Last night, I stayed in with a bottle of wine and whilst my partner worked on a presentation, I had myself a little musical journey via the wonders of Youtube. I thought I’d share my little aural odyssey in case you’d like to try the ride for yourself, so here’s some edited highlights. Might suit a Sunday afternoon quite well as it happens.
I started with one of my favourite artists around at the moment, the downtempo electronica specialist, Jon Hopkins:
From there to another favourite, also on the excellent Just Music label – Digitonal:
Had a little play then with some other electronica, kinda enjoyed Future Loop Foundation, tho they didn’t quite rock my socks to the level of the previous two:
And then, I felt it was time to progress deeper, into the earliest history of electronic music (1937) with this ethereally beautiful piece from Olivier Messaien, employing a very early synthesizer, the Ondes Martenot:
Thence, to the quite simply stunning movement “Louange à l’éternité de Jésus” from Messaien’s “Quartet for the End of Time”. If you dont know this, prepare to be mind blown:
Hard to know where to go from there, but Im a life long Beethoven fan, pretty familar with the syphonies and concertos, but not yet with the chamber music. Which is a shame, cos the string quartets, particularly the late ones, are said to be his very finest work. Here, I tried out the C# minor quartet. Here’s the first movement which begins with a theme described by Richard Wagner as “the most melancholy sentiment ever expressed in music”.
If you enjoyed that and want to hear the rest of the quartet which was a favourite of Beethovens and lead Schubert to remark on hearing it “”After this, what is left for us to write?” then this link will do you.
Enjoy.
Xx
I’m thinking of djing with youtube at the next big pxp. purely going on recommendations from the last song… there’s a website that lets you play to youtube clips in one page. or just use two tabs…
Beautiful selections mate. Really enjoyed em all and gave me some new digging material. Nice one Mx