tunequest

Air [french band]'s first album in three years, Pocket Symphony, will be released in a handful of days. In preparation for that event, I thought it would be fun to take a trip through the French band's back catalogue, starting with their earliest works, which range from the 1996 early singles to 1997's debut album Premiers Symptomes. :: Imagine it's 1969 and your thoughts are aimed toward the future. Not your ...

Read the rest of this post.

From the archives: I wrote the original version of this article for a newspaper column about 5 years ago. So it reads more like a newspaper column and not so much like a the informal blogginess that's usually found around here. It's from the Records that time forgot series that I hope to revive in 2007. This version corrects a couple awkward sentences and updates the formatting, but remains ...

Read the rest of this post.

Interpretations of John Williams' Star Wars music is a veritable cottage industry. A portion of it is sure to turn up at any concert performance featuring "movie music" as well as concert recordings featuring the same. Then, there's Meco's disco versions, The Evil Genius Orchestra's excellent cocktail versions as well as countless techno/trance/club versions. So it should come as no surprise that there is at least one jazz variation. The ...

Read the rest of this post.

Continuing the tunequest within a tunequest today, I listened to a handful of tracks by Argentine composer Luis Bacalov during the morning's rainy commute to the office. Bacalov rose to prominence writing film music for 60s and 70s era spaghetti westerns and hard boiled Italian dramas. Prolific, he's got more than 140 composer credits to his name and even won an Academy Award in 1996 for Il Postino. More ...

Read the rest of this post.

I knew this day would eventually come, since the tunequest made it into the "i"s many months ago. Back in 2001, I ran across a posting on the usenets called Italian Cinema Lounge. It was 225 songs taking up 700 MB and spanning eleven and a half hours of music culled from various Italian film composers from the 60s and 70s ranging from Alberto Baldan Bembo to Walter Rizzati. Fascinated ...

Read the rest of this post.