Gotobeds - Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic - VINYL LP

Vinyl LP pressing. The Gotobeds reenter the fray with their third full lengther, Debt Begins at 30. The esprit de corps and anxiety-free joy that permeates their other LPs and EPs remains intact. The octane is high-test, the engine still has knocks and pings and the battery is overcharged. The Gotobeds - as Pittsburgh as it gets, the folk music of the Steel City - have more tar for us to swallow. Debt Begins at 30 is an old-fashioned blast furnace and the liquid iron flows. Debt Begins at 30 is not Inchpub sopInch in any way or shape. Debt Begins at 30 also features outside contributors on every track.

Volume 8 in this series documenting Augusta Read Thomas' music, three major scores dominate, with 4 shorter works filling out this 80-minute sonic portrait of an inexhaustibly inventive and individual composer. The brass quintet Avian Capriccio is typically free-wheeling in it's evocation of 3 contrasting types of birds, hummingbirds, swans and canaries. Scored for wordless soprano and string quartet, Plea for Peace acts as a single, seamless block beginning in near-immobility, with the voice animating the instruments as the music embarks on it's slow, implacable progress. Even in a catalogue as multifarious as Thomas', the carillon piece Ripple Effects stands out as a one-off. Commissioned by Rockefeller Chapel, Chicago and devised in a number of versions, sculpted for carillons of three sizes, requiring varying numbers of players. The ballet score The Auditions was written for the Martha Graham Dance Company, and with it, Thomas joins a distinguished company of composers who wrote scores for this seminal figure in modern dance. It is structured in 7 sections, with the auditions of the title being the even-numbered, action-packed sections, and the odd-numbered ones acting as slower, more otherworldly frames. That Two Thoughts About The Piano's title should be identical to a work by Elliott Carter is no accident, as Thomas' work is a response to the older composer's piece without actually quoting or even emulating Carter's music. We've already encountered Selene in a previous volume of this ongoing survey of Thomas' music, but it appears here in a wholly new dress. The original was for string and percussion quartets, but here the strings are replaced by a woodwind nonet in an arrangement by Cliff Colnot, thus preserving the original's harmonic richness. Bringing this collection to a close, Your Kiss sets a love poem by e.e. cummings for soprano and piano.

This double album dedicated to Psalms and Dialogues (released after the 4-album titled Oratori, Mottetti e Lamentazioni) is completing the opera omnia of sacred works hitherto known by the Augustinian friar Ippolito Ghezzi. Within these recordings, the Cappella Musicale di San Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna led by Roberto Cascio is revealing to us a prolific and talented composer, endowed with technique, inventiveness, and happy melodic vein. The Cappella Musicale San Giacomo Maggiore was founded in 2006 with the aim of reviving the unpublished scores of the many composers who belonged to the order of the Augustinian fathers between the 16th and 18th centuries. Among the ensemble's performers are renowned theorists such as Lodovico Zacconi and composers like Ippolito Ghezzi, Guglielmo Lipparini and Tiburzio Massaini. The Cappella Musica, with it's research and restoration work, intends to contribute to the rediscovery of the Italian historical and musical heritage.