It's time for the annual blog post no one asks for: my favorites of all the new (to me) music I bought this year.
But I'm exhausted and lack the energy to spend a lot of time on this - despite the fact that I really enjoy and appreciate virtually all of the sixty-six albums I got.
It's not a spoiler that Rolling Stones' list of the 50 greatest progressive rock albums is topped by Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I have 20 of them, including 9 of the top 10.
I don't recall why I bookmarked this page of free, open-source healthcare icons but here they are in case you need to use one.
Along those same lines, here's a page with 4000 web badges, those little rectangles that proclaim some affilition.
Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain novel and the 1971 film by Robert Wise are both absolute favorites of mine. Meaning I could reread or rewatch at any time with full enjoyment. Here's a look at production of the film. If nothing else, click through and watch the original movie trailer.
Science has found some of the universe's missing matter, "confirming that 80–90% of normal matter is located outside of galaxies."
Yes, the Crystal Bridges Museum is off the beaten path. And yet it's architecturally beautiful (soon to be 50% larger) and the collection is top-notch. Read Alice Walton's thoughts (of Walmart fame) about what she created in Bentonville.
Like most lists, the compulsion is to see where you fit. In the list of most educated cities in the U.S., the Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington metroplex comes in at a disappointing 73rd place. Madison, WI comes in 5th place which is ahead of 6th place Boston, Cambridge, Newton.
Austin has been named the #1 place for post-college life in the U.S. Fort Worth is #5.
From the Things I Didn't Know Could Be Fossilized, here's some dino skin.
An exhibit of Helen Frankenthaler's work promises to "reveal just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.
Often in the discussion of Fort Worth's art museums, one gets left out. There's The Modern and The Kimbell, but don't forgot about the Amon Carter.
You've heard about NUKEMAP, the online tool for computing the effects of a nuclear blast. Here's Earth Impact Effects Program (not nearly as snappy of a name) for computing the effects of a meteor impact.
Early today I tweeted that Mutual Isolation, the new album from the duo of Colin Edwin and Jon Durant, is probably my favorite of all their albums (under the name Burnt Belief). Here's a preview.
"all marks on a flat surface are abstractions" writes David Hockney in Abstraction In Art Has Run Its Course which is interesting but I didn't reach the same conclusion he has.
I won't make it to the San Francisco MoMA before 17 January, so hopefully someone else will checkout the Joan Mitchell retrospective.
The richest man in Jerusalem probably sat on this throne.
There are many reasons why The Aviationist is on my list of must-read blogs when it comes up in my RSS feed. Here's one of those reasons - a fabulous slo-mo video of the F-22. I could watch this for hours.
Regrets of the dying might seem a little morbid but they do offer life lessons. #3 I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
CTO Pradeep Dass calls his hypersonic aircraft "Sexbomb." Send bombs and vagene?
There are many candidates for the best animated short film Oscar. The one that stands out to me for its wonderful geometric animation is Any Instant Whatever by Michelle Brand.
What do you need to know about quantum physics? #3 Many things will be discrete versus continuous.
Weigh Anchor will be the first album from a new band formed by Markus Reuter. Here's video of the track Knot 1. (Will buy this as soon as it becomes available.)
Phantasmagoria, Or A Different Kind of Journey by the Eivind Aarset 4-tet. (Ordered.) Some excerpts.
California Guitar Trio opened for King Crimson when we saw them on tour recently (see below) so it was a no-brainer to get Live in Scottsdale on Tour With King Crimson. For a video version of some of what's on the album, see this.
Signals, the latest from Marconi Union coming this November.
This is a beautiful photo of aerodynamics at work. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the aircraft was travelling supersonically. source
If you don't recognize the name Tacit Blue, you won't want to watch this video interview with a former program manager.
A time crystal can provide coherence within a quantum computer which can make them much more practical. Google may have create them.
