Sharkissimo

I like Dylan too, although admittedly I'm not so keen on the Cult of Dylan, that like an overgrown tree, cuts out sunlight to other equally worthy songwriters, who for all their talent aren't as adept at the art of personal myth-making as he is.

Just to add my interpretation to @Loert.'s - At the heart of this movement is a bitonal tug-of-war game between B minor and it's dominant, F# Major. Neither key centre quite wins out, and at the closing measures in a masterstroke of compositional of guile, Poulenc reinterprets the F# as the dominant of B Major, forming an elegant Picardy cadence. The chord you highlight is a G#7#9, which is just the II7 chord in F#, spiced up with a Stravinskian false relation. Note that we've been primed with the genuine article, a G#m, at :09, so when this more colourful chord arrives it feels somewhat uncanny. As the G#3 generates a D#5 in the form of the third harmonic, Poulenc chooses to omit the fifth (a common jazz practice), and this along with way the chord's voiced lends it an open, ambiguous quality, that could lead one to read it as an appoggiatura chord derived from the previous sonority. Both are valid readings I think, but I'd argue there's merit in viewing this passage in the wider context of an expanded functional harmony.

^ See?

I've been on a Sylvian/Sakamoto/Japan deep-dive for the last few weeks, although I've already been familiar with his music for some years. Mick Karn's singular sound was essentially the reason why I took up fretless (well him and Jaco Pastorius's work on Hejira). There was a time when I found David 'wish-I-Scott-Walker' Sylvian's glutinous voice grating, but I've come to appreciate it, warts and all. Tin Drum might be Japan's masterwork, but Gentlemen Take Polaroids is still the album I revisit most often--Swing in particular. As much as I love the original, there's something quite magical about this stripped-down performance of Ghosts. For me, the verses evince more pathos when transposed down a major second and furnished with the uneasy harmonies that were only latent within the original's Prophet-5 drone. You could probably count the number of pop songs that involve a move from the submediant to a Dorian supertonic on one hand. Hey thanks! I've put it back. It got so few likes that I thought I'd gone overboard, or had simply bitten off more than I could chew.

It's probably their most consistent record, although I love The Lamb's seething ambition.

While in classical terms that might called a quartal stack, I would approach it from more of a jazz perspective and see it as an Em11 in a quartal arrangement. By 1976 quartal voicings had been widely embedded within the harmonic vernacular of funk, disco and similar jazz-inflected forms of pop, from Donald Fagen of Steely Dan to Nile Rodgers of Chic. From Kool & the Gang arranger Ronald "Khalis" Bell's Wikipedia entry: The salient figures here in this quote are Miles Davis and John Coltrane, as it was Bill Evans and later Herbie Hancock with the First and Second Great Miles Davis Quintets (respectively) and McCoy Tyner with the John Coltrane Quartet who were the among the first pianists to introduce quartal-type voicings into what became known as modal jazz. These cats in turn were drawing from earlier innovators like Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Billie Strayhorn, who together were integral to the formulation of Alex North's own unique language. For all of these artists the mother source will always be composers like Ravel, Debussy, Milhaud, and the great quartal boom that stretches roughly from 1910 to 1940. Apologies for the excessively didactic info-dump, Jilal. I know you're pretty au fait with this subject already--just couldn't help it.

Serving pandiatonic realness. I wonder if Howard Shore has this somewhere in his record collection.

Can anyone help me decrypt the cluster-like sonority in Angela Morley's arrangement for It's Raining Day from Scott 3? I can hear that it's divisi strings - divided half and half with some playing artificial harmonics and the others tremolo. Unveiling that is what sounds like a bowed vibraphone with the motor on, and then of course the mark tree that shepherds in the guitar and bass--an expectant Db(add9). This Youtube comment describes the effect best: "The genius of Angela Morley's string arrangement... that creeping uneasiness in the background - like overhead electricity pylons, lifting the hairs on the back of your neck skyward..." As a side note, this is probably my favourite song of all time. Here's a live version with the great Sheffield crooner Richard Hawley on vox.

Why does the 4K master of the Empire Strikes Back look so gloomy?

Brain fart. The soundtrack album's titled Passion, which I play more frequently than the film.

A few heterodox scores that haven't been mentioned. Ennio Morricone - Battle of Algiers Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Ryuichi Sakamoto & David Byrne - The Last Emperor Peter Gabriel - The Passion of the Christ Michael Danna - The Ice Storm

Current mood