Record Listening Breakdown
I asked six artists and friends – whose taste I deeply respect – to choose a record for the Intentional Record Listening sessions at the festival. Their choices and thoughts will be posted below. Host your own record listening party if you missed the session! - Erin
I asked six artists and friends – whose taste I deeply respect – to choose a record for the Intentional Record Listening sessions at the festival. Their choices and thoughts will be posted below. Host your own record listening party if you missed the session! - Erin
Record: TheBluWave [TimesWhenSilenceIsAPoem - TheIceHasMelted - AndBleedingGlaciersFormOurTears]_
Artist:JoyCut
Record choice by Julian Martlew
On May 30th we recorded a band I had not really listened to before they came into the station. JoyCut from Bologna, Italy. They had an energy around them, some ineffable chemistry that I was really drawn to. The music they make is a balance of organic acoustic instruments played by human beings, and on the other side of the scales the endless textures of electronic and synthesized sound. They are committed to a green sustainable future, using biodegradable and plant based materials, even solar powered recording studios. They count the Chemical Brothers and Robert Smith amongst their fans.
Their latest record is “TheBluWave [TimesWhenSilenceIsAPoem - TheIceHasMelted - AndBleedingGlaciersFormOurTears]_”
Like that very serious title - it’s way too much, and also always over too soon.
Julian Martlew is an audio engineer and media producer for KEXP - 90.3FM in Seattle.
Artist:JoyCut
Record choice by Julian Martlew
On May 30th we recorded a band I had not really listened to before they came into the station. JoyCut from Bologna, Italy. They had an energy around them, some ineffable chemistry that I was really drawn to. The music they make is a balance of organic acoustic instruments played by human beings, and on the other side of the scales the endless textures of electronic and synthesized sound. They are committed to a green sustainable future, using biodegradable and plant based materials, even solar powered recording studios. They count the Chemical Brothers and Robert Smith amongst their fans.
Their latest record is “TheBluWave [TimesWhenSilenceIsAPoem - TheIceHasMelted - AndBleedingGlaciersFormOurTears]_”
Like that very serious title - it’s way too much, and also always over too soon.
Julian Martlew is an audio engineer and media producer for KEXP - 90.3FM in Seattle.
Record: Heresy
Artist: Roger Doyle
Record choice by Monika Khot
This is the music to Act 2 of an electronic opera called Heresy, about the life of Giordano Bruno, written by the highly underrated and still acclaimed electro-acoustic Irish composer Roger Doyle. The voice of Roger Doyle lives in nowhere I have been, and yet is somehow as familiar to me as home. When a music can shock you with its personality, and simultaneously be confirmed as the thing you’ve always yearned to hear (un-heard in all else), you know you’ve stumbled across something spoken from a level of being you don’t normally operate on, but is within you (awaiting to be stood upon). This record is a beautiful and shocking example of focused and seemingly endless creativity wielded from the fulcrum of a wide artistic vision. Around the 6th listen, something deepens.
Nordra is the project of London/New York based multi-instrumentalist and producer Monika Khot. The project lives as a means of bringing to the surface emotions of a nuanced nature.
Nordra’s masterful ability to deconstruct musical structure in a language of industrial music and noise alongside the al- chemy of her live performance has led to her sharing the stage with artists of a psychotropic nature like beak>, Demdike Stare, SUMAC, Anthony Braxton, Yves Tumor, Puce Mary, and OXBOW.
Nordra has just finished work on her debut studio album “Time Did What Laughs”, produced by multi-faceted extreme, experimental and film score producer Randall Dunn. In between her touring-duties as bass player for Zola Jesus and her focus of scoring film and dance works, Nordra is playing select shows comprising works off past releases and songs from her new record.
Artist: Roger Doyle
Record choice by Monika Khot
This is the music to Act 2 of an electronic opera called Heresy, about the life of Giordano Bruno, written by the highly underrated and still acclaimed electro-acoustic Irish composer Roger Doyle. The voice of Roger Doyle lives in nowhere I have been, and yet is somehow as familiar to me as home. When a music can shock you with its personality, and simultaneously be confirmed as the thing you’ve always yearned to hear (un-heard in all else), you know you’ve stumbled across something spoken from a level of being you don’t normally operate on, but is within you (awaiting to be stood upon). This record is a beautiful and shocking example of focused and seemingly endless creativity wielded from the fulcrum of a wide artistic vision. Around the 6th listen, something deepens.
