Friday Random Five

Sirocco by The Icicle Works
Album: Nirvana (7″ single)
The Icicle Works belong to a category I call ‘October Music’. It’s autumnal and pagan. You can see the smoke hang over the village. All of 1984, I listened to their first album, and enjoyed the world it created, as the best albums always do.

This song predates the first album. I think this single on Troll Records might be quite rare.

My Old School by Steely Dan
Album: Remastered: The Best of Steely Dan Then and Now
I’ve always loved Steely Dan for their jazz-tinged close harmonies, even as a kid. I’m not as familiar with their early catalogue though. I don’t think it had the smoothness and sophistication of their later work, like Aja or Gaucho. It’s interesting, though, to listen to stuff from just before I was born. I don’t usually go there. I will say this: it’s so much better than pre-disco, like Al Stewart or Leo Sayer, even if I’m not very interested in it all the time.

Sor: Rondo by Andrés Segovia
Album: Andrés Segovia
Quote from Fernando Sor, His Life and His Music

The guitar used be called a tavern instrument; one that could not meet the demands of classical music. In the early nineteenth century, Fernando Sor set in motion the quest that continues today, to raise the guitar to the greatest musical level possible. Sor was one of the most prolific composers for, and promoters of, the guitar as a “concert” instrument, in the last two hundred years. He, and others like him paved the way for Andrés Segovia to emerge and bring the guitar to the immense popularity, and respect it enjoys today.

Easter by The Choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral
Album: An Elizabethan Chorus
This track is presented as part of an Easter church service, complete with lector. I confess that I now have mixed feelings about having religious music in my collection. On the one hand, I’d hate to get rid of it all. Mozart’s Requiem? Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater? Vivaldi’s Gloria? Bach’s oratorios? Great stuff — we’ll never see music like that again, and I’d be poorer without it.

On the other hand, now that I no longer have a certain set of religious assumptions, I find it unexpectedly irksome to be confronted by a style of music, the overt purpose of which was to promote adherence to a set of absurd dogmas. And it irritates me that generations of musical geniuses chose to promote such systems with their wonderful music — or that they were conscripted to promote same. I still sing it, because it sounds wonderful and it’s something we’ve inherited from the past. So I suppose I shall have to adjust and not worry about it too much.

New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 by R.E.M.
Album: Automatic for the People
A moody and contemplative piece, especially poignant for what’s happened to New Orleans since the recording. Watery electric organ with somewhat off-kilter timing from the other instruments give this track a feeling of a rough draft from a sketchbook.