Not to be outdone, physicists discovered a new particle, the tetraquark, which is an exotic exotic hadron because it has two charm quarks and and up and a down antiquark. And if those explanations mean anything to you, let me know.
runDisney is back. And by that I mean they're selling registrations for in-person runs. And we're hoping that Covid-19 Delta doesn't mess that up. (Thanks, unvaccinated.)
I'm a GIMP man when it comes to image editing (and my skill set is very lean). But I'm interested in Photopea, an online photo editor.
Even more interesting is Ojoy for scaling up images while improving its quality. (Because usually when you scale up an image the quality goes in the toilet.)
Dan Flavin, Untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim). Sometimes you just want minimalism. source
Brian Eno launched a radio station, Lighthouse, on Sonos Radio. I really like Eno's music but I can't generate enough interest to listen to online radio.
But I will paraphrase one of Eno's quotes. "The great benefit of computers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement."
Kurasowa's 100 favorite movies is probably worth taking a look at. Those that I've seen include It's a Wonderful Life, A Streetcar Named Desire, Gojira, Lawrence of Arabia, The Birds, The Day of the Jackal, The Godfather Part II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Killing Fields. Which is probably more than either you or I thought.
Continuing on the theme of things new to science, a study of 2,000 year old fossilized human feces indicates a) we have a much less diverse gut biome these days and b) we used to have things in our gut that are totally new to modern humans.
Markus Reuter's "Living the Dream" podcast continues with an interview with Leonardo "MoonJune" Pavkovic, owner of MoonJune Records of which I am a happy subscriber.
Markus Reuter also interviews Trey Gunn, currently on part 4 of 10.
From a list of 99 bits of unsolicited advice, "If you meet a jerk, overlook them. If you meet jerks everywhere everyday, look deeper into yourself."
Leave it to the folks at Pantone to come up with a color chart letting you know whether you're peeing frequently enough. (Just like mom used to say, have two pale urinations a day.)
ICYMI, Jason Matthews, author of the Red Sparrow trilogy, has died. That trilogy got me more excited about espionage thrillers than anything since Clancy.
This set of paintings "Black Windows" emerged from Sean Scully's time in Covid lockdown. One of them is currently in the exhibition at The Modern in Fort Worth.
Another map that lets you follow a raindrop along all the rivers in America: River Runner.
A couple years ago I saw the exhibit Cult of the Machine: Precisionism in American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. In addition to seeing a startlingly beautiful and unique Georgia O'Keeffe, the exhibit left me with such a positive impression that I used a quote from the curator in a presentation I gave at a CFD conference shortly thereafter. After all, precisionism was a movement that depicted in art the glory and power of technological and architectural development and in America in the 1920s and 1930s. And CFD is nothing if not precision.
Through a recent article in the WSJ on the exhibit Ralston Crawford: Air + Space + War, I found a fork in the Precisionist road. Crawford's work matured during WWII when he had access to a variety of aircraft settings (flights, factories) and post-war nuclear testing - including being in the U.S. Army. That exposure to death and destruction greatly influenced his work, retaining the flatness and precision of Precisionism while introducing an element of chaos that heightens the work's emotional appeal.
Certainly my initial attraction was the usual juxtaposition of several of my interests (painting, aircraft, nuclear weapons development). But upon reading the exhibition catalog and learning about the development of Crawford's work and how it fits with his contemporaries (the chapter on aviation art was really interesting) I found myself loving his painting solely on its own merits - the shift of perspective, the rough edges, the colors.
So if you're in Pennsylvania, I recommend heading over to the Brandywine River Museum of Art before the exhibition closes on 19 Sept. For everyone else, here's a video walkthrough that deserves more than 72 views.
At what point do we just throw our hands up and say to the anti-vax (or the white-washed "vaccine-hesitant") people, "Fine. Don't get vaccinated. Get sick and die."
Because I've gotten to feeling that way more and more often.
Well, the simple answer is you don't. You go back to protecting the public health.
Because C-19 vaccination is at best only half about personal health.