Nordra is the project of London/New York based multi-instrumentalist and producer Monika Khot. The project lives as a means of bringing to the surface emotions of a nuanced nature.
Nordra’s masterful ability to deconstruct musical structure in a language of industrial music and noise alongside the al- chemy of her live performance has led to her sharing the stage with artists of a psychotropic nature like beak>, Demdike Stare, SUMAC, Anthony Braxton, Yves Tumor, Puce Mary, and OXBOW.
Nordra has just finished work on her debut studio album “Time Did What Laughs”, produced by multi-faceted extreme, experimental and film score producer Randall Dunn. In between her touring-duties as bass player for Zola Jesus and her focus of scoring film and dance works, Nordra is playing select shows comprising works off past releases and songs from her new record.
Record: Tutti Morimmo a Stento
Artist: Fabrizio De André
Record chosen by Blaise Agüera y Arcas
This is a 1968 concept album by one of Italy’s great “chansonniers,” a sort of Italian parallel figure to Georges Brassens in France and Leonard Cohen in North America (in fact he did Italian covers of songs by both earlier in his career). If you watched the second season of White Lotus, you heard a couple of his songs deployed to great effect, which is how I discovered him. Now I’ve listened to pretty much everything he recorded, and this deeper cut ended up becoming my favorite recording so far this year.
Although only De André’s second studio album, Tutti Morimmo a Stento (which means something like “we all die suddenly,” or “we all die at once”) is both musically sophisticated and was cutting edge at the time— the “concept album concept” didn’t exist in Italy in the 1960s, and this one is really ambitious. It consists of seven songs and three instrumental interludes, with themes carrying through from track to track even as the mood and instrumentation shift like mountain weather. Often I find that I like foreign songs less once I know what the lyrics mean (I’ll be honest, that’s how I felt about a lot of Beatles songs when I became more fluent in English), but like many of his fellow chansonniers, De André is a brilliant lyricist. Of special note: Leggenda di Natale (A Christmas Tale) is an understated yet devastating song about childhood abuse. Ballata degli impicatti (Hanged man’s ballad), based on Ballade des pendus by medieval French bad boy poet François Villon (1489), ends with the lines “We hold a grudge for everyone / With an odor like clotted blood / What we then called pain / Was just a suspended discussion.” And Girotondo (a nonsense song a bit like Ring Around The Rosie) features a children’s choir singing about nuclear bombs falling because... well, 1968.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a Fellow and VP at Google Research, where he works on AI. Which will totally not lead to the end of the world, though it may be incompatible with capitalism. He also plays instruments sometimes (but only to himself) and writes. His AI novella, Ubi Sunt, just won a design award from AIGA (and is available for free online), and he has a new book, Who Are We Now? coming out in the Fall.
Artist: Fabrizio De André
Record chosen by Blaise Agüera y Arcas
This is a 1968 concept album by one of Italy’s great “chansonniers,” a sort of Italian parallel figure to Georges Brassens in France and Leonard Cohen in North America (in fact he did Italian covers of songs by both earlier in his career). If you watched the second season of White Lotus, you heard a couple of his songs deployed to great effect, which is how I discovered him. Now I’ve listened to pretty much everything he recorded, and this deeper cut ended up becoming my favorite recording so far this year.
