26. LYCOURGOS ANGELOPOULOS & THE GREEK BYZANTINE CHOIR - Akathistos Hymn 2CD set of a service that's approximately 1,300 years old. More Greek Orthodox Church music. Great stuff.
27. GEORGE ANTHEIL - Ballet Mecanique Antheil was an obscure American composer that got the only real attention he ever received for the piece Ballet Mecanique, which was music written for a silent film. Like the title, the music is mechanical and has a lot of percussion and jumpy, shifty, churning sounds. I heard it on this NPR show about modernist music in the 20th century and wanted to go snag it for myself. Some of the other pieces on the disc are pretty straight ahead orchestral works. Good stuff deserving of more attention that it has received. This disc is part of Naxos' "American Classics" series aiming to make American composers and their music more familiar. The average Naxos disc runs around $5-$8, which shows that these companies don't have to rob us blind to turn a profit.
ST. ANTHONY'S MONASTERY CHOIR - Vigil of Saint Anthony More Greek church music. This was recorded at a monastery in Florence, Arizona. My godfather is actually a monk at this monastery (he doesn't sing on it though, it was recorded before he became a monk.) This is one of my favorite chant albums. Very slow. I love the ison (drone) singers.
29. ANTHRAX - Persistence of Time This is probably one of the weirdest transitions we'll experience in the collection. Anyway, this is back when metal was good. Too much of it today sounds just the same. This was when there were a bunch of good bands all doing something unique. Anthrax was always my favorite of the metal bands. This is the only one of their albums I still have though (I used to have them all on tape.) I don't want to own their entire catalogue, but I might have to pick up few more on CD at some point. This CD has a great cover of Joe Jackson's "Got the Time" as well as some great originals like "Keep in the Family," "Belly of the Beast," and "One Man Stands." They were one of the first bands that made me aware of any social/political issues as a kid.
Just a handful of CDs away from starting the letter "B" For some reason, looking through my collection, the letters "A" & "B" contain very few rock/pop/country/reggae/etc type of bands. It's almost all classical music & world music for some reason. The real fun of this thread won't start for most people until we hit "C." This makes my collection look way lopsided towards those two genres, when actually rock/pop/etc makes up well over half my collection.
30. ARARAT - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Soundtrack to a film about the Armenian genocide. The movie is pretty good (worth watching) and the soundtrack is fantastic. It combines western orchestral music with Armenian folk instruments and incorporates Armenian sacred music as well. Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian absolutely soars on this disc. She has one of the most incredible voices I've ever heard. Composer Mychael Danna really knows how to trigger an emotional response with his music too. Good stuff.
This is a wonderful idea. I should start one. I have my CD's basically in order of year of composition since they are almost all show or movie scores (arranged by opening date for shows and first release date for films). Such placement makes sense and follows the development of the form. Good luck.
31. ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION - Enemy of the Enemy A bunch of Indian guys from England that produce a very in your face mix of rap, electronica, reggae, Indian beats, and crunchy guitars. One of, if not the best of the Indian acts in the west. This album features a track with Sinead O'Connor ("1000 Mirrors") and another one with a Brazilian singer called "19 Rebellions" that is about prison uprisings in Brazil. They are VERY political as one can tell from track titles like "Fortress Europe" and "Blowback." They have some harsh words for racism in Europe as well as for the foreign policy of the United States. Great stuff.
32. THE ROUGH GUIDE TO THE ASIAN UNDERGROUND One of the many CDs in the "Rough Guide" series that's supposed to give a broad taste of a specific genre. Most of the stuff here is pretty mediocre (Asian Dub Foundation, Ananda Shankar and a few others being the exceptions.) There's so much good underground Indian music, I don't see why some of those guys didn't make onto this compilation. Groups like Tabla Beat Science, Karsh Kale, MIDIval Punditz, and many others could've taken this disc up quite a few notches. Not that any of this stuff is particularly bad, but a lot of it is pretty typical electronic South Asian music. It's not something that's going to reach out and grab you, it's better absorbed slowly as a whole disc. Sometimes the Rough Guide CDs are amazing and sometimes they're so-so. This one falls in the latter category.
33. THE ATHENIANS - Best of Greece I loves me some Greek folk music. Talk about a culture than loves life and lives it to the fullest. CD reminds me of the Greek food festival back home. There are a few sappy/modern-ish numbers on here that I usually skip over, but overall it's a solid disc. I think I landed it on eBay for a few bucks, so I've easily gotten my money's worth out of it.