Remember that COVID-19 (which should've been called SARS-2) is a pandemic and a national emergency. Which is why the other half of vaccination's importance is public health.
Each unvaccinated person is a walking petri dish for the virus and an enabler of its transmission and mutation. As long as the virus transmits, the unvaccinated will get sick and die. If that isn't bad enough, these walking virus hosts will give SARS-CoV-2 the opportunity to mutate. Mutations happen all the time and most are benign but there's always the possibility of something worse than the delta variant, worse in the sense of it being immune to the current vaccines. Which would put us all back at square one.
Not feeling compassion for your fellow citizens? How about the sheer economic cost of closed businesses, the strain on hospitals, the federal expense? Can you be motivated by your wallet?
Sadly, everything about preventing SARS-2 applies to the flu. Get vaccinated, stay home when you're sick, wash your hands. If we all followed those guidelines for the flu, the annual gains in productivity (or decrease in lost productivity) would be enormous. Nothing about remediating SARS-2 is new. It just highlights so many shortcomings in society. (One of which is the abject failure of public education to impart a basic understanding of virology and statistics with which we probably would be in an entirely different situation today.)
Do you have the right to refuse to be vaccinated? Sure. But that doesn't mean society has to accommodate your personal choice. Kids gotta be vaccinated (and prove as much) to attend school. Why should you not have to do the same to return to work or public events? You have freedom of choice but all choices come with consequences.
It's as though half the country is waiting to see World War Z outside their front door before they'll even consider driving over to CVS for a jab. FOR FREE.
To say that I'm disappointed would be an understatement. Surprised? Not so much.
Here's a Houston Chronicle article about the renovated Rothko Chapel. If the real thing is even close to the photo at the top of the article with the improved natural lighting, it'll be like a whole new experience - in a great way.
If you like the Vim text editor, you may like browsing the web with vimium, a Chrome extension.
In the beginning, there was a perfect fluid (aka quark-gluon plasma).
A couple of years ago, I got to see fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were on tour as a museum exhibit. Just recently, new fragments have been discovered.
Speaking of discoveries, a secret Cold War project in Greenland drilled some ice cores and then forgot about them in storage. When rediscovered, they were found to contain fossilized plants.
If you're a fan of the band Stick Men (Markus Reuter, Pat Mastelotto, Tony Levin) you can enjoy recorded web event with the band and fans talking about the history.
Gluons glue together quarks to form protons and neutrons. The odd thing (pun intended) about gluons is that odd numbers of them don't like to be together; only even numbers of gluons are typically found. Well, science has proven the existence of odderons (a clump of an odd number of gluons) by smashing together protons at high speed.
From Futility Closet: "Walt Disney World draws its power from a pylon surmounted by a circular steel tube and two elliptical rings."
The taste of chocolate comes, in part, from fermentation. I did not know that.
The notional F-36 Kingsnake is a fighter aircraft to replace the F-16. It is compared to a Nissan 300ZX and because I'm not a car guy I have no idea what that means.
It'll be interesting to see how closely this bit of concept art matches the actual configuration of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter (i.e. the F-22 replacement).
Give a listen to a preview track called The Giant Nothing from Supervoid.
Said to be a classic and a very approachable introduction to the subject, Thompson's Calculus Made Easy (1910) is now available in an online HTML version and a PDF version.
Science discovered that pigs can breathe through their butts. Doctors wondered whether this gave them an option when treating human patients with lung problems. I think you see where this is going.
I'm afraid to use Readable on one of my blog posts. I'm afraid because one of the statements on their home page is "+83% The increase in the number of people who will finish reading your content if its readability is improved [emphasis mine] from grade 12 to grade 5." Maybe we can improve the average reader from grade 5 to grade 12."
What is the first principle of product management? Maximize impact to the mission. You'll have to click through to read the second.
"Music and sleep are the two most natural ways to escape from everything and when they combine it truly becomes a dream. Let us take you there with our artists’ sublime music curated especially for you by The Ambient Zone." That's the introduction to the digital album Sleep 001.
