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I am very lucky to live in New Zealand. It’s a beautiful, peaceful place. However, there are some disadvantages living in a thinly populated string of islands a long way from the rest of the world. One of these disadvantages is lack of access to comprehensive record shops. One of the highlights of travelling in Europe, the USA and Japan has been buying music that you can’t get back home. (Of course, we have some great music stores in New Zealand. But my point is that we are a long way from the distribution channels of North America, Asia and Europe, so the variety and depth of stock is often poor.)

So online shopping has opened up a whole new world of music consumption for us kiwis! We can now buy from shops all over the world, while avoiding the need to spend $2000 on an airfare. Last week my latest CD order arrived from Amazon, and I realised that the every single disc I bought was the result of discovering it through audioblogs, or through my own blogging activities. Here’s my shopping list, and the reason why I bought the album:

• Mark Hollis – Mark Hollis. His solo album from 1998. Discovered via david fenech’s blog.
• Charles Mingus – The Great Concert of Charles Mingus. Discovered while researching Mingus for my recent series on Mingus’ orchestral work
• Jacques Coursil – Way Ahead. Discovered via PODvains
• Art Ensemble of Chicago – Live in Paris. I came across this while putting together a post on Lester Bowie which still awaits the light of day…
• Cuong Vu – Bound. Cuong Vu’s first album. I was blown away when I heard this record on Xanax Taxi.

I would not have found any of this music without the aid of the Internet – it is not played on the radio, it is not advertised in magazines. Some of the recordings are 40 years old. Audioblogs seem to provide a great opportunity to breed a more informed and more sophisticated community of music consumers. I can only thing that this must be good for music as an industry in the long term, and more importantly, this must be good for music and musicians.

Mark Hollis- The Gift
From Mark Hollis: Polydor 537 688-2 [Buy]

We music geeks all seem to carry around in our heads a mental list of our “Top 10 Albums ever”. Every so often, you discover a new piece of art that is a serious contender to knock one of those well-loved records into 11th position. When I first heard pianist Uri Caine‘s urlicht/primal light a few weeks ago, I was completely blown away. It is awesome.

urlicht/primal light features recordings of Uri Caine’s (re)arrangements of the music of Mahler, played by a solid crew of Downtown New York musicians – Dave Douglas (tp), Don Byron (cl), Michael Formanek (b), Mark Feldman (vl), among others. Under Caine’s guidance, Mahler’s music rediscovers much of its frankly Jewish roots, (as a composer/conductor in fin-de-siècle Austria-Hungary, Mahler had to renounce his Jewish faith in order to find employment). The overall effect is stunning.

If you thought the jazz artist’s capacity for reinventing European classical music ended with Jacques Loussier’s Play Bach series, go out and buy this album today.

Uri Caine – Symphony no.5, Funeral March
From urlicht/primal light: Winter and Winter 910 004-2 [Buy]

In other news, ECM founder Manfred Eicher is interviewed in Le Monde (in French), blogs take over the world, the new episodes of Family Guy start on TV in New Zealand tomorrow night, and Rushan has arrived safely in Exeter, NH.

Sometimes you just have to show a bit of pride in your fellow countrymen. Flight of the Conchords is a musical comedy duo from Wellington. They rightly claim the title of New Zealand’s 4th most popular folk parody act, and here they are blowing up all over the world. An HBO special, sell-out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and now, they’ve even been on Conan O’Brien.

They are not only very funny, they are also very fine musicians. Their David Bowie “song” is one of the best things I’ve ever heard live on stage. And Brett McKenzie played/plays in The Black Seeds, who are world famous in New Zealand.

I seriously recommend you download/watch their Conan appearance [.avi file, 22MB]

And make these guys superstars, please. We need more entertainment heroes in this country beyond Peter Jackson and Chris Knox.

My awareness of youth music is receding as fast as my hairline.

Driving back from attending the Dianova piano recital on Saturday night, I see thousands of kids lined up on Queen Street outside Auckland’s St James Theatre. It must be the Black Eyed Peas show, I assume (after all, that’s what the kids are into these days, right? Hell, I even played support for the BEP’s Auckland gig years ago, before their Elephunk superstardom. Yeah, I know what’s going down.)

It turns out that the queue of thousands is for a gig by a Canadian punk band called Simple Plan. I have never heard of them. Until I read about the gig in the paper on Monday.

And then the first part of my order of CDs from Amazon arrives – Mingus and Art Ensemble of Chicago, both live recordings from the 1960s. It is all over. I am out of touch.

Tzenka Dianova – XX Century Piano Music
Saturday, 1st October, University of Auckland School of Music

There are limited opportunities in Auckland to hear 20th Century “classical” music. So Tzenka Dianova’s piano recital last night was an event to be leapt at. Dianova specialises in the avant garde end of 20th Century composition for piano, and the ambitious program was a satisfying survey of this particular musical vein, spanning music from 1905 to 1986.

Charles Ive’s Three Page Sonata was the only piece with which I was familiar, and Dianova played the bustling third movement far more rhythmically than does Peter Lawson on his excellent American Piano Sonatas recording. There was even a hint of ragtime in Dianova’s playing…

Peter Lawson – Three Page Sonata (Ives)
From American Piano Sonatas: Virgin Classics 61928 [Buy]

The real highlight of the concert was John Cage’s Daughters of the Lonesome Isle for prepared piano. Oh to have a spare Steinway grand that you can fill with nuts, bolts, screws and bits of rubber! I couldn’t help being reminded of Javanese gamelan on hearing this piece.