Although only De André’s second studio album, Tutti Morimmo a Stento (which means something like “we all die suddenly,” or “we all die at once”) is both musically sophisticated and was cutting edge at the time— the “concept album concept” didn’t exist in Italy in the 1960s, and this one is really ambitious. It consists of seven songs and three instrumental interludes, with themes carrying through from track to track even as the mood and instrumentation shift like mountain weather. Often I find that I like foreign songs less once I know what the lyrics mean (I’ll be honest, that’s how I felt about a lot of Beatles songs when I became more fluent in English), but like many of his fellow chansonniers, De André is a brilliant lyricist. Of special note: Leggenda di Natale (A Christmas Tale) is an understated yet devastating song about childhood abuse. Ballata degli impicatti (Hanged man’s ballad), based on Ballade des pendus by medieval French bad boy poet François Villon (1489), ends with the lines “We hold a grudge for everyone / With an odor like clotted blood / What we then called pain / Was just a suspended discussion.” And Girotondo (a nonsense song a bit like Ring Around The Rosie) features a children’s choir singing about nuclear bombs falling because... well, 1968.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a Fellow and VP at Google Research, where he works on AI. Which will totally not lead to the end of the world, though it may be incompatible with capitalism. He also plays instruments sometimes (but only to himself) and writes. His AI novella, Ubi Sunt, just won a design award from AIGA (and is available for free online), and he has a new book, Who Are We Now? coming out in the Fall.
Record: Perfect Offering
Artist: Cassandra Miller
Record chosen by Eve Beglarian
this isn’t an actual record, but maybe that’s okay...
this is a live performance (of the premiere?) of Cassandra Miller’s Perfect Offering….the way she uses bell ringing as the structure, and how it is all about the beauty of imperfection, the break that lets the light shine through…the way you end up meditating on the absence of the actual Leonard Cohen song, can’t stop hearing it and thinking about it as this abstracted version unfolds...
here's her program note for the piece:
"I wrote the first drafts of music for this piece during a long period of convalescence, at a time when I felt pretty useless (ok, deeply useless). I discovered that even when I didn’t have the will to do much at all, I could lie in bed and push notes around (laptop sitting on my chest as we all do), in sweaty pyjamas. It was all a bit gross. This time overlapped with the early days of lockdown, depressing and very confusing.
At that time, I had the quote in my head ‘ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering’ (Leonard Cohen), and the piece began to be about bells somehow—how they swing, and how they mark passing time. The piece is not at all about Leonard Cohen, but with this mantra-like quote in mind, the process of composing became a meditation on the imperfect perfection of this tiring body and all the uselessness of plans.
After making a few drafts with my own ideas of what swinging bells might sound like (and the patterns they might make together), I realised I needed instead to understand more about bells in reality. I then worked with closely with a recording of a peal of bells from a convent in France, from which the composition now derives all of its material. In particular, there was magic to be found in slowing the recording down, hearing and singing along to hidden melodies that emerged as bell-resonances combined like interleaving lines in renaissance polyphony."
Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist” (Los Angeles Times). A 2023 winner of the Arts and Letters Award, she is also a 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” as well as numerous other prestigious awards. Current projects include a solo piano piece about Emily Dickinson responding to Ives’ Concord Sonata for the pianist Donald Berman, a piece for 24 basses in a grove of trees, composed for Robert Black and friends, and more. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” evbvd.com
Artist: Cassandra Miller
Record chosen by Eve Beglarian
this isn’t an actual record, but maybe that’s okay...
this is a live performance (of the premiere?) of Cassandra Miller’s Perfect Offering….the way she uses bell ringing as the structure, and how it is all about the beauty of imperfection, the break that lets the light shine through…the way you end up meditating on the absence of the actual Leonard Cohen song, can’t stop hearing it and thinking about it as this abstracted version unfolds...
here's her program note for the piece:
"I wrote the first drafts of music for this piece during a long period of convalescence, at a time when I felt pretty useless (ok, deeply useless). I discovered that even when I didn’t have the will to do much at all, I could lie in bed and push notes around (laptop sitting on my chest as we all do), in sweaty pyjamas. It was all a bit gross. This time overlapped with the early days of lockdown, depressing and very confusing.
At that time, I had the quote in my head ‘ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering’ (Leonard Cohen), and the piece began to be about bells somehow—how they swing, and how they mark passing time. The piece is not at all about Leonard Cohen, but with this mantra-like quote in mind, the process of composing became a meditation on the imperfect perfection of this tiring body and all the uselessness of plans.
