Six Degrees of Janis Joplin’s Pearl

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.

Paul Meyer, Corigliano-Carter: American Clarinet Concertos

There was a time when the appearance of music by John Corigliano and Elliott Carter on the same record might have raised eyebrows: in the world of concert music, these two respected composers stood as twin poles of a long-standing musical schism.  Time passes, things change, gardes get recast, and, as this record demonstrates, there is plenty to admire, respect, thrill to and even love in both pieces.  Corigliano’s epoch-making (and this is not hyperbole; this piece changed things) is a dynamic and forceful exercise in raw orchestral sound, with three movements rich in variety and mood: the playfulness of “Cadenzas”; the sheer gorgeousness “Elegy”; and the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink closing of Antiphonal Tocatta.” By way of both contrast and concomitance, Carter’s taut single movement struts and frets, plinks and plunks in a well-paced way, giving both the performers and the listener more than enough to ponder, to hear, to adore. Eddy Vanoosthuyse’s nuanced performances of both demanding works is well matched and given appropriate space to breathe by Paul Meyer and the spot-on Brussels Philharmonic.

Serafina Steer, The Moths Are Real

Creating a sense of mystery in an age of instant information is difficult, but Serafina Steer manages it beautifully with her third album, The Moths Are Real. There’s nothing particularly enigmatic about her CV — classically trained London harpist who has worked with Bat For Lashes, Patrick Wolf and John Foxx — but left to her own devices, Steer enters a world of her own, drawing you in by her side. Produced by Jarvis Cocker, The Moths Are Real flickers between the physical realities of love, sadness and urban life — the naked romance of “Skinny Dipping,” the wintery alienation of “Ballad Of Brick Lane” — and a frosted mythological wonderland that lurks the other side of the looking glass. It’s a record that trembles on the threshold between worlds, not just in its merging of folk, psychedelia, prog and electronica, but in the way the lyrics are sweetly conversational one second (“Of course, my scanty life philosophy, as you suspected all along, is actually based on lines from songs,” shrugs “Disco Compilation”) and as stylized and strange as a temple oracle the next (“Island Odyssey,” “Lady Fortune”). The reference points might seem to be in place — Joanna Newsom, Shirley Collins, Alice Coltrane, Robert Wyatt — but Steer sends the compass needle spinning, charting the places where magic and mystery poke through threadbare normality.

Who Is…Serafina Steer

“Seeing the word ‘kooky’ in relation to my stuff is sickening,” shudders Serafina Steer, all too aware of the pre- and misconceptions that come swarming the minute a harp enters the picture. Her horror is utterly justified: the classically-trained Steer’s third album, The Moths Are Real, is a transfixing collection of songs that trip between the lyrical and the conversational, the physical and the ethereal. Robust folklore rubs up against Greek mythology; oracular meditations on fate and fortune are spiked by wistfully sensuous love songs and some thoroughly modern one-liners. Musically, too, it trembles between high and low, old and new, with synth-pop, prog and psychedelia snapping at the harp’s lovely heels.

In keeping with her musical shape shifting, Steer has worked with diverse roster of artists, including Bat For Lashes, Chrome Hoof, Patrick Wolf and John Foxx. Three years after her debut Cheap Demo Bad Science, her second album, Change Is Good Change Is Good, was picked by Jarvis Cocker as one of his favorite albums of 2010. It obviously wasn’t just end-of-year punditry: He produced The Moths Are Real, joining Steer on the eerie Scott Walker glow of “The Removal Man.” Even in starry company, though, Steer burns brightly all by herself.

On playing the harp:

The harp comes with a lot of baggage, physically and literally. On The Moths Are Real, I tried to use the harp more as other people might expect to hear it. I wasn’t trying to be willfully oblivious to the fact that it is quite swoony — I wanted to use the glissando and the cosmic potential of it, all the effects to make a whole world. I think before I thought it was more subversive to ignore that and just treat it as a guitar.

On working with Jarvis Cocker:

I often work with people in a semi-producer-like way, but I’d always end up slightly overruling them. Feeling a bit more confident about the songs this time, I did feel that I’d be ready to work with someone and let them have that role. I sent Jarvis a couple of emails — we’d met a couple of times — and he said he wasn’t a producer but to send some tracks anyway. Then we did two days in Shoreditch Church (in East London), where he suggested working on two of the demos I sent him, “The Removal Man” and “Skinny Dipping,” to see whether we could collaborate together and whether he liked being a producer. I think what was good — apart from that he’s terribly nice — is that I don’t know him so well, so it was good to have that respect. It wasn’t like I was going to start having…well, I might have had one tantrum!

