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Post by Sordel on Sept 29, 2014 11:31:53 GMT -5
Testament of Solomon is okay, very much along established lines so don't expect to be surprised.
I see that The Last Judgement (forthcoming) is listed as the final album for the Moonchild group. Coming after hints of the end of the Filmworks series, it's interesting to see Zorn drawing some lines under projects.
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Post by stefanodoug on Oct 2, 2014 15:04:15 GMT -5
I think I will go for Zion 80 after having heard excerpts here and there. And it looks like the Song Project is coming out on vinyl in November. I hope to read about the Laswell/Zorn disc and Aguares on this forum soon.
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Post by rodrigo on Oct 2, 2014 15:26:24 GMT -5
I really love Aguares! I also liked Adramelech but I haven't listened to it as much as Aguares, it hasn't grown up on me the way Roberto Rosriguez's has. Also waiting for the Dream membrane reviews.. it's on its way
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Post by Offering on Oct 6, 2014 14:22:32 GMT -5
I really want to check out Dream Membrane, but I don't want to purchase the actual disc and incur import duties. Amazon don't have it listed for download, and Valentine's Day is grossly overpirced for MP3s. Seriously, the Tzadik business plan is pretty ridiculous in 2014 - especially in the age of Bandcamp, where not only can bands sell physical copies of both vinyl and CD, but also sell digital in various bitrates including .FLAC AND also sell merch there too. With the band taking all the money directly.
And here's Tzadik, not only with NO digital facility on their outdated website (which would make them a TON of extra income), but still ONLY peddling compact discs. Great if you live in the USA and collects CDs I guess.
LUDICROUS!
(Rant over)
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Post by stefanodoug on Oct 6, 2014 15:59:37 GMT -5
Perhaps i am wrong, but i recall Zorn saying that artwork still meant a lot to him, therefore he would have pushed the release of cds or vinyls as much as he could. Now with services like iTunes, Spotify, Deezer and the alike, it sounds and looks a bit naive to still have that simple webpage today but i guess that is the way they want to keep it until they change their mind (i am referring to Zorn and those who operate on that page). As far as i am concerned, when i purchase from DMG i always ask them to dangerously send as gift because i live outside US and i am not willing to pay for extra customs fees. But i do buy cds because i am not yet cluttered and in spite of my deep admiration for John Cage (who despised the process of collecting music defining it the end of music itself) i like artwork too and usually Tzadik's standards are way above the average, specially on the Zorn related releases. I also remember reading that profits were equally split among the bands. So even if the revenues are mainly made via Zorn's output, every band benefits from it. Is it really so? It is true that digital sharing allows the bands to get funded with no one in between, but there are still people out there who want to wait for a parcel to arrive and slowly taste the music nicely packaged and hopefully played. The only remark -imho- of this digital downloading is its inner impersonal quality that resembles the same phenomenon i experienced with music trading. It was really cool to search for people with similar tastes in the early days of trading. Peer to peer and torrents annihilated the meeting of fans (later reinvigorated by social communities) and though they are a quick means to have everything in a matter of seconds, which can be useful at times, it cannot be the only option. In the end, i support your point, that is, Tzadik should embrace digitalness a little more, but i hope it will always retain its concrete, physical side Sorry for going a little bit off topic.
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Post by Offering on Oct 7, 2014 2:04:36 GMT -5
Hmm... DMG always flat out refused to write "gift" on their packages. My record customs fee was £40 and they hadn't even opened the package. Awesome.
I totally respect those that collect the physical product, and I truly love Chippy's art. The simple fact is that many people just want the music (the most important part). It's an age old discussion and one that we won't ever solve. I'm just annoyed as I want to check out the new Zorn records! It is no wonder people download illegally, which is another reason why they should do their own downloads.
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Post by sarahv on Oct 7, 2014 8:10:16 GMT -5
I suspect it is a similar question/answer as why a comic writer/illustrator I like won't do e-books. If he allows/encourages digital then a certain percentage of sales go that way and he sells fewer physical books. And he is already at the edge of printing enough books to make it economically worthwhile to print them at all (the more you print, the cheaper they are per piece, so you really need to print a minimum number to make them cheap enough that people will buy them). I imagine CDs are the same way... it might make sense to print and sell 5,000, but if you allow digital to cannibalize 40% of the sales then you are looking at a 3,000 piece print job and you might start to lose money on CD sales.
It makes less sense in this case if they are allowing them on iTunes/Amazon, though...
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Post by Sordel on Oct 16, 2014 13:03:15 GMT -5
Hmm... DMG always flat out refused to write "gift" on their packages. My record customs fee was £40 and they hadn't even opened the package. Awesome. There's an Amazon seller called 'all your music' that I've found very reliable for esoteric discs from the U.S. to the U.K. They work out about a third cheaper than Amazon.co.uk once you factor in p&p.
