Music I'm enjoying right now.
- "Wolf Cub" - Burial & Four Tet Burial, apparently, was a big deal, or something, last year? I dunno. I downloaded this for Four Tet, and it didn't disappoint.
- "Stillness Is The Move" - Dirty Projectors
- "If I Had A Heart" - Fever Ray My radio, in my car and in my study, is permanently set to Classic FM. (It's a brilliant station, which plays not just classical music, but lots of world music, film music and jazz.) I listen to very little "new" music. I don't know what's hot and what's not, and I have not gone into a records store in about three years now, except to buy DVDs. So, to partly make up for 11 months of ignorance, I usually spend December going through the "Best Albums of the Year" lists at Metacritic.com and sampling all their recommendations. Which is how I ended up getting the Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca from iTunes last year. Fever Ray's first album, Fever Ray, I would probably have gotten regardless, seeing as how much I love Karin Dreijer Andersson's work with her brother as The Knife.
- "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" - Carole King Everyone should have a version of this song.
- "Jiu Kuang (Wine Mad)" - Yao Bingyan From The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan, another excellent collection of East, Central and South Asian music from the Silk Road Project. David Harrington, in this short documentary about the Kronos Quartet's collaboration with Alim Qasimov, described "classical music" as meaning to him "something that has been distilled over many, many years... [Having the] quality of clarity and distillation." That very same quality, of clarity and distillation, is what I love about the guqin (Chinese zither).
Jiu Kuang is a guqin melody commonly attributed to the 3rd century CE poet, Ruan Ji, although this version is based on Yao Bingyan's reconstruction of the piece in the 1950s. Yao's interpretation uses triple rhythms, which is more or less unheard of in classical Chinese music. The lyrics explore a subject common in Chinese poetry and song:
Fleet worldly matters: I laugh at the strain. Quiet, sad feelings are wasted pain.
How to cure sadness: call for wine! When drunk all day bad manners are fine.