On sea shanties:

The song “Night Before Mutiny” is a response to a traditional sea shanty about a whore called Serafina — it’s not too bawdy, but it’s not very nice about her. Everything rhymes with Serafina — the sea shanty even calls her a “dirty she-hyena.” I suppose because it’s an unusual name, I felt a kind of a kinship with the character. There’s this funny lack of concern for her in the song. I guess as a feminist, those whore or tart-with-a-heart archetypes, they get to me.

On lyrical labyrinths:

I think the record is a bit of a labyrinth, but I don’t want to sound like a twat, or have anyone examine it as a concept album and therefore find it lacking. In the imagery of the lyrics, there are quite a lot of cracks or lights, leading to, or in between, cosmic changes of forms — drowning, lying, sex, sleeping and waking. So to me, it’s sort of labyrinthine in a multi-dimensional, Borges-inspired sense.

On prog-rock:

What interests me about prog, and the children of prog, is that the music offers an artist the freedom to explore form and rhythm and esoteric lyrical ideas as part of a complex tradition that seems to have grown organically. And it comes without the leaden dogma or lineage of being an aspiring contemporary classical composer. Though it’s probably as riven with prejudice and dogma as anything. I was talking to a friend about whether I could honestly claim a prog influence, and they spoke about prog’s lack of attitude and preoccupation with a kind of perfect musicianship, as opposed to other influences like Mark E. Smith or Young Marble Giants. I thought, “Oh God, that’s me.”

Food, Mercurial Balm

British soprano saxophonist Iain Ballamy and Norwegian percussionist Thomas Strønen have functioned as a duo in Food since 2007, when trumpeter Arve Henriksen and bassist Mats Eilertsen left the fold, but as their gorgeously contemplative new album Mercurial Balm reinforces, they’ve adapted to those losses magnificently. The 10 atmospheric pieces here were fully improvised, both in the studio and in concert, but there’s a lyric beauty and textural generosity that feels meticulously considered. As on the album’s predecessor Quiet Inlet, the duo is joined here by a revolving cast of guests that add extra color and melodic counterpoint: guitarists Christian Fennesz and Eivind Aarset (who both also add electronic processing to the mix), trumpeter Nils-Petter Molvaer, and the Indian singer and slide guitarist Prakash Sontakke. On a piece like “Moonpie” you can hear those helpers doing much more than draping extra tones over the sonic landscape, as Molvaer and Ballamy deftly intertwine their spontaneous solos, slaloming around one another in an elegant, high-level dance. On “Phase” the guitars veer from cloudy and drifty to acidic and biting, with Strønen giving the interplay a march-like propulsion, while “Chanterelle” imagines Hindustani music on Jupiter.

Each of the guests change the complexion of the tracks they appear on, but Ballamy and Strønen firmly maintain an identifiable sound throughout. The former brings a gentle astringency to his instrument, blowing lengthy improvisations marked by rich melodic elaboration: he combines the spirituality of John Coltrane and the wide-open spaces of Scandinavian folk music even though he hails from the UK. Strønen delivers a wide array of sounds, bringing a surprisingly melodic quality to his often frenetic kit work, adapting the clattery sound of Tony Oxley with the feel of Indonesian gamelan. Both players bathe their output in milky, ethereal electronics to heighten the music’s meditative ambience without softening its edge; it’s at once soothing and exploratory.

Vusi Mahlasela, Sing to the People

Pretoria-born Vusi Mahlasela’s ninth release marks the 20th anniversary of the South African activist-singer’s debut, When You Come Back, whose reconciliatory title track (also a popular 2010 World Cup anthem) continues to inspire the masses. Apartheid only began to end in 1994, but enough of its residue remains to make Mahlasela’s folky freedom songs continue to resonate today — hence the rowdy enthusiasm of his Johannesburg audience.