A live performance from 2008 by the Five Peace Band (Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Christian McBride, Kenny Garrett, and Vinnie Colaiuta).
Amazon has 14 leadership principles (aka core values) which is a lot and I'm curious how many employees can remember them all. There are so many I'm having a hard time choosing one to show here. "Leaders are right a lot."
In the mid 1960s an experiment was run to see whether three physics PhDs could build a nuclear bomb. Their final report is classified so it's uncertain whether they succeeded or not.
"The record is a triumph of atmosphere..." is part of this brief article about one of my absolute favorite albums of all time, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne.
"Lockdown Throwdown" is an unfinished performance by Gary Husband and the late Chick Corea. Enjoy and marvel at what is and what might have been.
"Poop" and "knife" are two words not usually found together but here you go: you can buy a poop knife for dicing dooky (slicing scat, carving crap) so it fits down the flush.
You may have heard that the Rothko Chapel has been remodeled. If you can't get to Houston soon for a visit, this new book is a pretty good substitute - Rothko Chapel: An Oasis for Reflection.
When you gotta cut loose but you're around genteel folks try these alternative (alternate?) swear words. For example, nerts, for the love of pete, and gee willikers.
This nice lady from Fort Worth who recently passed away collected a lot of art that's now up for auction at Sotheby's. Check out the collection of Mrs. John L. Marion.
Stephan Thelen's Fractal Guitar 2 is definitely on my list of favorite albums of 2021.
Piet Mondrian, Gray Tree, 1911. From an article about how Mondrian's abstractions became a new way to see the world. Gray Tree is stunning and in it I see all his mature works. They're all there.
Roger Waters recorded a new version of The Gunner's Dream from The Final Cut and its everything you'd want in such a remake. Hearing it motivated to pull the CD off the shelf for this weekend's listening.
That's what's on my mind as I sit in the morning stillness, warm in a friend's home, listening to a bird chirp outside on this 21 degree winter morning.
Why am I here?
My home has been without power for going on 56 hours, two days with temperatures that never got close to the freezing mark and in fact hit -2 degree one night. Waking up in a house at 42 degrees with smartphone batteries dwindling was enough.
A friend took us in. A friend whose home had power and heat and wifi. A friend who probably would've driven over and dragged us out of our house had we not decided to bail when we did.
We got a hot meal, eight hours of warm sleep, and recharged batteries, both literally and figuratively.
It would be easy to talk about the material things we take for granted: a good night's sleep, a warm shower, decent food. True, I do feel like a fully charged battery this morning relative to last night when my power meter was in the single digits. (Coincidentally, a tweet in my feed this morning said something to the effect that no one needs to be told that they look like they're tired which is exactly what my friend said to me last night. I didn't mind and in fact took it as a reason to go to bed at 8pm.)
What we too often taken for granted are friends and simple human kindness and resilience.
I am inspired by our team at work, all of whom are dealing with some variation of my story. Their energy, positivity, initiative are the warm glow of our shared vision and mission. Not only are they taking care of their family and friends, they are squeezing in work as they can whenever the office has slice of power and the computers come back online. They are going to the office to assess its status and ensure its safety. They are taking initiative and doing what they can when they can.
I am warmed by friends who, while only connected by the tenuous thread of online media, reach out to check on and inspire each other. Friends who take the time to let you know that you're not alone and they are thinking about you. Friends who understand the unifying power of shared experience.
All people are talking about is power, power, power. Why did it go out? When is it coming back? The power that never left us and which remains undiminished is the power of the human spirit.
We've spent several days focusing on the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy. The kindness of friends raises us all to its heights.
My first music purchase from Unquiet Music is In The Name Of... (A Prayer For Our Times). From the label: "Please consider being in a rested state, wide awake in order to maintain concentration whichever duration you may define for listening to this music, at the risk of being annoyed."
