Rota / Phil Baden-Baden: De Boeve Wies / Hee - Divertimento Concertante - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Roberta Rust - Devoted to Debussy [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/26/2007

Limited violet cloudburst colored vinyl LP pressing. One of stoner doom's founding bands summons forth some of the most monolithic riffs and heaviest tones ever known! Acid King is stoner doom royalty, and Beyond Vision is their first new album since 2015's Middle Of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere. Recorded by longtime producer Billy Anderson, the album's songs flow into each other without beginning or ending, propelled by an undulating, lysergic pulse that traces the winding path of interplanetary existence and takes listeners wherever they'd like to go. With blistering guitars and swirling power dirges aplenty, Beyond Vision began as an experiment and became the path to a silver future, marking the dawn of a new era for the band who built the template for thundering, swinging doom.

This disc of pieces played by pianist Polina Osetinskaya brings together the music of Nino Rota and Leonid Desyatnikov. An odd combination? Actually, no! Rota lived entirely in the 20th century while Desyatnikov was born in 1955, but what these composers have in common is not just the century they lived in but the way their work challenges what academic music had become. Neither Rota nor Desyatnikov has ever been part of any musical movement, and they have written no theoretical tracts (as was all the rage in the 20th century), but we can still see their music as a riposte to contemporary isolationism, arrogance, and fear.