Harold Budd

According to his Wikipedia page, I have missed a few releases by Harold Budd, most notably two connected albums with Robin Guthrie (with whom he composed the excellent Mysterious Skin soundtrack) and an exclusively digital album recorded in memory of one of his former teachers. The page indicates:

# 2007 Perhaps (Samadhisound)
# 2007 After The Night Falls (with Robin Guthrie) Darla Records
# 2007 Before The Day Breaks (with Robin Guthrie) Darla Records

Harold Budd is one of my favourite ambient artists, along with Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Biosphere, and some work by David Sylvian on Gone to Earth (I already wrote about this album here). Tortoise probably fits in this list too.

If you would like to discover Harold Budd in a single album (his career spans over decades), his Music for 3 Pianos with Ruben Garcia and Daniel Lentz is exceptional—with rather sad overtones, don't expect Cuban rumba.

Ministry - No W

BBC Reviews

BBC Experimental now has a syndication feed, featuring:

• The last Fripp & Eno. In line with The Equatorial Stars.
• The last Robert Wyatt. In line with Cuckooland.

Dailymotion Jazz Group

This made my day. Some of the videos are exceptionally good, just like Miles Davis.

Are you still here?

Listening to Kraftwerk

My three-part guide.

• Part 1: 1974-1975. Albums: Autobahn, Radio-Activity. The best way to discover what they were trying to do is to listen to their live is Köln from 1975, which was recorded and released by some Italian bootleg radio.
• Part 2: 1977-1978. Building the crib for industrial music. Trans-Europe Express is the cold hand, Die Mensch-Machine is the warm hand.
• Part 3: 1981-onwards. The stuff that inspired electronic dance music. Album: Computer World. Their last versions (Tour de France, Minimum Maximum) are funny tribute: “look guys, we're also doing techno now—But you invented it in the first place!”

Radiohead, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”

To my own amazement, there is something in the last Radiohead (free) album that is actually interesting. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” is their first song with more to it than some kind of weak lament covered by what I consider to be poor arrangements.

Funnily enough, the last track on the last Chemical Brothers, “The Pills won't Help you Now,” comes with an identical development in its rhythmics (well, at least in my twisted vision of the matter).

Precisions:

1. Yes, “paying what you like” means “free” to me, they still owe me for their previous overpriced records.
2. Yes, I do consider the full Radiohead career to have been less inventive than the first fourteen notes from King Crimson's “Starless.”
3. Wow, that's my first “plain rock” post!
   

Zeppelin fuel

Led Zeppelin is fuel you pick up on the road to keep going forward. Here's a very decent live recorded in Paris in 1971. Seven songs, two from I, one from II, two from III, two from IV.