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Post by stefanodoug on Oct 18, 2014 10:41:54 GMT -5
Hmm... DMG always flat out refused to write "gift" on their packages. My record customs fee was £40 and they hadn't even opened the package. Awesome. There's an Amazon seller called 'all your music' that I've found very reliable for esoteric discs from the U.S. to the U.K. They work out about a third cheaper than Amazon.co.uk once you factor in p&p. Thanks for pointing this seller out. His catalogue is remarkable aand features various Zorn related releases at a bargain price. Not to mention some Jaki Byard's albums I was about to purchase... oops, almost off topic again
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Post by Sordel on Feb 10, 2015 16:14:12 GMT -5
I hope that everyone is getting the Olympiad volume 1 disc by Dither. I received a copy yesterday and I think it's absolutely essential.
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Post by rodrigo on Feb 11, 2015 11:20:06 GMT -5
To be honest I wasn't plannig to! Previously recorded game pieces are not my cup of tea... Although when I saw Dither play some of them live I enjoyed it, wasn't planning on buying the cd..
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Post by Sordel on Feb 11, 2015 14:13:12 GMT -5
To be honest I wasn't plannig to! Previously recorded game pieces are not my cup of tea... Although when I saw Dither play some of them live I enjoyed it, wasn't planning on buying the cd.. No question that the game pieces fall at the thornier part of fhe spectrum for Zorn, which is one reason that I flagged up this particular release. I even buy the ones that I don't honestly find all that rewarding, and this new release is also hard listening, but it's also a great single-disc compendium and it doesn't have the flaw that I find in the Tzadik Cobra: i.e. that particular performance doesn't sound like a 'real' game piece when compared with the HatArt performances. I also think that it helps that some of the more outré sounds are not present (the wet electric Hockey, for example, could be mistaken for something by a Metal band, although admittedly the acoustic performances are in general pretty unequivocally gamey). I'd say that this disc is a valuable piece of the puzzle.
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Post by rodrigo on Feb 11, 2015 19:11:48 GMT -5
Well I don't need to be convinced.. and since I'm missing this week at the Vanguard, I'll try to compensate and give it a try, as well as Sonic Rivers and Valentine's day, which I didn't pick up earlier. Does the Olimpiad cd come with some explanatory text/notes?
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Post by Sordel on Feb 12, 2015 5:00:03 GMT -5
Well I don't need to be convinced.. and since I'm missing this week at the Vanguard, I'll try to compensate and give it a try, as well as Sonic Rivers and Valentine's day, which I didn't pick up earlier. Does the Olimpiad cd come with some explanatory text/notes? There's more explanation than is usual on a Zorn album thanks to some notes by James Moore, but without a reproduction of the score and copious annotation a general listener is never going to understand these pieces beyond what can be pieced together from listening. By the way, for what it's worth, I skipped Sonic Rivers but found Valentine's Day very hard going: it's a "better" reading of the same pieces than Enigmata, but you'd have to be a big fan of Enigmata to need it. If anyone has comments on Sonic Rivers I'd be interested to hear them.
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Post by Offering on Feb 12, 2015 6:34:16 GMT -5
Well I don't need to be convinced.. and since I'm missing this week at the Vanguard, I'll try to compensate and give it a try, as well as Sonic Rivers and Valentine's day, which I didn't pick up earlier. Does the Olimpiad cd come with some explanatory text/notes? There's more explanation than is usual on a Zorn album thanks to some notes by James Moore, but without a reproduction of the score and copious annotation a general listener is never going to understand these pieces beyond what can be pieced together from listening. By the way, for what it's worth, I skipped Sonic Rivers but found Valentine's Day very hard going: it's a "better" reading of the same pieces than Enigmata, but you'd have to be a big fan of Enigmata to need it. If anyone has comments on Sonic Rivers I'd be interested to hear them. I really enjoyed Sonic Rivers. That said, I really love Wadada Leo Smith's playing, so am always interested in hearing any of his work. He puts out quite a lot though, and some of it is difficult to obtain (certainly here in the UK at least). As for Valentine's Day / Enigmata, I think overall I prefer VD. Since it came out I've been trying to compare the tunes on each record together, but with no real success! I'm still curious as to how Valentine's Day was put together though. Did Tyshawn Sorey just have Enigmata to work from and constructed his part solely around that album, or did Ribot and Dunn re-record their parts from scratch live with TS? I'd be curious to know. Definitely going to pick up Olympiad too. I've always enjoyed Zorn's game pieces and it's encouraging to read your positive thoughts on it. I admit I do have to be in the mood for such works, but when I am nothing comes close!
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