Singing in English, Sotho, Swahili and other languages, Mahlasela covers a lot of turf: “Our Sand” voices support for resettled Kalahari bushmen experiencing the “ghostly shadows of a vanished world,” while “Say Africa” claims a more global system of “UN loans and passport controls” is oppressing the modern African. Mahlasela’s wonderful voice turns sweet, strong or grainy depending on context. He scats intensely in “Ubuhle Bomhlaba,” evokes a dove’s summer celebration with a mbaqanga Zulu groove in “Amdokwe,” and swings hard in “Tswang Tswang Tswang.” The show’s highlight, unsurprisingly, is “When You Come Back,” which begins as an a cappella lament and evolves into a hard-jiving anthem. Go ahead and dance now, Mahlasela appears to imply; the struggle remains the same.

New This Week: Broadcast, Pere Ubu & More

Broadcast, Berberian Sound Studio The last Broadcast release to feature singer and co-songwriter Trish Keenan, who died in 2011, is a sublime, sad reminder of a remarkable talent lost. Luke Turner reviews the soundtrack to last year’s acclaimed British horror film Berberian Sound Studio:

“It’s rare that a soundtrack album constructed from fragments of music and snatches of dialogue is a rewarding listen, but Broadcast — perhaps because they are so adept at creating otherworldly sounds from pop’s detritus — managed it beautifully here. Some of the tracks are genuinely unnerving, such as “Mark Of The Devil,” its mean electronic pulses and chants sounding like wraiths in charge of a power station… A bewitching last Broadcast.”

Pere Ubu, Lady From Shanghai Thirty-five years after releasing one of the great avant-rock records, The Modern Dance, Pere Ubu are still pushing at the parameters of pop: this is supposed to be an album of dance music, but often sounds like anything but. With mainman David Thomas an unstable influence over electronic glitches that only occasionally break into recognisable melodies, this is an exhilarating, if sometimes demented, listen.

Wooden Wand, Blood Oaths Of The New Blues James Jackson Toth – aka Wooden Wand – has said he set out to make an album that would sound good on hallucinogens with Blood Oaths of the New Blues, his hundred-and-something release (really). Shamanic country music by the most prolific outlaw in Americana. Recommended.

Dropkick Murphys, Signed And Sealed In Blood Named after a tattoo contest where the band invited fans to get their logo inked into their skin – how you feel about that is a probably good indicator of whether or not this album is for you – the Celtic punkers’ eighth is more high-proof, rabble-rousing punk-folk, the aural equivalent of wearing a Guinness hat on St Patrick’s day.

Callers, Revival Released in the States last year, the Brooklyn duo’s third album finally gets a UK release for fans of gauzy, swoon-worthy art-rock.

Broadcast, Berberian Sound Studio

When it came to soundtracking Peter Strickland’s horror film Berberian Sound Studio, about a British sound engineer working for an Italian film company in the 1970s, there could have been no other name on the list than Broadcast. The band, aka Trish Keenan and James Cargill, were recording this album when Keenan died from pneumonia in 2011, age just 42, and it is a sublime, sad reminder of a remarkable talent lost. On their own albums, the pair’s haunting songs are constructed from elements that evoke half-remembered television themes, or a ghostly folk group transmitting from the future. It’s rare that a soundtrack album constructed from fragments of music and snatches of dialogue is a rewarding listen, but Broadcast — perhaps because they are so adept at creating otherworldly sounds from pop’s detritus — managed it beautifully here. Some of the tracks are genuinely unnerving, such as “Mark Of The Devil,” its mean electronic pulses and chants sounding like wraiths in charge of a power station, or the guttural gabbling of “A Goblin.” These terrifying moments are contrasted with pastoral instrumentals, built largely from flute, xylophone and organ, which could soundtrack a cold, misty morning as well as the original film. A bewitching last Broadcast.

Joan La Barbara and Kenneth Goldsmith, 73 Poems

Vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara’s collaboration with the poet Kenneth Goldsmith blurs the distinction between poetry, music and the amorphous catchall term “sound art.” It was inspired by (and dedicated to) the late John Cage, whose own performances of his idiosyncratic writings were similarly hard to define. Everything about 73 Poems asks you to question some pretty basic assumptions: What is a song? What is a poem? How many is 73? (There are 79 tracks here.) Even the line between abstract art and the concrete is blurry here — Goldsmith’s texts use words, but sometimes more for their sound, and often more for their appearance, than their meaning. And the sounds, while based in recognizable words (and numbers), become a kind of aural abstraction, a “wall of sound” quite different from Phil Spector’s famous use of that phrase.