Kelly O'Connor's work explores our preoccupation with temporary, artificial happiness and uses many theme park motifs. In this case, it's Mary Blair's "it's a small world" at Disneyland. I love Blair's work across a variety of Disney projects and "it's a small world" is a zenith of her brand of minimalist design and eye for color.
Attention Star Wars geeks: droid stamps are coming from the USPS this year. I'm quite partial to all gonk droids.
Pantone's color of the year for 2021 (actually colors) are ultimate gray and illuminating (yellow) for a sense of resilience and hope.
King Crimson performed on Conan in 1995 and here's the video to prove it.
Mark you calendar - a Sean Scully retrospective, The Shape of Ideas, is coming to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in June 2021.
Meet Mark Waki, an aviation artist for Northrop Grumman.
The F-111H was designed as a competitor for the B-1. I had no idea. The F-111 holds a special place in my heart due to two close encounters with it early in my career.
Staying on the Lockheed Martin topic, here are Kelly Johnson's 14 rules and practices. It would take time and thought to adapt these to work other than designing and building aircraft but one stands out: 5. There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.
Testing the radar cross section of an A-12, the SR-71's precursor.
How can you tell whether a B-2 is male or female? Turn it over and look at it's belly. Not really, but what you'll see is cool despite lack of genitalia.
The Pentagon Papers are available online for you to read in all their glory.
Lacking the motivation to weave a coherent theme through all these thoughts (i.e. opinions), they are presented here as nothing more than mental dandruff.
Like it or not, agree with it or not, anti-vax or not, everyone needs to realize that normalcy returns only after a significant majority of the populations gets vaccinated. Every business in this country should be vocally advocating that federal, state, and local governments get their collective act together and make this happen as soon as possible.
Regardless of what political party was or might have been in power at the beginning of 2020 when the pandemic got underway, the weak, ragged, uneven rollout of vaccinations was predictable. The logistical challenges here are huge and are complicated by how the feds and states interact.
Notwithstanding the previous, the administration in power during the first year of the pandemic severely underperformed. They either overachieved or underachieved depending on how you interpret "One day - it's like a miracle - it will disappear."
At lot of musing about "the end of X" where X is movie theaters or fitness centers or dining out is misplaced. Once "everyone" is vaccinated, all this stuff will come roaring back. The flip side is that all the positive behaviors we've adopted like handwashing and not shaking hands and staying away from other people when sick are already disappearing.
It's quite dismaying that the behaviors we've all be asked to adopt (stay home when sick, cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough, wash your hands) are exactly the same things we should be doing regarding the flu. And sadly, many don't. If only one of these behaviors stick, I hope it's staying home from work when you're sick.
If everyone got the flu vaccine each year, the savings in terms of lost productivity at work would dwarf the cost of the shots.
Having an anti-vax opinion is your right. It's my right to say you're wrong.
The human animal is quite weak and I'm not speaking about susceptibility to viruses. Who knew how strong was the desire to dine in public at TGI Friday's and drink in public at the neighborhood pub? On TV the other day I heard a "man on the street" interview with someone who just had to travel somewhere, anywhere, right now. Who knew 9 months was the limit of human willpower?
If the pandemic was a TV show called "National Emergency," it would rank lower than Joanie Loves Chachi.
During the pandemic year of 2020 with its lockdowns and working from home, some people compensated by baking bread, others with home fitness, still others binged all their favorite shows on streaming services.
I listened to a lot of music. By "a lot" I mean 107 new (to me) albums. So many that over the course of the year I lost track of what I had ordered, in what format (digital or CD), and whether I had received it or not. It was only after cleaning up the backlog of tunes over the past couple of weeks that I settled on 107 as an accurate count.
It's hard to identify just a handful of favorites from a list that long. So you'll have to indulge me for being lengthy in terms of the list and brief in terms of the descriptions.
PANAMERICA by Stick Men with David Cross
The first new album I bought in 2020 made the list: the 5-CD PANAMERICA by Stick Men featuring David Cross (violin). Recorded throughout a South American tour, the 5 CDs of PANAMERICA are themed as Improvs (Disc 1), Suites (Disc 2), one full live show (Discs 3 and 4), and Soundscapes (Disc 5).