34. MOUNT ATHOS MONKS - Selection of Orthodox Chants Well, the title pretty much says it all. That's not true actually, this is in Greek, though there are Athonite monks from all over the world. You'll also find monasteries that speak Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, English, Georgian, Arabic, etc. on Mount Athos. Pictures of Mount Athos
35. Athonite Monks - Service of St. Simon of Athos I could only find that tiny little album cover photo. The music on this CD is good, but at times, the mastering is way off and there's a decent bit of distortion and static on it, which takes away from the enjoyment of it. Bascially, it's a CD of hymns in honor of St. Simon of Athos.
36. JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH - Brandenburg Concertos #s 1, 2, 6 The most famous collection of baroque concertos. Performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. This is disc one of two. (Sold seperately)
37. JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH - Brandenburg Concertos #s 3, 4, 5 2nd disc of the six Brandeburg concertos.
38. MUNIR BACHIR - En Concert A Paris Recording of a Paris concert on 19 November 1987 by Iraqi oud virtuoso Munir Bachir. This is purely a solo concert. Very chill. A lot of Arabic music is quite fiery, but this shows the more pensive side of Arabic art music.
39. LEONARDO BALADA - Cello Concerto no. 2 "New Orleans" Balada grew up in Spain, but moved to the US in the late 60s/early 70s and is now the composition professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. The pieces is really cool, it incorporates jazz elements as well as some spirituals. When I first heard about it, I didn't think it would come off very well, but it suprised me. I didn't think too much of it at first, but it's one of those pieces that you like more with each time you listen to it. The other pieces are good too, but it's the cello concerto that I return to again & again.
40. Balamand Monastery Choir - Chants from Balamand Orthodox chant in Arabic from a monastery in Lebanon. Intense stuff. Arabic is such a powerful sounding language.
41. BALAMAND MONASTERY CHOIR - Concert de Chant Byzantin en France Arabic chant concert recorded in France.
42. NIKHIL BANERJEE - Live to Air - KPFA, Berkeley 1967 Recording of a live radio broadcast of sitarist Nikhil Banerjee from a Berkeley, California radio studio. Two ragas are performed here, first an alap only (no percussion) version of "Chandrakaush" and then a full performance of "Khamaj." Banerjee is accompanied by tabla player Mahapurush Misra. This is a fantastic CD. Banerjee is my favorite sitar player by a mile. He made me forget Ravi Shankar even exists. I literally sold off just about every Ravi Shankar CD I owned after hearing this guy. Amazing.
43. NIKHIL BANERJEE - Misra Kafi: Live - Berkeley, 1982 This could easily be entered in a worst album cover contest. Bad design, bad picture. Anyway, thankfully the music is light years beyond the packaging. This is one long rendition of Raga "Misra Kafi." It clocks in at 74:25. Banerjee was known for his super long renditions of ragas (he has one recording of over 100 minutes on one raga.) Thankfully, he had something to say musically and it isn't just a bunch of noodling and flashiness. His performances are quite thoughtful and not showy. Banerjee didn't like making studio recordings. He actually didn't like being recorded at all, because he said it made the performer too self-concious. Thankfully, many times his concerts were recorded. Most of his albums are live performances and most of them released posthumously (he died unexpectedly and prematurely in 1986.) Here, he's accompanied on tabla by Swapan Chadhuri, one of the legends of tabla.
When I saw you posted in this thread, I knew there'd be something funny posted. Jackpot. However, I did see Skid Row open for Guns n' Roses after Skid Row put out Slave to the Grind. It was a pretty awesome show.
44. NIKHIL BANERJEE - Afternoon Ragas Live concert recording from Rotterdam, Holland in 1970. Certain pieces of Indian music are intended to be played at certain times of the day. They have pieces for literally all times: twilight, morning, afternoon, early evening, late evening, they even have them for the rainy season and sometimes the time of day they're supposed to be played changes depending upon the season of the year. This is largely theoretical, but the pieces do have a bit more magic if you play them at their "proper" times. Anyway, in the west, you usually only hear afternoon or early evening pieces because concerts aren't typically held outside of those times like they will be in India (although I did go to one Indian concert in Alabama that didn't get started until about 9 or 10 pm, so we heard some late night stuff that night as it was a loooooooong show.) Anyway, this is a recording of two afternoon ragas: "Bhimpalasri" and "Multani." (One note, the first recording of Banerjee's in my list from 1967 in Berkeley is of two morning ragas as the radio broadcast was in the morning.)