La Barbara’s overdubbed vocals — guttural overtone effects, swooping glissandi, whispers, etc. — draw a lot of their structure from the way the poems look on the page. Black text appears with a shadowy grey text underneath — usually the grey text is an “echo” of the preceding poem. This suggests an analogy to tape or digital delay effects in music, and that is how La Barbara treats it. Towards the middle of the piece (the poems in the 40s), the text devolves into a series of O’s and 0′s — typographically close but musically represented by completely different sounds.

Each poem is brief, and many of these tracks are under 30 seconds. Given the large number, it makes sense to just download the whole album, since that is how the project is meant to be heard. But if you want to get a taste for the piece, start with tracks 44 and 45, and you can go here to see the poems and more complete notes on the piece.

Discover: New York Hip-Hop

There are no words too hyperbolic, no expressions too excited to describe the tectonic impact Public Enemy's second album had on the world. It is that vital and that infecting. Nominally a rap album, It Takes A Nation… is more like a sound grenade, thanks to the Bomb Squad's quadruple-stacked sampling, hypeman par excellence Flavor Flav's sonorous squeal, and leader Chuck D's stentorian flow — dependent not so much on meter, like most rappers, but instead a kind of confident, formless roar.

"Chuck's a powerful rapper. We wanted to make something that could sonically stand up to him," The Bomb Squad's Hank Shocklee told the Daily News when the album was released. So drum maniacs Hank and his brother, Keith, along with the musical heart of P.E., Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, seized the challenge, creating songs, if you can call them that, that whinny and snarl and ping and clash, incorporating screeching saxophones, cross-cutting vocal samples, hissing teapots, hard-nosed breakbeats, and empty hallway pianos lines. It's a fast and new kind of electric blues — or, in places, a broken, discordant jazz — they stumbled upon. Chuck takes the music and uses its harshness to deliver unrepentant political jeremiads. "The follower of Farrakhan/ Don't tell me that you understand/ Until you hear the man/ The book of the new school rap game," he raps on "Don't Believe The Hype," the totemic single. Chuck's politics are confusing beyond calls for righteous Black Panther and Nation of Islam-inspired unity. But as The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote at the time of the album's release, P.E. refracted the notion of "individualism" in rap, demanding a new "community," encouraging activism and cynicism in equal measure. Whether denouncing a rotting, rotten prison system and governmental authority on "Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos," or the locally debilitating crack epidemic on "Night Of the Living Baseheads," Chuck's fury is so persuasive, you may find yourself punching the sky during these songs without regret. It Takes A Nation… has aged remarkably well, as sonically arresting, and socially unforgiving as any album you're likely to hear. No one made being uncompromising so inspiring.

Pierre Favre, Drums and Dreams

Pierre Favre’s massive, definitive statement on drumming, Drums and Dreams, is a lot to absorb: An album consisting of 28 tracks of solo percussion doesn’t just demand a lot of the performer; the listener has got to be down for it, too. Luckily Favre, a drummer of both technique and imagination, has thought deeply about what to present. If the result is exhausting, it is exhausting in a Joycean Ulysses kind of way.

It’s possible to see Favre as a slightly more uni-metric, more measured version of Milford Graves: someone who is more concerned with creating a drum environment than in maintaining band time. And, in keeping with the “dream” theme of the album, the drums come at you from unusual places: They rush from the back of the speakers to the fore, they emerge off in the distance, they’re right in your ear. Although these are clearly drum-centric pieces, what matters most here is composition and form. Favre’s architectural sense is formidable. The pieces have clear, defined narratives, no matter how abstruse (and some of the pieces are, in fact, very difficult). The long “Dimitri (Le Clown)” ranks among the most fully developed drum solos ever recorded.

Favre is so loose-limbed in his execution that it takes a while to realize that he is repeating incredibly intricate phrases with impeccable precision. At one point, he starts a bell-and-drum motif that combines stick and brush work, and the brushes themselves produces a circular buzzing noise; the effect is so staggeringly complex (and beautiful) that it strains believability. “Where Is It?” could have come from a more virtuosic Sunny Murray. “Swiss Sunday” is more about silence and space than about sound, drawing the listener into concentrically fading cymbal and gong touches. Power and subtlety are given equal consideration in “The Blue Picture.”

