On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Backwaters is an excellent collection of experiments that Christopher Hanlon recorded “over the last year or so.” The emphasis is largely on the ambient and atmospheric, which is to say the emphasis is on a lack of emphasis.
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▰ I mentioned this album a couple weeks back in a different context, and when only one pre-release track was available. Now all of Chloe Lula’s deeply reverberant Oneiris — which combines her techno and cello experiences into something that is quite different from merely those two elements amalgamated — is out, and it’s dramatic, rich, and just plain fantastic.
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▰ I have no idea how long this video will remain online, but on the YouTube account of a James Lee there is a complete take of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, all nine screens edited into one compelling rendition. Lee has put the nine screens as insets shaped like an L — that’s 5 down, 5 across, with Kjartansson in his bathtub at vertices’ intersection. And then in the space that L frames, there are alternately one or two details from the overall performance given more space. For some reason the video embed isn’t working, so go to the video’s YouTube page to check it out.
▰ I really enjoyed the Beat tour when I caught it a couple weeks ago in San Jose (that’s Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Steve Vai, and Danny Carey doing songs from King Crimson‘s legendary mid-’80s trio of records: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair). The evening’s second set was when the band sounded less like a recital and more like a thoroughly engaged ensemble, and it opened with this great arrangement of “Waiting Man,” from the Crimson album that gave the tour its name. This video was recorded back in mid-September. Levin has a long-running photo album on his own website, and if you know what I look like, you can find me a few rows back stage right in some of his shots of the concert I attended.