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Crowd­ed House has a tremen­dous per­sonal sig­nif­i­cance for me. I have not had many days of undi­luted hap­pi­ness, but per­haps the best of them end­ed with putting on Tem­ple of Low Men for the first time. For some strange rea­son, I had nev­er heard it, though I had been famil­iar with oth­er Crowd­ed House albums for years. So I can’t be objec­tive about the song “Into Temp­ta­tion”. But I think that even with­out the per­sonal asso­ci­a­tions, I would rec­og­nize it as a superbly craft­ed song. And that about sums up Neil Finn’s song­writ­ing: superb crafts­man­ship and intel­li­gence applied to intense­ly emo­tional sub­jects. I am not a sen­ti­men­tal per­son, and musi­cal treat­ments of the joys and dis­ap­point­ments of love don’t usu­ally tug at my heart. But noth­ing seems arti­fi­cial or child­ish when Neil Finn writes it.

For this Focus, I’m lis­ten­ing to the entire cor­pus of Crowd­ed House, and and much it’s pre­de­ces­sor Split Enz, as well as the solo work of broth­ers Tim and Neil Finn. My col­lec­tion is fair­ly com­plete. I have all of the orig­i­nal Crowd­ed House stu­dio albums [ Crowd­ed House (1986); Tem­ple of Low Men (1988); Wood­face (1990); Togeth­er Alone (1993)], as well as the post-breakup sin­gles col­lec­tion After­glow (1999) and the com­pi­la­tion album Recur­ring Dream (1996), which also includ­ed three unre­leased songs. In addi­tion, I have the Bonus Live album which had a lim­ited release as a pro­mo­tion for Recur­ring Dream . This con­tains some unusu­al live per­for­mances, some of which eclipse the stu­dio ver­sions. The ten minute rework­ing of “Hole in the Riv­er” is a com­plete meta­mor­pho­sis. In addi­tion, I have a per­sonal anthol­ogy of down­loads of mis­cel­la­neous live per­for­mances, includ­ing odd-ball col­lab­o­ra­tions with Sinead O’Connor and Cheryl Crow. The only thing I’m miss­ing is Farewell to the World (1996), their last live con­cert in Sid­ney. This is not even list­ed on Amazon.com, so I pre­sume it can be found only in Aus­tralia or New Zealand. Read more »

A large reper­toire of “new age” music has come out of Chi­na in the last few years. There, the term seems to mean more or less what “elec­tron­ica” means in North Amer­i­can par­liance. Some of it is equiv­a­lent to the sooth­ing stuff called “new age” here, but much of it is quite dif­fer­ent. You can find dance and tech­no mixed with Chi­nese pop vocals, both Asian and Euro­pean clas­si­cal ele­ments, and the kind of spooky elec­tronic stuff that used to come out of aca­d­e­mic music labs. Liu Xing (not to be con­fused with the young gomas­ter of the same name) is one of the big shots in this genre, and I’ve got two of his albums: Inde­fin­able, and To Do Noth­ing, as well as three pieces on com­pi­la­tions. Inde­fin­able def­i­nitely fits into the “spooky exper­i­men­tal” cat­e­gory. To Do Noth­ing is essen­tially a show­case for Liu per­form­ing on the zhon­gruan, a tra­di­tional stringed instru­ment. He is famous for his pro­fi­ciency on this instru­ment, and com­posed a con­certo for it, which I have not yet had the plea­sure of hear­ing. In this album, this instru­ment comes across like a sort of mel­low span­ish gui­tar as if Joaquin Rodri­go had some­how picked up sheet ­mu­sic of tra­di­tional Chi­nese melodies while stoned, and gone with the flow. The album’s title cut “To Do Noth­ing” is a good exam­ple. I liked best “Chaishi Fes­ti­val” which has a sort of Vaugh­an Williams feel­ing to it, although “Late Autumn Rain” came a close sec­ond. Some of the stray pieces I have, like “Still Clouds and a Soli­tary Crane”, and “Fad­ing Vil­lage”, which can be found on the com­pi­la­tion “Chi­na Chill” are imme­di­ately appeal­ing pop­u­lar music, with strong melodies etched out against sharp pizzi­cati. Both would be extreme­ly evoca­tive music in an appro­pri­ate movie. Liu was born in north­ern Manchuria, stud­ied and first flour­ished in Shang­hai, and made his first impact with a con­certo sub­ti­tled “mem­o­ries of Yun­nan”, which gives him about as broad spir­i­tual roots in Chi­na as any­one could man­age. He was one of pio­neers who strug­gled to open Chi­nese music to cos­mopoli­tan music, and is now giv­ing back as good as he got.