But, in the end, it makes less sense to point to individual tracks on Drums and Dreams than it does to steer you to the album in its encyclopedic entirety. I’ve never heard anything remotely like it before, and doubt that there’s anything else in the “jazz” discography of drumming that approaches it in its ambitiousness. Anyone willing to set aside a couple of hours of uninterrupted listening time to absorb it whole will be richly rewarded.

Stanley Cowell, Brilliant Circles

It’s hard to figure out why pianist Stanley Cowell never became a real jazz star. There was — and is — nothing he can’t do, no deficiencies in his playing. He’s got technique, courage, imagination and responsiveness. He knows the music’s history thoroughly, and is capable of persuasively emulating any of his illustrious precursors’ styles. But his working mode has always been to push forward toward where jazz is heading.

At the time that Brilliant Circles was recorded in 1969, the pianist was keeping company with other young and restless players, and the album reflects this spirit of collective risk-taking. Trumpeter Woody Shaw, tenor saxophonist/flutist/clarinetist Tyrone Washington, vibes player Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Joe Chambers all play very hard, often prompting one another into combustible outbursts. The group takes tunes at impossible tempos, abandons the conventional ensemble signposts used by less surefooted players of the day, and effortlessly combines intellect with passion. Most importantly, for all their youthful aggression, everyone in this group plays beautifully.

The album starts with the third take of the title track. After a statement of a pensive theme, Tyrone Washington tears into the opening solo in double time. Workman and Chambers go with him some of the time, but keep the slower meter as often as not, creating a jangling tension. Cowell’s own solo is dizzying in its ambidextrousness; he effortlessly juggles separate lines with complete aplomb. There’s another take of the same tune that bookends the album, and it’s instructive that, although the general shape of the tune remains the same, each soloist varies his approach enough to warrant keeping both versions of the piece on the album.

The rest of the material is equally strong. “Earthly Heavens” is an expansive modal composition featuring another ambitious piano solo, buffeted by composed horn interjections. The often recorded Woody Shaw piece “Boo Ann’s Grind” brings the band closer to hard bop tradition (a number of the players came up with either Horace Silver or Art Blakey). They welcome this stuff like it’s a lost relative, with the composer taking a fiery, bluesy solo, Washington playing with characteristic urgency, and Hutcherson with elegant ease. Woody Shaw is no longer with us and Tyrone Washington has seemingly dropped off the music map, but everyone else on Brilliant Circles is still playing magnificently today. They’re all special musicians. This early offering of their work makes that point emphatically.

Trio 3, Open Ideas

It would be easy to overlook Trio 3′s Open Ideas, since there’s no tipoff in the group’s name as to who they are. But alto saxophonist Oliver Lake, bassist Reginald Workman and drummer Andrew Cyrille are all major figures in post-’50s jazz, and their coming together represents a sort of eminence grise summit meeting. Don’t expect fireworks. These players are too experienced and too invested in using an extensive preexisting vocabulary to try to bowl you over. They’ve worked hard to become the musicians they are, and the assumption is that their audience will take time to engage with them on Open Ideas.

If there’s a tonal antecedent for Trio 3, it’s probably Ornette Coleman’s 1960s trio with bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett. One significant difference is that, where Ornette’s group was autocratic (the rhythm section playing very much in service to the saxophonist), Trio 3 is entirely democratic, and both bass and drums are given an unusual amount of solo time. The format is to swing very hard (and it’s striking how much Cyrille’s drumming resembles Moffett’s) under a starkly uncompromising front line. Lake’s tone on alto is hard edged and relatively opaque, offset by Workman’s warmly hospitable one.

This balance (with Cyrille serving a mediator) serves well in both ballads like the title track and the more aggressive pieces like “Hooray for Herbie.” Some of the strongest tracks are the ones where the deepest pockets are established — “Y2 Chaos,” with Cyrille’s nearly tonal drum solo preceding Lake’s bluesy exchange with the drummer, or the pulsating “Prophet’s Path,” with its vocalized alto solo (notably reminiscent of the late period playing of Sonny Simmons). But the measured “Valley Sketch” is persuasive too, as Workman sticks to Lake very closely (and Cyrille, in turn, shadows both of them). “5-4-3-2″ is more like an intimate three-way conversation, and it’s a piece that can only be accomplished by mature musicians with a lot of seasoning, players who understand that they have nothing to prove. Open Ideas requires some quiet attention to be fully appreciated, but giving it will provide you with a lot of very powerful music.

