The pioneers of Russian avant-garde jazz and improvisational music are captured in fine form performing at a festival in Lithuania from 2005.

I’ve become a bit of a classical guitar nut recently, thanks to a rather lovely woman inspiring me to delve into the genre a bit deeper these days. Some years ago, I took in on consignment the records of a Los Angeles-based label called MA Recordings. One of the artists I listened to was Serbian-American maestro Dušan Bogdanović. The disc was amazing, but the label’s advertising budget was nil, and we sold few. Still, his name kept popping up when I lived in the Balkans, and I’d talk with people who worked with him off and on.

This piece, Ricercar Kalij, is a favorite of mine, and it is performed by Vera Ogrizović, a splendid guitarist herself.

Mexico is a land rich with tradition, and they have a musical heritage that ranks well with any country on Earth. Narcocorridos are not part of that tradition. Rather, it is part of the musical cesspool that is so disregarded that some local authorities banned this excrement. It is not that I have anything against the musicality of the bandas. In fact, some of these are utterly magnificent instrumentalists. It is the fact that they glorify the vile animals ruining the country in a way that makes gangsta rap artists look like choir boys that gets my goat.

One of the bigger artists in the genre, El Shaka, was murdered today. Ironically, he had had to announce that he was not dead thanks to an erroneous press report. He was shot to death in his Cadillac at close range. His murder makes him the seventh musician killed in the past three years. The wages of peddling the glories of a drug baron are on display for everyone to see. What a waste of talent.

Organisers say the event, the work of American musician and artist Laurie Anderson, is the first of its kind. Ms Anderson called it “an inter-species social gathering on a scale never seen before in Australia”. It featured the cries of whales and high-pitched electronic sounds inaudible to human ears, accompanied by a bass guitar and violin. For an hour or so Australia’s most recognisable building became a giant kennel. The sounds sent some agitated pets into a frenzy, while others seemed rather bemused. “Most dogs are fine with it but we had to move away because he was getting a little bit freaked out by the whale noises,” said one dog owner. Ms Anderson said it was one of the best moments of her career. “Supposedly, they are sort of like bats and whales that they can hear super high things and they can. Their hearing is so much better than ours. “We didn’t want to do something that humans couldn’t hear too, so we chose a different bunch of things. A lot of dogs seem to enjoy classical music, frankly.” While the dogs’ owners certainly enjoyed the show, we’ll never know what their four-legged friends made of it. These pets were a tough crowd. There were plenty of barks, howls and yawns along with the occasional snarl as the Sydney Opera House witnessed a piece of canine musical history.

I adore Laurie Anderson, and I’m sure she means well, but this is silly.

Kyle Dunn’s music seems to be less about music as commonly understood and more about how one can color a mood with sound. There is certainly a method to Dunn’s style, as though it may well be improvised, it flows in beautiful order much in the manner of spilled honey rather than a river. A simple closing of the eyes is enough to put a listener into a Martian landscape, something many of us who loved sci-fi movies feel cheated out of.

Tracks from his two-disc release, A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn, he demonstrates a mastery of organic ambient music that harkens back to the days of Kosmische Musik from Germany.

In his piece Empty Gazing, there seems to be a spacious interplay between what sounds like an oboe and synthetic drones. Bonaventure’s Finest Hour gives the mental image of the venerable saint at work in his office. Sets of Four (Its Meaning Is Deeper Than Its Title Implies) pleasantly jars one’s listening experience with piano in a way that would remind one of Achim Roedelius’ work in Cluster or on his solo albums. The standout piece of this compendium of Dunn’s work, There is No End To Your Beauty, drones and whistles, meandering in a way that gives a feeling of ‘cool’ rather than ‘cold’ or ‘frigid’.

To hear samples of Dunn’s work, check out his Myspace site. To purchase his albums in America or Britain, click here for Darla Records and Distribution or here for Low Point Distribution.

Swedish prog-rock legend Bo Hansson passed away April 24th. He was found dead in a hotel room in Stockholm, Sweden.

Hansson had a stellar career in Sweden, teaming up with Janne Karlsson to form Hansson & Karlsson, releasing albums that spread out to an international audience, even catching the attention of Jimi Hendrix, who would go on to jam with the band. Hendrix would take one of Hansson’s compositions, “Tax Free,” and do a cover of it. in 1972, he released a progressive rock masterpiece called “Music Inspired by Lord Of The Rings,” which would earn him international acclaim, and would end up being sampled by younger musicians, something Hansson got great pleasure out of, apparently.  RIP.

The Japanese may not put out a lot of bands making original music (noise is a huge exception, though it barely qualifies as music), but once they latch on to a concept, they can get maximum value out of it. One of the better examples of this concept is Bi Kyo Ran.

During the first years of the band, they sounded like a King Crimson (‘Red’ era) cover band, albeit a very competent one. They had pretty much did a tribute album live (Madoromi Live Vol.4 is a good example of this trend)and seemed to be heading down this path until the release of their eponymous debut album in 1982. The vocal work by Kunio Suma and Masahide Shiratori took a shrill tone, as if Geddy Lee of Rush was making a bad attempt at singing in Japanese. Harsh, certainly, but very effective for a music filled with brutal time changes.

Their next album, Parallax, was more spacious, and showcased the band becoming a bit more experimental with their sound, but it wasn’t until Go-Un finally set the band in a different light in 1995. Go-Un kept the King Crimson-isms to only a few, and added elements of zeuhl (a la Magma) and even Fela Kuti. Fela’s name may seem slightly out-of-place among progressive rock enthusiasts, but if you’ve ever had the chance to witness the cacophony that man was able to create, it would leave beyond a shadow of a doubt that the African giant could easily hold his own playing prog. The track Omoi-ire showcases a brutal brass section and wild vocals and chorus, which you can listen to here: