This month we review: Christina Landshamer, Akademie für das alte Musik Berlin/BERNHARD Forck, Yomiuri Nippon SO/Skrowaczewski, Asmik Grigorian, and
Christophe Rousset
Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and a fuzz-effect first... how did an army surplus hut become Columbia Studio B and help country music cross into pop? Steve Sutherland reveals all
Crazy? You want crazy? OK, let’s pop into Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge for a snifter. See that guy over there in the corner, nursing the same warm beer he’s been sipping for the past hour or so? Well, that’s Willie Nelson, a wannabe songwriter who’s been kicking around Nashville of late getting pretty much nowhere beyond a police record for drunk driving without a licence. He’s got a wife and three kids to feed back home and the money ain’t so good.
Before embarking on a decades-long solo career, Gary Numan was the driving force behind New Wave three-piece Tubeway Army, and his electronic fingerprints are all over their sci-fi-tinged 1979 album, which took synth pop to the very top of the charts
When punk arrived in the UK in late 1976 it had its radical aspects, including questioning the relationship between audience and artist, but it was essentially a form of back-to-basics rock ’n’ roll, albeit harder, faster and more aggressive than its predecessors.
The San Francisco power pop band chased perfection on their second album – and broke up a little over a year later. Steve Sutherland checks out the 180g reissue
It’s a crime, that’s what it is! An absolute outrage! Chances are you feel the same way as I do about a favourite album that no one else in the world seems to give a fig for. I’m not talking about the one that reminds you of your first date or some other sentimental attachment. I’m referring to the LP that was released into an uncaring world and inexplicably ignored when, by every measure you employ to judge a record’s artistic worth, it should have been embraced, applauded, lauded and been top of the charts for weeks on end.
Centuries ahead of his time, Kraus was the master of Scandi noir, says Peter Quantrill, in a catalogue of symphonies and theatre pieces crying out for wider recognition
The title is neither original, nor strictly accurate. Born five months after Mozart in June 1756, Kraus grew up in the German town of Buchen im Odenwald. His father was a clerk who (not unreasonably) regarded music as an unstable profession and pressed his son into a law degree. The plan failed, and by the age of 20 Kraus had composed pieces for the church including a Te Deum, a Requiem and a Passion oratorio [see Essential Recordings, opposite].
With visuals inspired by JBL’s hi-fi products from the 1960s, the brand’s ‘Classic’ range of separates are populated by technology familiar to audiophiles some 60 years later...
Think JBL and, not unreasonably, you’ll probably think ‘speakers’. The company has been in the loudspeaker business for getting on 80 years, having been founded in California in 1946 by James B Lansing, from whom it takes its name. Lansing himself took his own life just three years later but left an insurance policy to keep the company going, in which form JBL has become an internationally famous audio company and, since 1969, part of what is now Harman International. In 2017 Harman became an independent subsidiary of South Korea’s technology giant, Samsung.
With visuals inspired by JBL’s hi-fi products from the 1960s, the brand’s ‘Classic’ range of separates are populated by technology familiar to audiophiles some 60 years later...
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