If you're not familiar with Stick Men they are Tony Levin (bass), Markus Reuter (guitar), and Pat Mastelotto (drums). To become familiar with the band, PANAMERICA is a great place to start because it gives you a taste of everything they do: the subtle application of power, sweeping melody, expressive rigor.
PANAMERICA and other Stick Men albums are available on Bandcamp where you can preview even more of their work.
Music from the Early 21st Century by Previte, Saft, and Cline
Bobby Previte (drums), Jamie Saft (Hammond organ), and Nels Cline (guitar) recorded this classic, improvisational organ trio live on tour in late 2019. The results are a spectacular springboard of classic forms into future possibilities.
Music from the Early 21st Century is available from RareNoise Records.
RUMBLE by Lorenzo Feliciati
This four-track EP is a stylistic standout from Feliciati's other albums. It's more of an orchestral take on jazz built upon Feliciati's rich, burbling bass lines that are more vocal than foundational.
The culmination of years of the two Eno brothers sharing keyboard pieces (Roger) and treatments (Brian) is the album Mixing Colours. The result is a series of shimmering soundscapes that deceive with their minimalism and entrance with their depth.
Keeping with ambience for a bit, I was totally blown away by the gravity of the sound achieved in Machinefabriek's (Rutger Zuydervelt) Stillness Soundtracks II, five deep tracks scored to accompany Esther Kokmeijer's film of icebergs at the North and South Poles. I can't recall music that more accurately conveys a visual representation of icebergs: solid/liquid, massive/fragile, still/moving, visible/hidden, white/spectral. Amazing.
Stillness Soundtracks II was released by Glacial Movements Records and is available on Bandcamp.
Music of Our Times by Gary Husband and Markus Reuter
When stranded in Tokyo during a pandemic after your tour is cancelled, what do musicians do? They book time in a studio and make music. In this case, Gary Husband (piano), who was touring with Stick Men, and Markus Reuter (guitar) were able to exquisitely capture a moment in time, their take on a world at inflection between live interaction and lockdown. Elegance.
Music of Our Times was released by MoonJune Records and is available on Bandcamp.
Punkt and Firma (96k) by Trey Gunn
I was unable to choose between Trey Gunn's (10-string Warr guitar) albums Punkt and Firma so we get both. All you need to know is their description: "These pieces will reward detailed and repeated listening. Likewise, they will punish casual listening."
My love affair with the combination of Sonar (a "progressive groove band") and guitarist David Torn goes back to 2018's Vortex in which Torn's playing was the salt to Sonar's polyrhythmic stew. Fortunately their collaboration continues on Tranceportation Vol. 2, described as "pointillistic, metrical complexity with deep subterranean grooves."
The Jerry Granelli Trio Plays Vince and Mose by The Jerry Granelli Trio
Speaking of love affairs, I don't recall when I first heard the piano playing of Jamie Saft but it's been a romance for me ever since. Here Saft joins Jerry Granelli (drums) and Bradley Christopher Jones (bass) as they perform their take on the work of Vince Guaraldi and Mose Allison. Fresh and lively without being anchored to the past, the album ends with what's now my favorite version of Christmas is Here.
The Jerry Granelli Trio Plays Vince and Mose was released on RareNoise Records and is available on Bandcamp.
Behind Closed Doors by Thorsten Quaeschning and Markus Reuter
When the pandemic made it virtually impossible for musicians to tour and perform live, some got creative. Markus Reuter, for example, held several live, online sessions with other musicians to demonstrate technique, record tracks for an album, or perform brief concerts. In this later category falls his 50-minute performance with Thorsten Quaeschning (Tangerine Dream). The combination of Quaeschning's synthesizers and Reuter's Touch Guitar is mesmerizing as they cover the gamut of tone and texture.
Bonus: Behind Closed Doors 2 came later in the year when the duo added percussionist Shawn Crowder.