The Primitives, Echoes and Rhymes

The Primitives’ first incarnation, in the late ’80s, was an exemplar of its guitar-driven indie-pop moment. Still, guitarist P.J. Court and singer Tracy Tracy always had deep roots in the music of the mid ’60s, and the forgotten byways of the singles bins meant more to them than the high-profile hits. The band returned from a two-decade break in 2011 with the Never Kill a Secret EP (two originals, two covers) but their full-on comeback album is a set of covers of songs originally sung by women, most of them from that mid-’60s sweet spot and almost all of them utter obscurities. (“I’m Not Sayin’” — a Gordon Lightfoot song that Nico recorded as her first single, and that Court sings here — is probably the most familiar song here; “Move It On Over” is not the Hank Williams hit but a song by one Le Grand Mellon.) The Primitives effectively translate most of these songs into their own idiom: Only a whomping version of German duo Adam & Eve’s “The Witch” would have sounded out of place on their ’80s-era albums, and Court’s sparkling arpeggios on “Amoreux D’Une Affiche” (originally recorded by Laura Ulmer) are straight out of “Crash.” Court and Tracy have done their fans a service by digging up these lost antecedents of their own music, and they sound like they’re having the time of their lives playing them.

Tedeschi Trucks Band, Live: Everybody’s Talkin’

The husband-wife team of Derek Trucks (guitar) and Susan Tedeschi (vocals, guitar), fortified by their 11-piece band, isn’t afraid to take on a honkin’ hard blues such as “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” But they sound just as good when they’re beefing up folkish material like Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Darling Be Home Soon,” which they stretch out past 10 exploratory but tender minutes. Tedeschi, who’s never had problems handling sassy material, shows more warmth and subtlety with each new effort as a singer, but can still get down and dirty as well; that’s her raunch guitar on “Learn How to Love.” Trucks has boiled his slide guitar down to its essence while refining his tone even further; he intros “Midnight in Harlem” with a tantalizing mash-up of “Swamp Raga” and “Little Martha.”It’s usually embarrassingly premature to cut a second album live (and make it a double disk at that), but thisone, whether reprising tunes from their debut or uncorking remakes like Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight,” does the job impressively.

Propaganda, A Secret Wish

The German synth-pop group Propaganda was never the stablest group — their lineup mutated even during the course of making this debut album — but they had just about everything else going for them. They turned the sonic extremes of the rock underground, and the language and imagery of the sexual underground, into genuinely mainstream European pop (A Secret Wish includes a cover of Josef K’s “Sorry for Laughing,” and their stage repertoire also featured Throbbing Gristle’s “Discipline”). They had two extraordinary presences in singers Claudia Brücken, the one with the Nico-like purr, and Susanne Freytag, the one who could scream blue murder. They had surprisingly complementary musicians in Ralf Dörper (formerly of industrial band Die Krupps) and classical percussionist Michael Mertens. And they had glorious, panoramic production by Trevor Horn (on their debut single “Dr. Mabuse”) and Stephen Lipson.

A Secret Wish is tuneful and light in places, but it’s also deliriously dramatic and grand: It starts with a nine-minute setting of an Edgar Allan Poe poem, and it sequences “Duel” and “Jewel” — the same song in two radically different versions, one crooned by Brücken and one howled by Freytag — right next to each other. And its centerpiece is the European hit “p:Machinery,” an icy cage of metallic electronics with Brücken’s resigned voice floating up from its center.

California E.A.R. Unit, Baley, V.: Chamber Music, Vol. 3 (Dreamtime)

The Ukrainian-American composer Virko Baley displays his keen ear for tone-color and mystery in Dreamtime perhaps his finest work. Written for the redoubtable new music group the California E.A.R. Unit, the work’s title can suggest Australian aboriginal creation theory, or a dark and unsettled night. The latter is certainly the case, but the former can’t be ruled out either; Baley’s musical imagination includes flights of Polynesian-inspired fantasy (the brilliant “Manao Tupapao”), ancient Ukrainian dances (the knuckle-busting fiddle tune “Kolomyika”), and the kind of nearly supernatural night music made by the American composer George Crumb (“The Hour of the Wolf”).

