The Poker Club Band Art Graham Karamazov Stoffer Lay - Tullochgorum - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

Blue Raspberry Cream Vinyl. On her latest EP InchSomething is a shell.Inch Sofia Isella's vocals swing from coolly detached to emotional detonation, often in the span of the same song. She brings listeners into a world colored by feminist hyper-realism, challenging listeners to re-define ideas of femininity, and safety; to see that things are not okay. She doesn't flinch from the horror stitched into the fabric of the feminine experience. Citing writers like Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Mona Awad as germinal influences on her lyricism, Isella plunges into the underbelly of expectations of good-girlhood, of valiant womanhood. In her songs she splays out the stakes of it all, plumbing the viscera, unearthing the blood, guts, dirt, and decay lurking beneath. By the time she hit fifteen, Isella's taste had expanded and grown darker and more mature. Artists like Nine Inch Nails and Tom Waits became a conduit for the kind of raw intensity she'd always been drawn to, and gave her permission to push herself to new depths of expression. That freedom that Reznor et al. Endowed to the songwriter are evidenced on her latest EP

The Belgian pianist Thérèse Malengreau has a particular interest in the relationship between music and the visual arts. With her first on BIS she offers us a rare opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the music of Hans Erich Apostel, banned as 'degenerate' by the Nazis in 1938, and a rarity in performance ever since. At the same time, her album allows us insight into the interplay between composers and artists in other disciplines during the first decades of the twentieth century, in the context of movements such as Der Blaue Reiter, the arts magazine Der Sturm or the Vienna Workshop. The three works here were inspired by artwork by Otto Kokoschka and Alfred Kubin, two of them appearing on album for the first time. In his Op. 1, the Zehn Variationen, Apostel translates 10 drawings by Kokoschka into sounds - but as Malengreau suggests in her own liner notes, what the music describes is the varying degrees of expressivity and intensity of the drawings, rather than the images themselves. The closing work consists of 60 very brief sketches (less than 40 seconds on average), in which Apostel is reacting to Kubin's drawings (caricatures rather than portraits) of nuns and witches, generals or huntsmen. Apostel completed it in 1948-49, but as early as 1945 it provided material for what is probably his best-known work the ten pieces that make up the 15-minute long Kubiniana.

For his new recital disc, the acclaimed Finnish guitarist Ismo Eskelinen had the aim of creating a programme that works like a story 'a modern guitar album that lends itself to continuous listening from beginning to end'. The pieces that he has selected are united by the fact that, with the exception of Tan Dun, Eskelinen has collaborated closely with all the composers. In the liner notes to the album he expresses his admiration for how intuitively they all understood the essence of the guitar, even though none of them is a guitarist. 'Everyone has found a unique way to bring his own musical style to the guitar, and each of the composers is clearly recognizable.' Opening the album are Kromos by Sebastian Fagerlund and Solo XI by Kalevi Aho, two pieces that in technical terms come close to the limits of what is possible on the guitar, but with a completely convincing musical logic. Olli Mustonen's Sonata No. 2 contains drama but also lyricism, qualities which are emphasized in Tan Dun's multi-movement collage Seven Desires with inspiration from the different traditions and characteristics of Spain's flamenco guitar and China's pipa (lute). Jukka Tiensuu is among the pioneers of modern Finnish guitar music and wrote his first work for the instrument as early as 1974. His Daydreams from 2016 is composed for guitar and electronics, but the sound world is strongly guitaristic, as the electronic part is modified from fragments played by Eskelinen on the guitar. Sometimes the use of electronics produces echo effects alongside the live guitar, and sometimes the sound image expands into that of a guitar trio. The very brief closing number is an arrangement, by Eskelinen himself, of Timo Alakotila's calm and soothing Psalm.