William Tyler - New Vanitas (RSD) - VINYL LP

Album Tracks 1. Zen and the Art of Nonsense 2. Fun on the Floor 3. The Blessed West 4. Taken for Granted 5. Looks Can Kill 6. Sacred Measure 7. Flare 8. Black Five 9. Vigilante 10. Zor Gabor 11. Tightrope

Vinyl LP pressing includes . Modern Country is the fourth full-length album by guitarist and composer William Tyler and his first recorded outside of his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. It features an ensemble backing group consisting of multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook (Hiss Golden Messenger, Blind Boys of Alabama), bassist Darin Gray (Tweedy, Jim O'Rourke), and percussionist Glenn Kotche (Wilco). The album was tracked at April Base Studios in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and finished in Nashville, recorded and mixed by Jon Ashley, and produced by Tyler and Brad Cook. While there is never a comfort zone in instrumental music, Tyler attempts to leave any perceived one behind with Modern Country. His first album for Merge, 2013's Impossible Truth, found Tyler exploring the boundaries of composition for solo guitar in a manner that paid homage to everyone from Leo Kottke to Brian Wilson. It was an epic song cycle that veered from cathedral-like psychedelic hymns to pastoral folk melodies. In contrast, Modern Country finds Tyler exploring more focused melodic themes rather than ethereal wanderings. These aren't pop songs, per se, but they are closer in spirit to Neu!, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Bill Frisell. Album Tracks 1. Highway Anxiety 2. I'm Gonna Live Forever (If It Kills Me) 3. Kingdom of Jones 4. Albion Moonlight 5. Gone Clear 6. Sunken Garden 7. The Great Unwind

Having begun their collaboration in 1997, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and it's conductor laureate Thomas Dausgaard have developed an unusually tight partnership. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in their cycles of the symphonies of Schumann, Schubert and, most recently, Brahms - performances which have been characterized by reviewers as variously 'fresh', 'vivid', 'transparent' and 'invigorating'. Of Mendelssohn the team has previously recorded the incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream, a described as 'capturing Mendelssohn's inimitable spirit' on the website Crescendo. The same disc included The Hebrides, and now the SCO and Dausgaard return to Scotland, with Mendelssohn's 'Scottish' Symphony. This was begun in 1829, after a stay in London during which the composer conducted his Symphony No. 1, also included on this disc. Mendelssohn's imagination was often fired by impressions from nature, and Scotland was the Romantic landscape par excellence, celebrated for it's rugged Highland scenery and melancholy tunes. 'I think that today I found the beginning of my 'Scottish' Symphony', he wrote to his parents after a visit to the ruined chapel at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. It took more than a decade for him to complete the symphony - but ever since it's first performance, in 1842, it has been a staple of the symphonic repertoire.