Baley’s musical style is omnivorous, drawing freely from both abstract modernism and from the sounds of world music, jazz and minimalism. Like Crumb, he makes telling use of unusual but effective sounds — a gently tolling piano chord, whispery flute harmonics, a single stroke from his large arsenal of percussion. The first 13 tracks comprise the first half, called “Palm-of-the-Hand”; these works introduce various musical cells and gestures which will be varied, twisted and bent later in the piece. The final six tracks of Dreamtime make up the second half, also called “Dreamtime.” Here the sense of a journey is heightened, and perhaps made more specific: the title “The Hour of the Wolf,” for example, is one that Baley has used for a number of completely different works to represent what we might call the dark night of the soul. The entire work is played with unerring commitment and imagination by the E.A.R. Unit, but if you’re looking for a place to start, the tracks named above, along with the softly clangorous “Tears,” would give you an idea of the subtlety and scope of Baley’s sound world.

The Who, Live at Hull

The evening in February, 1970, after the Who played the show immortalized as Live at Leeds, they played another gig 50 miles or so down the road in Hull (initially released as part of the super-deluxe Leeds 40th-anniversary box a few years ago), once again including a slightly condensed run-through of their rock opera Tommy. As with Leeds, this purports to be a warts-and-all document of that gig; as with Leeds, it isn’t quite. (In particular, there’s allegedly some jiggery-pokery involving Jon Entwistle’s bass parts, some of which were apparently missing from the master tape.)

One of the things that earned Leeds its place in the pantheon is its suggestion of total spontaneity — Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and Entwistle all seem to be just on the verge of flying off in their own directions, but listening to one another closely enough that the Who machine somehow takes flight. And what makes Hull vital listening for Who buffs is that it becomes clear what’s spontaneous and what isn’t. The two shows have identical set lists (except that there’s no final encore of “Magic Bus” here); even the 15-minute jam on “My Generation” has a very similar structure. Instrumentally, though, the rhythmic anchor of the band turns out to be Townshend — his riffs are the ground around which Moon and Entwistle are constantly improvising. This is also a Keith Moon showcase like no other Who album: His drums are bright and loud in the mix, coming off like a free-form solo that magically sticks to the precise contour of the band’s groove for two straight hours.

St. Louis Jimmy Oden, Blues Legend – The Best Of

Had he never written and recorded anything except “Goin’ Down Slow” — which is only one of the half-dozen or so most enduring blues songs ever — Oden’s place in history would be assured. As it is, he’s known primarily as a songwriter, and while that is where he made his greatest mark once he went to Chicago, his singing and playing are often regarded with condescension. Yet his voice is hardly lacking in back-alley grit, and his piano style digs deeper than many. More importantly, he made fairly imaginative records, mostly of his own songs, in the ’30s and ’40s; check out that wicked big-city fiddle in “Six Feet in the Ground,” “Pipe Layin’ Blues” and “I Have Made Up My Mind,” for example, as well as his dreamy arrangement of “Yancey’s Blues.” And his own version of his calling card “Goin’ Down Slow” can hold its own against any of the celebrated remakes. Oden may not be an essential artist, but for the blues aficionado he’s a rewarding one on his own terms.

Various Artists, Hot French Chicks in the Garage

The French yé-yé scene of the ’60s had a handful of relatively presentable stars — Françoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Hallyday and the like — and then a legion of garage knockoffs, cash-in artists, wannabes and arrivistes, many of whom had at least one completely awesome single in them. It’s the latter category whose dirty jewels are collected on this terrific set, a Nuggets-style anthology of a very specific subgenre: Francophone, woman-sung garage pop with production designed to sound a lot more expensive than it was.

Hot French Chicks in the Garage is a very odd assemblage of material, with inconsistent sound quality, and not everything seems to fit its remit — the Québécois group Les Musi-Q-airs, for instance, were neither French nor chicks, and Reggy van de Burght’s heavy-breathing “Eenzam op’t leidseplein” is unmistakably in Dutch. The only really familiar names here are France Gall (who turns up with a jingle she recorded for a wine company) and Englishwoman Sandie Shaw (remaking “Too Bad You Don’t Want Me” in French), although there are a handful of songs familiar from their English-language originals: one guess what Julie D’s “Aiko-Aiko” is translated from. Nearly every track here, though, has something delightful about it, from the drunken brass band wheezing along behind Aline’s “L’éducation” to the lascivious English professor intoning “I love, you love, she loves, he loves” on Chantal Kelly’s “Notre Prof’ D’anglais.”