Erik Satie - Musique d'Ameublement, Vexations

2006; 6 tracks
Marius Constant, conductor

I didn't include the Hindemith because I really don't like him. If you're looking for some early ambient works by Satie, however, this is perfect.

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Claude Debussy - Jeux, La Mer, Nocturnes

1999; 6 tracks
Loren Maazel, conductor
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

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Maurice Ravel - Piano Concertos

2002; 5 tracks
Joaquín Achúcarro, pianist
Gilbert Varga, conductor

This lovely CD features the 2 Piano Concertos by Maurice Ravel. The first three tracks are his Piano Concerto in G Major, the fourth track the "Alborada del Gracioso, for orchestra," and, to end the album, the Piano Concerto in D Major (for the left hand). So beautiful.

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Air - Talkie Walkie

2004; 10 tracks

I know I've said this before, but this album by French duo Air is one of my all-time favourites. Every track is truly a jewel and a treasure to behold - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did/do. :3

A part of me would like to travel in your veins

Giya Kancheli - Exil

2000; 5 tracks

Giya Kancheli is Georgian composer who, apparently, is often compared to both Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. Instantly, you should realize that this is not "easy" listening. I take both Kancheli and Tavener (having not listened to a great amount of Pärt, sadly) as both holy and doomed. Their music contains a spirituality that is not often captured in "classical" music, but I find it an extraordinarily haunting, and beautiful, dimension to otherwise boring vocal music. This is a highly meditative work that deserves at least one listen.

Exile is a vocal work sung in German, in faultless style, by Maacha Deubner accompanied by an ensemble of 5 instrumentalists with subtle additions of synthesizer and tape. It starts with a setting of the 23rd Psalm, followed by three settings of small, searing poems by Paul Celan, and ends with `Exile', a poem by Hans Sahl. Both of these poets knew exile and were scarred by Nazi atrocities during World War II - Celan barely escaped with his life from an Romanian prison camp, and Sahl fled Germany in 1933 and escaped to America on one of the last ships leaving Marseille in 1941, so even though this work is titled after 'Exile' and alludes to Kancheli's own exile from his country, it is also heavily weighed upon by memories of the war. The music is uniformly slow with spare, open writing and few of the extremes of dynamics common to his writing. The composition is intensely `inner', nearly conversational, and the voice, held at all times non vibrato and in great control, echoes in pure tones as if sung in a vaulted space like a haunted cathedral.

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Erik Satie - Avent dernières pensées

2009; 71 tracks
Alexander Tharaud, pianist

New releases devoted to Erik Satie are rarities these days, as if the charm and quirkiness of his music have dulled and faded from fashion. But pianist Alexandre Tharaud's repackaging of 71 of Satie's miniatures is an ideal way of rekindling interest in this still-elusive and misunderstood figure. Tharaud devotes the first disc to solo piano pieces, in which the six marvelous Gnossiennes are threaded through a sequence that includes the Avent dernières pensées and wonderfully named sets such as the Embryons desséchés and Heures séculaires et instantanées.

In the seven piano pieces that make up Le Piège de Méduse, Tharaud "prepares" the piano by placing sheets of paper on the strings as Satie evidently did for the premiere, anticipating John Cage and George Crumb's invention by more than 20 years.

On the second disc, Tharaud is joined by a succession of other musicians for duos that range from the piano four-hands version of the Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire to tiny pieces for trumpet and piano and violin and piano, via songs with the tenor Jean Delescluse and the chanteuse Juliette. The chansons could easily be my favourite of the second disc, as Juliette's magical voice is never operatic but perfectly surreal.

There are so many amazing things to be found in Satie. Art that hides art.

Disc 1

Disc 2

Dolorian - Dolorian

2001; 9 tracks

Prepare to be transported to an alien landscape by the psychedelic, very dissonant guitars and heavy dark atmosphere in this doom metal masterpiece. Hidden underneath the slow paced (sometimes even purely atmospheric) and the alternate powerful/faster parts you will find some of the best sounds you will ever hear in your life. You will miss the place you went as soon as the album ends.

Doomload.