This Is the Kit - Off Off On - VINYL LP

Singer-songwriter and composer, Kate Stables returns with a wondrous new This Is the Kit album, Careful of Your Keepers, that chronicles a world of mistakes and mishaps, cruel circumstances, and universe-driven surprises. It's a record that embraces the concept of outrospection - the idea that you get to know oneself by developing relationships and empathic thinking with others - and brings the Paris-based, UK born bandleader's signature ability to move swiftly between cryptic poetry to honest inquisition to the fore. Guiding the ship through changing seas is producer Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), who deftly enhances the innate shared language that Stables has with her band, capturing beautiful instrumental performances while leaving the space required for her robust, silken voice to lead. The music here is daring and soft, cutting and warm, a wild feat of complexity and combined dispositions. Surviving change is a constant throughout this record and This Is the Kit takes us to the front lines in InchMore Change,Inch where we celebrate the losing battle of fighting change with barbed dancing lyrics that whisk us from the mundane to the massive as a steady beat and delicate guitars wind in and out, down and around Stables words Inchlight bulb / life changing / found a friend... claw sanity back again.Inch The sonic brilliance always comes back to bite and the cascading melodies of InchStuck In A RoomInch plant the listener in the most familiar of recent quandaries, wanting to leave but being unable to. There are so many versions of InchleavingInch one might be attracted to in this disappointing modern age, and Stables works through them all. Conflict hits hard and with surprise but have the right people around you and you can escape by the skin of your teeth.

Cherry Rhodes - Cherry Rhodes at the Kimmel Center [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/31/2010

Three concertos for double bass and orchestra by Johann Matthias Sperger, who was not just a composer but also the most renowned double bassist of the 18th century, performed and recorded here by orchestra and soloist according to their original scores. These works are all products of the years of Sperger's first employment as a double bassist, between 1777 and 1783, in the court orchestra of the archbishop of Hungary, the duke Joseph Graf von Batthyány in Pressburg. They date specifically from the years 1778 and 1779. The soloist uses gut strings, as was common practice at the time of the works' composition well over two hundred years ago, bringing out the warm sound of the instruments. To do justice to history and for the pleasure of today's audience the present recordings were made in the same auditorium as Johann Matthias Sperger first presented these concertos in the InchHall of MirrorsInch in the Primate's Palace of Bratislava (formerly Pressburg).