Hersch / Gaisford - Last Autumn - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2011 sophomore album from the Celtic Punk band. Following on from their self titled debut album, which topped many of the best of 2010 lists in the genre, they take it one step further with a work that sums up what it's like to live in this chaotic and unpredictable world of ours. Sir Reg is for lovers of Flogging Molly, the Pogues, Men They Couldn't Hang, Dropkick Murphy's and others in Folk/Celtic/Rock/Punk style. The songs deal with issues of hardship, emigration, pain and the desperation that many of our people are faced with, as well as the hopes and dreams that we share and the belief in a better future.

Rachmaninov / Infante / Lutoslawski / Milhaud - Virtuosic Dance [COMPACT DISCS] date 09/30/2016

Composer Michael Hersch's string quartet, performed here with absolute commitment by the New York based FLUX Quartet, is inextricably connected to his friendship with the late American artist Michael Mazur. More specifically, Hersch was inspired by a series of etchings and lithographs Mazur did of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum in the 1960's. In his musical depiction of these images, Hersch writes music that is at times aggressive and disturbing and at other times wistful, but always with the profound intensity of a deeply sensitive nature. Mazur wrote of Hersch's music InchThese compositions are filled sometimes with frightening sounds. They are unrelenting, nearly without hope... But no artwork can be without hope since it is in the very nature of creative work to be optimistic, if only in as much as we continue to work through everything but our own death.Inch