This six-disc boxed set offers a broad survey of a hundred years of Finnish chamber music, featuring more than sixty performers and twenty composers – between the late Romanticism of Toivo Kuula’s Piano Trio (1908) and the postmodernism of Veli-Matti Puumala’s String Quartet (1994). Highlights include songs by Aare Merikanto sung by Soile Isokoski, Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rilke song cycle, sung by Marcus Ullman, and Joonas Kokkonen’s third string quartet, performed by the Sibelius Quartet.
The first time Dandelion label head John Peel heard the Way We Live, courtesy of a demo tape they mailed him, he thought someone was playing a trick on him - some accomplished superstar band, perhaps. Only when he actually met the duo did he discover that they really were as good as their demo insisted, and A Candle for Judith - itself comprising exactly the same songs as that original tape - allows the listener to share in Peel's amazement. Eight tracks find the band drifting across the musical spectrum, sometimes heavy (the opening "King Dick II" sounds almost Sabbath-like), sometimes folky, but never less than fascinating…
The Giallos Flame is a musical group specializing in Giallo Music. Their music has been featured in several low-budget horror films including Murder-Set-Pieces, Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, Black Devil Doll, Psycho Holocaust and The Black Box. As their name suggests, the band's music is heavily influenced by the giallo genre of Italian horror films as well as American grindhouse cinema that was produced during the 1970s. This UK-based band is led by multi-instrumentalist Ron Graham and was formed in 2001.
The Way We Live wasn't a terribly commercial or compelling name for a rock band, and Tractor is a yet more awkward and less appealing moniker. Yet, for some reason, that's what the Way We Live changed their name to between the 1971 A Candle for Judith album (which turned out to be the only the Way We Live LP) and their 1972 follow-up, Tractor. Both albums are combined onto one CD on this 1994 reissue by See For Miles. A Candle for Judith was uneven, second-division, early-'70s British hippie rock, divided between lumpy, bluesy hard rock and far folkier, pastoral, acoustic-flavored musings. The folk-rockier stuff is better than the harder-rocking stuff, with "Squares" strongly recalling the folkiest…