Small Moments by Michael Manring
Perhaps not a household name, but when you think bass guitar Michael Manring's name should be at the forefront of your mind. Similar to Trey Gunn's albums cited above, Small Moments features Manring and his basses and that's about it. Pure and expansive, these pieces (written to be performed live), reveal mastery of one's instrument combined with artistic expression.
Listening to Pictures and Seeing Through Sound by Jon Hassell
Being a fan of Jon Hassell (trumpet) doesn't necessarily mean I've done a good job of keeping track of his work. I was thrilled to hear about his new album Seeing Through Sound and disappointed in myself for finding out it's the second in his Pentimento series, the first being Listening to Pictures. So I got both. And was not disappointed.
Both of these albums by Jon Hassell are available on Bandcamp.
Spectral by Robin Schlochtermeier
I first heard about Schlochtermeier in an online post by Eraldo Bernocchi whose opinions are usually enough to get me to take action. Spectral is the first solo album by the composer of film soundtracks and "captures some of this mysterious, nebulous spirit of bafflement and wonderment" he witnessed in his baby daughter.
Spectral was released on Denovali Records and is available on Bandcamp.
Selling England by the Pound and Spectral Mornings Live by Steve Hackett
It's not surprising that a Steve Hackett album should land on the favorite list of a person for whom Genesis was the genesis of his musical interests. Yet it may be surprising to know that of all the Hackett albums I own (which are many) this is my favorite. These performances feature Hackett and his band in fine form and the version of Spectral Mornings is fantastic.
I'll be honest. I didn't expect to like this album knowing that previous work by the parties was heavy, raging improv. On Cuts Open, they didn't take their foot off the gas but maybe turned down the volume from 11 to 10.
From a description of the album: "When the occasional bursts of brutality arrive – and they do arrive, in all their eviscerating glory – they’re almost cathartic in their relief from the teeth-gnashing tension of the album’s more subdued moments, where menace hangs in the air like a thinly veiled threat."
Fittingly named OWARI meaning "the end," this live album was recorded on the last date of the group's truncated tour of Japan thanks to the pandemic. Perhaps because of this, the performances are majestic with Husband's keyboards playing a central role.
OWARI was released on MoonJune Records and is available on Bandcamp.
Bumerang by Hallebeek, Feliciati, and Voskuil
Bassist Lorenzo Feliciati joins guitarist Richard Hallebeek and drummer Niels Voskuil on this self-titled album by this new trio. To my ear there's a definite Allan Holdsworth influence that's paired with Feliciati's triumphant bass playing. Can't wait to hear what Bumerang does next.
Even if this album wasn't good (which it is) I would've put it on the list. It was the last album released by Harold Budd before his death due to complications from Covid-19. Unlike their other pairings, this album to my ear emphasizes Budd's piano work over Guthrie's lush washes of guitar.
In yet another example of a favored artist of mine (Bernocchi, see above) paired with a Tangerine Dream alum, the result is - let's say - "classical electronica."
I do not know Mr. Dorgon but I do love Saft's piano work. If you listened to any of the samples of Trey Gunn's albums above, those are a good analogy for this album of "intuitive, counter-intuitive, and non-intuitive" compositions.
"One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain."
This album was released by Veal Records and is available on Bandcamp.
PORTAL by Feliciati and Mastelotto
I hadn't realized how much of Lorenzo Feliciati's work was on this list until now but we'll end with his PORTAL album with drummer Pat Mastelotto. Maybe the most melodic rhythm section you'll hear today.
This blog reflects my personality as it is childish and immature, self-aggrandizing and ego-maniacal, a rambling stream of consciousness devoid of forethought and consideration of consequence. Therefore, it's perfect for the internet.
Things you'll see here: computational fluid dynamics (CFD), social media and internet, animation art, coin collecting, popular culture, progressive rock music, abstract expressionist art, poop and flatulence humor, computer science geekery, and miscellaneous internet detritus.
