Wal Mart???? There’s a pretty good unofficial Michael Brook page here.

Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel’s 1995 film Middle of The Moment is a poetic treatise on nomadism, intercutting documentary footage of a tribe of Tuareg nomads in North Africa and a European art-circus group. The film is a mesmerizing journey with a completely unique sense of pacing… protracted… crystal-clear… with a laser beam focus on tiny illuminating details. Fred frith, who was the subject of Humbert and Penzel’s 1990 documentary Step Across The Border, wrote the excellent score for the film.

In creating the soundtrack CD, Frith took the entire audio track of the film as his raw material, and created a unique sound and music montage piece which weaves together his music with the evocative sound landscapes of the film. This track has very little of Frith’s “music” - some drones drift by occasionally - but rather creates a captivating mood through layers of “musical” found sound, including roosters, wind, and Tuareg voices.

The CD of Middle of The Moment is available here. The DVD is here. Fred Frith has a site here.

Derek Jarman’s 1993 meditation on mortality features music by Simon Fisher-Turner and others, the voices of Jarman, Tilda Swinton, and a couple of other actors, deep landscapes of sound effects, and a bottomless field of blue. And that’s all. Completely unique, very powerful, and highly recommended.

You can find the CD of Blue here. The DVD isn’t available in the US, but you can find it at Amazon in Germany here. You can find the entire text here. You could also create a pretty accurate approximation of watching the film by dimming the lights, listening to the CD, and staring at a large blue card. Just make sure you have the right shade of blue.

Here’s a 14-minute-long, rambling improvisation that also happens to be one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever written. It came up this morning on the random play from my iPod and somehow seemed like a good end of summer mood, so I thought I’d share.

It’s taken from my 2000 CD Shadow Economy, and features my long-time collaborator Andre Burke playing violin, myself on fretless bass, and Chris Muir on guitar. You can find more information about Shadow Economy here, and buy a copy of the CD from Amazon here, or from CD Baby here.  Buy Shadow Economy from The iTunes Store here.  And you can get this track for free anytime here.  Enjoy!

Harold Budd is retiring at the age of sixty-nine, and as a parting gift is leaving us with one of his finest records yet, the double CD Avalon Sutra. Because he first gained major notice on his 1980 collaboration with Brian Eno The Plateaux of Mirror, Budd is usually thought of as an ambient composer; but his work evokes Romantic Classicism more often than not, and his reliance on the piano sets his music apart from most music usually thought of as ambient. The pieces on Avalon Sutra include several solo piano works like this one, but also several pieces accompanied by woodwinds, and some with strings. The second disc is a 70-minute reworking of “As Long As I Can Hold My Breath”, the piece which closes the first disc.

There is more information and music excerpts at Samadhi Sound, David Sylvian’s label which is releasing Avalon Sutra. You can buy Avalon Sutra here.

Cliff Martinez has scored every one of Steven Soderbergh’s films, and the score for the 2001 film Solaris was one of their best collaborations. Expertly weaving the orchestral and electronic components of the mix, Martinez creates a lush, sinister, dreamy wash that doesn’t quite manage to sell us on the preposterous conceit of the film, but does create a very appealing mood in the meantime. Sort of like very accessible martian ambient gamelan music.

Martinez was a drummer for Captain Beefheart and The Red Hot Chili Peppers before he turned to film composing. Frank Zappa’s trombonist Bruce Fowler did the excellent orchestrations and also conducted, as he has done on quite a few Hollywood scores over the last fifteen years. There’s an interview with Martinez here. You can buy Solaris here.

Much of The Necks music is resistant to blogging, by the simple fact that most individual tracks are over an hour long. Three Australian guys on piano, bass, and drums, play a very simple groove with minute variations, adding and subtracting elements in a style more like dub or techno than jazz. The end result is uniquely hypnotic. Cage’s musing on repetition applies well here:

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” –John Cage.

This track captures the typical mood of The Necks, but time compressed into a few minutes. It’s head-spinning in its development and speed compared to most Necks tracks. It comes from the soundtrack to a 1998 Australian film also called The Boys.

Most of The Necks’ CDs are available from their own site out of Australia, and quite a few are available in the US via Amazon among others.

If you only buy one record this century, it should probably be Maarifa Street. This is an exceptional project. One of our era’s most original composers, at the top of his game, has independently released his first solo work in five years, and the music is as good as anything he’s ever done. Maarifa Street arrives in the US today, on Hassell’s brand new self-owned NYEN label.

This music hangs in the perfect balance between: improvised/composed ~ sacred/profane ~ Europe/Africa ~ America/Islam ~ ancient/modern ~ slow/fast ~ empty/full ~ accessible/refined ~ night/day ~ dirty/clean. Maarifa Street sounds like the Jon Hassell record I have been listening to in my mind’s ear for the last 25 years, now finally incarnated. You get it instantly, but it feels like you could keep listening for the rest of your life and learn something new each time.

There’s a great Web site accompanying the release, crammed full of background information, with exclusive remixes and special editions coming soon. NPR had a ten-minute interview with Hassell on Sunday, and you can hear the archive here. The NPR page also includes three entire tracks from the record as streaming audio - well worth a visit. You can buy the new CD here, among other places.

One of Hassell’s teachers, the great Kirana style vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, has said:

“It is necessary to remain one hundred years with the guru, then practice for one hundred years, and then you can sing for one hundred years.”

Maarifa Street feels like the magnificent beginning of the next hundred years after that; may Jon Hassell have a good 4th century.