Harrison / Gottlieb,Karen - Music for Harp - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Los Angeles-via-Oakland musician Chris Adams who makes music under the moniker Pendant releases his Saddle Creek debut Harp, on April 8th. A rich, surprising new body of work from the producer and songwriter, Harp connects 90s house and rave music with hip-hop, shoegaze, and pop, and which serves as a culmination of years of painful emotional work for Adams brought on by the death of his Father over 10 years prior. Though Harp is Adam's sophomore album as Pendant it feels like a starting point. The of his 2019 debut Through a Coil was marred by the messy, public dissolution of the record tag it was released on the day it was to be released. A year later he was burnt out. Attempting to tour the album had been hard on his voice, and the structures of rock music, which had dictated his entire life as a musician, were beginning to feel claustrophobic. Pendant's salvation came, ironically, in the form of the pandemic. Adams was ready to make new music but was both mentally and physically marooned, unable to reach the tools he would ordinarily use to make music or the headspace he would ordinarily inhabit. Without a guitar, the crutch that had supported much of his music-making in the past, he was forced to sketch out Harp's world in a more impressionistic, free-associative way. Long a fan of dance and electronic music, he was suddenly without any good reason to not venture into that beat-heavy, synth-drenched world. The resulting Harp recalls the precise but emotionally rich landscapes of Arca or Oneohtrix Point Never, rendered in the watercolors of My Bloody Valentine.TRACK LISTING1. Laid in Orchids2. Static Dream3. Thorn4. Altered Destinies5. LED Head Rush6. Blue Mare7. Latex Heart8. Harp9. Contract10. Rights for an Angel11. Eventless Horizon12. Secret in the Dusk

Various Artists - Eternal Harp [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/24/2001

The repertoire for harp and piano is modest indeed; only Carlos Salzedo's Sonata (1922) enjoys any currency on disc. However, the combination of plucked and keyed chromatic instruments is one that affords any number of imaginative possibilities and a broad palette of timbres, especially in the contrasting sustain and decay patterns of each instrument. For her second album on Brilliant Classics, after the critical success of 'Dionysus and Apollo' (95925, featuring equally rare Romantic flute and harp repertoire), Anna Pasetti explores the work of four mostly Milanese-based composers. First among them is Francesco Pollini, dedicatee of Bellini's I Sonnambula and composer of a 'Grande Sonate' in a concertante style, exploiting the idiomatic contrast between the instruments to the full. The Capriccio by Benedetto Negri is written in the form of a nocturnal divertimento typical for the time a cantabile introduction prefacing an elaborate variation set with a brilliantly figured coda. Best known of our quartet is Saverio Mercadante for his operas and florid variation sets on popular operatic themes which cling to the fringes of the instrumental repertoire, especially for flute. His rhapsodic Melodia is a chamber arrangement of a concertante work for harp and small orchestra, with an opportunity for improvised virtuosity in the form of a cadenza which Pasetti has devised for herself. Neapolitan by birth and training as an operatic composer, Lauro Rossi took charge of Milan's conservatoire before succeeding Mercadante at the head of the Naples conservatoire. His Divertimento is an early work, dedicated to a talented pair of musician sisters, in which the piano takes the lead role, unlike the other works here.