Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

S Convergence: Sakamoto, Satie, Stewart, Sylvian

2008-04-25T02:29:27Z

Item 1: Mrs. Veneer buys Ryuichi Sakamoto's CD of solo piano pieces, BTTB. It's quite beautiful and Sakamoto mostly avoids the New Age clichés that plague so many piano CDs. Some of the pieces are obvious homages to classical works, such as "Opu...

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It's raining queens (Mississippi Queens)

2008-04-03T01:43:01Z

I have previously written about my dear friend, the late Mark Harp. Mark's band Null Set brought postpunk to Baltimore; when another band called Null Set, from another city, put out a record, Mark's Null Set changed their name to Cabal. The sing...

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Modern Sunshine Part 2

2008-03-27T03:26:41Z

I've fallen behind on my sunshine pop theme due to spending last night sorting out the dueling MySpace players problem. Solution: no more MySpace players. If they've got it set to autostart, there's not a thing you can do about it by tweaking pa...

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Chris Joss

2008-03-09T18:49:56Z

To the elite group of musicians who have mastered the art of retro-disco-cop-show-funk-o-lounge-a-phonics (i.e. Skeewiff and Shawn Lee) add Frenchman Chris Joss, who since 1999 has built up an impressive catalog of recordings in that vein. His la...

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Spy music roundup

2008-03-09T14:08:07Z

Taking me even further afield from trumpets and dark cabaret is my discovery last weekend of another whole box of CDs (about 200!) that I hadn't unpacked since moving into this house eighteen months ago. And in that box was The Fluid Soundbox by...

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Trumpet time: Nils Petter Molvaer

2008-03-01T05:45:26Z

Last week I remembered I like Steve Tibbetts, so I added a Steve Tibbetts station to my Pandora account. I was listening to it yesterday when I heard an unfamiliar Jon Hassell song. Or so I thought--it turned out to be by Norwegian trumpeter Nil...

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The Divine Comedy

2008-02-22T03:09:48Z

Since Salty Miss Jill brought up Neil Hannon in the Music Lovers post, here is Neil himself singing his song with "Jill" in the lyrics: Neil Hannon is the true inheritor of Scott Walker's mantle, though he has a lighter touch: his humor is more ...

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Some real Killing Joke

2008-01-18T01:53:58Z

Instead of more long-lost but now-found music, I'm going to follow up the past two posts of pretend Killing Joke with some real Killing Joke. After the gothic beauty and mainstream appeal of 1985's Night Time, Killing Joke went into decline. But...

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Ultramarine reminds me of 23 Skidoo

2008-01-10T23:38:44Z

Upon discovering, just last year (fashionably late again) that A Primary Industry had morphed into Ultramarine in 1990, I got Ultramarine's first album, Folk. It's a nice extension of the softer side of API, with lots of layered reeds (from both ...

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Radiohead reminds me of Simple Minds

2008-01-04T12:15:20Z

Back in 2003, Radiohead fan Mrs. Veneer got me a little on board the Radiohead bandwagon by steering me toward a handful of songs that were near-perfect matches for my personal music receptors (Airbag, Electioneering, Idioteque). So I picked up H...

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