After making a few drafts with my own ideas of what swinging bells might sound like (and the patterns they might make together), I realised I needed instead to understand more about bells in reality. I then worked with closely with a recording of a peal of bells from a convent in France, from which the composition now derives all of its material. In particular, there was magic to be found in slowing the recording down, hearing and singing along to hidden melodies that emerged as bell-resonances combined like interleaving lines in renaissance polyphony."
Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist” (Los Angeles Times). A 2023 winner of the Arts and Letters Award, she is also a 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” as well as numerous other prestigious awards. Current projects include a solo piano piece about Emily Dickinson responding to Ives’ Concord Sonata for the pianist Donald Berman, a piece for 24 basses in a grove of trees, composed for Robert Black and friends, and more. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” evbvd.com
Record: Ernest Chausson Concerto for violin, piano and string quartet
Artists: Itzhak Perlman, violin | Jorge Bolet, piano | Juilliard Quartet
Record choice by Noah Geller
Hello Erin Jorgensen Festival! I’m so thrilled you’re getting together for a listening session. Nowadays with earbuds, Spotify, and everyone on the move, I feel like it’s rare to sit down and listen to a full album. When I was a student, I was ravenous in my listening. To this day I’m an aural learner, so a lot of my musicianship was developed by constantly listening to different performers and composers—deciding what I liked and didn’t like, and why.
This particular album is one that I discovered while still in high school. I checked out the cd from my local library and played it on my discman through headphones without noise cancelling technology. Somehow I still managed to enjoy it. My reason for choosing this recording is that it was at the top of my mind having just performed this piece at the Seattle Chamber music Society in July. When I’m asked, “Who is your favorite composer?” Or “What is your favorite piece?” My answer could easily be “Whatever I’m playing at the moment.” Whenever I delve into a piece of music, especially a great one like the Chausson, the piece becomes like a little part of my identity, so it is quite personal for me.
The score for this work is not equally challenging for all players. The solo violin and piano bear the brunt of the heavy lifting, while the string quartet provides an orchestra-like accompaniment. The quartet certainly is indispensable in this piece, but the stars of the show are definitely the solo violin and piano. Being a violinist myself, I would like to point out how special Itzhak Perlman sounds in this music. He is at the peak of his powers, and his luscious sound and effortless technique are still riveting for me to hear. I am a fan of musicians who are always being creative and searching for ways to vary their playing. I.e. two notes next to each other are never the same. In this recording, Perlman is the quintessential example of this. Listen to the way he lilts phrases, paces things perfectly, and always sounds as though he’s telling a story. His ability to stir emotion through his playing is on full display in this glorious, very French music. The performances by the Juilliard Quartet and Jorge Bolet are excellent indeed, but make no mistake, I’ve chosen this cd as a prime example of some of the greatest violin playing we are fortunate to be able to enjoy. I wish you all the best, and hope to see you at the Symphony sometime!
Noah Geller is the Concertmaster at the Seattle Symphony. He attended The Juilliard School for both his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees and has also performed with many chamber and festival organizations around the U.S. including the Marlboro Music Festival, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center, and here in the Pacific Northwest at the Olympic Music Festival in Port Townsend, Washington. Geller and his wife, percussionist Mari Yoshinaga, and their dog, Monkey, reside in Seattle. He performs on a violin by Justin Hess made in 2020.
Artists: Itzhak Perlman, violin | Jorge Bolet, piano | Juilliard Quartet
Record choice by Noah Geller
Hello Erin Jorgensen Festival! I’m so thrilled you’re getting together for a listening session. Nowadays with earbuds, Spotify, and everyone on the move, I feel like it’s rare to sit down and listen to a full album. When I was a student, I was ravenous in my listening. To this day I’m an aural learner, so a lot of my musicianship was developed by constantly listening to different performers and composers—deciding what I liked and didn’t like, and why.
This particular album is one that I discovered while still in high school. I checked out the cd from my local library and played it on my discman through headphones without noise cancelling technology. Somehow I still managed to enjoy it. My reason for choosing this recording is that it was at the top of my mind having just performed this piece at the Seattle Chamber music Society in July. When I’m asked, “Who is your favorite composer?” Or “What is your favorite piece?” My answer could easily be “Whatever I’m playing at the moment.” Whenever I delve into a piece of music, especially a great one like the Chausson, the piece becomes like a little part of my identity, so it is quite personal for me.
