David Ayers

As someone who trains regularly I notice the very brief effect that sports events have on uptake. First week of Olympics the fast lane at the pool was mysteriously full of strangers (the regulars seemed to have taken the week off - good for me, about the only way I get to be fastest in the pool, except when I am first in). Second week, the newbies had vanished and the regulars were back. Same with running and biking, a notable sudden flurry, then back to the usual empty roads and deserted trails. It's sweet how people get inspired and reminded that they do like to swim/bike/run - I wonder if this time the effects will be more lasting.

Breakthrough and Song Everlasting are on the Select. Out of print. Kettle defense. I never borrowed your kettle. Anyway it had a hole in it. Besides, I gave it you back. FWIW the Pullen is a cheap download at amazon. i.e. the Pullen Mosaic

Send me a check over a couple thousand £ so I can attend various concerts, m'kay? And send a few months of time and some good orchestras and conductors along! Seriously: I wouldn't consider buying the box at all if I wasn't at least somewhat interested. But seeing the symphonies performed live - I don't think so. Classical concerts over here cost an arm and a leg, and I don't think Shostakovich often makes the programmes, either. Ah well over here we are awash with Russian conductors, but really everyone plays Shostakovich here and the core of instrumental symphonies (4,5,7,8,10,11 and 15) come around fairly frequently - all are due to be played at least once in London in the next 12 months. It helps to hear them done to think about what they are supposed to be. They can be quite hard to bring off for various reasons, one being that they toy with hollowness and thereby risk hollowness. A passage that in Mravinsky suggests the last survival of a battered interiority in another sounds like there just isn't enough music, which often there isn't. And this hollowness is core Shostakovich and as much at the mechanical heart of his endless early satirical work and now-celebrated 4th as anything else. Those who knew his work were shocked when in the 5th he unveiled an anguished slow movement - they didn't think he could write slow music, or music with feeling. It takes just a little time to work out what came when, why it came, and what it was that came. And yet, so much of it is not 'good'.

Whatever view a person takes, in the end, of the symphonies, of individual symphonies, of movements or individual sections within symphonies, it is necessary to know them and understand what they are (for example, if you haven't got past Volkov and the unmentionable MacDonald, then you haven't really started). In order to start, some commitment is needed, and that means not just seeing the symphonies as a bargain-box job-lot but taking a little time, hearing them in concert with different conductors and orchestras - comparing recorded versions, the usual. After a time of course you *will* come out the other side - which is what folks here are registering - but by then you will know how to look back.

Breakthrough and Song Everlasting are on the Select.

Yeah the one I have been listening to isn't really country, but it is somehow derived from the principles, ethos and soundworld of country...

I've found the celebration of Team GB in British media boorish. Just seems rude to invite people to your country for a party then do nothing but celebrate beating them at games. Especially if most of the time you don't actually win. Total number of TV interviews with non-anglophone athletes = 0. So three cheers for the drunken host - if you can make yourself heard over his incessant self-congratulation. UK-ites will know what I mean if I say this character will next appear on your screens as the unselfconscious big-head held up for mockery on an episode of Come Dine With Me.

Have to agree. If they didn't check it on this occasion it means they probably never check public archives for anything. It also means they didnt talk to too many experts.

I like the idiom of what I've heard - musically straightforward, rough feel, lyrically a kind of cynical, gnomic folk.

I came in late on Mekons when I bought Natural on CD in 2007. I know it is not 'typical' but I do understand its charm. A band more known by name than by its music, maybe? From Leeds, Yorkshire (my neck of the woods) but (part?) based in US, now (?). Natural was recorded in UK. Plenty on Spotify but I am as much interested in getting a feel for who/what they are and who is into them as I am into actually hearing all the records. My kind of band but when I used to play I entirely ignored them (even though people I played with referenced them...).

Talk about the Mekons.

And we haven't finished yet. About time the world woke up to us, let alone the featureless desert of the pointless 'rest of the UK'. Go Yorkshire!

Thanks for streaming - it's the future! Well, it's the present...

All on Spotify Along with the whole of Blandine Rannou, two Starkers, etc, etc. Takes the guesswork out of it and a little better than amazon clips. Come and join the modern world.

Most folks round here gave up real life for nostalgia decades ago - and in some cases nostalgia for other people's past...

That's a big pile of the good stuff!

Well, I humbly suggest that we should celebrate these rather than cavil. This label, and no other, cared to record so much Abrams that it now has more titles than it can reissue in a viable way. I don't see any other label that either has this scale of back catalog or that is continuing to set remastered but bargain price box sets before the public. Three of these sets were top of people's list in the preceding discussion.

Huge big chunks of hearty goodness! Thanks for the heads up. I was trying to see if there's a theme to what's missing from the MRA box, but heck - it's the first Abrams box in world history! And eight albums at that. Thinking about is I don't see a theme for a second box. In any case these were long in print as LPs and as CDs. I replayed Q...etc recently and got less out of it than I might, so maybe the missing titles are lesser titles? And George Lewis! Who'd ever have thought it, a George Lewis box!!

That might appeal to some folks, but not to me. Spending as much, and in some cases possibly more, for downloads compared to a physical product is counter-intuitive and makes little business sense. Well, I don't think we should pretend that downloading or streaming make less sense than they do. Here is one way you save with downloads - you only need to purchase the product at the very point you want to listen to it. There is no stockpiling or collecting, you can access it anywhere via wi-fi or even via 3G. It's really a cheaper way to do things (and streaming of course even more so). The physical products resell for peanuts with very few exceptions and just sit in piles looking old-fashioned. That said, the point of physical product is to maintain a certain identity and presence, mainly by framing or presenting the music via the text and artwork, and even by the commitment of the physical acts of procurement and filing and by the ritual act of playing. Maybe - but even Mosaic ditched the artwork decades ago and there is a trickle at least of d/l's released with digital booklet. Mind you, Mosaic kept the 12 x 12 format even for CDs - how retro is that?

To clarify: their USP over itunes is that you can toggle between hard copy or d/l in the same store - so they want to give you the choice and this is a way to influence copyright owners to play that game.

I've noticed amazon doesn't always have downloads that itunes does. Apple is amazon's biggest rival, and I think this change is intended to drive a catch-up.

Possible influence of Lark Ascending on the Bloch?

As a consequence of your post I just took a look at the (extremely intermittent)Journal of Carl Nielsen Studies. Surprisingly interesting. Either that or I am easily entertained. http://e-tidsskrifter.dk/ojs/index.php/carlnielsenstudies/index

Youtube, twitter and facebook are being merged as youtwitface. I hate that joke too.