The score for this work is not equally challenging for all players. The solo violin and piano bear the brunt of the heavy lifting, while the string quartet provides an orchestra-like accompaniment. The quartet certainly is indispensable in this piece, but the stars of the show are definitely the solo violin and piano. Being a violinist myself, I would like to point out how special Itzhak Perlman sounds in this music. He is at the peak of his powers, and his luscious sound and effortless technique are still riveting for me to hear. I am a fan of musicians who are always being creative and searching for ways to vary their playing. I.e. two notes next to each other are never the same. In this recording, Perlman is the quintessential example of this. Listen to the way he lilts phrases, paces things perfectly, and always sounds as though he’s telling a story. His ability to stir emotion through his playing is on full display in this glorious, very French music. The performances by the Juilliard Quartet and Jorge Bolet are excellent indeed, but make no mistake, I’ve chosen this cd as a prime example of some of the greatest violin playing we are fortunate to be able to enjoy. I wish you all the best, and hope to see you at the Symphony sometime!
Noah Geller is the Concertmaster at the Seattle Symphony. He attended The Juilliard School for both his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees and has also performed with many chamber and festival organizations around the U.S. including the Marlboro Music Festival, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center, and here in the Pacific Northwest at the Olympic Music Festival in Port Townsend, Washington. Geller and his wife, percussionist Mari Yoshinaga, and their dog, Monkey, reside in Seattle. He performs on a violin by Justin Hess made in 2020.
Record: Journey in Satchidananda
Artist: Alice Coltrane
record chosen by Clyde Petersen
There are moments when you hear something for the first time and your perspective is forever altered. That was indeed the situation when I first heard this album. I was somewhere in America, flying down a highway on another long and formative tour in my 20’s. It was back when we had CD wallets and we all chose a few precious albums to carry with us on the road, before the world’s musical selection was on-demand and at our fingertips. Seattle musician Steve Moore pulled a burned CDR from his soft case and for the next 38 minutes we all sat in silent awe of a masterpiece unfolding itself as the highway rushed by. There is no way to ever hear every note on this album. It’s a thick wall of entangled sounds and with every listen, something new is revealed. I recommend closing your eyes. There are times when people speak of music as a competition, they enjoyed one band better than another at a show, a performance spoke to them more or less. For the most part, I dismiss this desire to rank music. Music is not a competition. But when I listen to this record, I do find myself elevating it above others. I return to it often, as it suits every mood and every weather pattern. When people ask me what music I listen to, Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda is always at the top of my list.
Bio: Clyde Petersen is Northwest artist. He is the director of Even Hell has its Heroes, Torrey Pines and countless music videos. His band Your Heart Breaks just released their 16th album, The Wrack Line, on Kill Rock Stars.
Artist: Alice Coltrane
record chosen by Clyde Petersen
There are moments when you hear something for the first time and your perspective is forever altered. That was indeed the situation when I first heard this album. I was somewhere in America, flying down a highway on another long and formative tour in my 20’s. It was back when we had CD wallets and we all chose a few precious albums to carry with us on the road, before the world’s musical selection was on-demand and at our fingertips. Seattle musician Steve Moore pulled a burned CDR from his soft case and for the next 38 minutes we all sat in silent awe of a masterpiece unfolding itself as the highway rushed by. There is no way to ever hear every note on this album. It’s a thick wall of entangled sounds and with every listen, something new is revealed. I recommend closing your eyes. There are times when people speak of music as a competition, they enjoyed one band better than another at a show, a performance spoke to them more or less. For the most part, I dismiss this desire to rank music. Music is not a competition. But when I listen to this record, I do find myself elevating it above others. I return to it often, as it suits every mood and every weather pattern. When people ask me what music I listen to, Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda is always at the top of my list.
Bio: Clyde Petersen is Northwest artist. He is the director of Even Hell has its Heroes, Torrey Pines and countless music videos. His band Your Heart Breaks just released their 16th album, The Wrack Line, on Kill Rock Stars.