“There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
It has for most of its history been a male-voice choir of tenors and basses, based in Moscow and directed and conducted
by Alexander V. Alexandrov from 1926 to 1946, by his son Boris A.
Alexandrov from 1946 to 1987, and by various directors up to the
present. It has always consisted of Soviet and then Russian Red Army
personnel, and has been held to represent that army at home and abroad.
Since the 1990s, female army personnel have occasionally been included
in the choir as sopranos. Since 2007 boy sopranos and altos from the associated choir school have joined the choir for some of the time.On December 25, 2016, a plane containing 92 people, including over 60 members of the choir, crashed while en route to Latakia, Syria.
Based on the extraordinary true story of Operation Anthropoid, the WWII
mission to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the main architect
behind the Final Solution and the Reich's third in command after Hitler
and Himmler. imdb
Skeleton Tree is sixteenth studio album by Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It was released on 9 September 2016 on Bad Seed Ltd. A follow-up to the band's critically acclaimed album Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree was recorded over a two-year period in several studios in Brighton, La Frette-sur-Seine and London and was produced by Nick Cave, Warren Ellis and Nick Launay.
During the sessions Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur died from an
accidental cliff fall. Most of the album had been written at the time of
Cave's son's death, but several lyrics were amended by Cave during
subsequent recording sessions and feature themes of death, loss and
personal grief. Skeleton Tree's minimal production and "less polished" sound incorporates elements of alternative rock, electronica and ambient music and features extensive use of synthesisers, drum machines and loops that were previously explored on Push the Sky Away. Several songs on the album utilise avant-garde techniques, including the use of dissonant musical elements and non-standard song structures.
Cave's allegorical and often-improvised lyrics have also been noted to
be less narrative and character-based than on previous Bad Seeds'
albums. One More Time with Feeling, a documentary film about the aftermath of Cave's son's death and the recording process of Skeleton Tree, accompanied the album's release. Directed by Andrew Dominik, the film received a limited release and was conceived by Cave to explain the context and themes of Skeleton Tree without conducting interviews with the media. Both the film and the album received widespread critical acclaim.
The Electric Horseman is a 1979 adventure-romance film starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda and directed by Sydney Pollack.
The film is about a former rodeo champion who is hired by a cereal
company to become its spokesperson, and then runs away on a $12 million
electric-lit horse and costume he is given to promote it in Las Vegas.
Clock DVA are an industrial, post-punk and EBM group from Sheffield, England. The group was formed in 1978 by Adolphus "Adi" Newton and Steven "Judd" Turner. Along with contemporaries Heaven 17, Clock DVA's name was inspired by the Russian-influenced Nadsat of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange; Dva is the Russian word for "two". wikipedia
- One of a batch of groups forming the so-called "industrial" scene of
Sheffield in the early 80s, Clock DVA's first release was,
appropriately, on Throbbing Gristle's
Industrial label. The cassette-only (until its re-release in 1982)
"White Souls In Black Suits" featured Adi Newton (vocals, ex-the Studs;
the Future; Veer), Stephen James "Judd" Turner (bass, vocals, guitar,
ex-Block Opposite), David J. Hammond (guitar), Roger Quail (drums) and
Charlie Collins (saxophone). However, there had already been three
previous line-ups, including synthesizer players Joseph Hurst and Simon
Mark Elliot-Kemp.
In 1981, the band (with new guitarist Paul Widger) offered "Thirst",
available through independent label Fetish. With the ground for such
"difficult music" having been prepared by Throbbing Gristle, the press
reaction was remarkably favorable. Nevertheless, the band disintegrated
at the end of the year, and tragedy struck with the death of co-founder
Turner. Newton kept the name while the three other surviving members
joined the Box.
By 1983, replacements had been found in John Valentine Carruthers
(guitar), Paul Browse (saxophone), Dean Dennis (bass) and Nick Sanderson
(drums). A brace of singles prefaced "Advantage", their first album for
Polydor Records. The following year Carruthers and Sanderson departed,
and Clock DVA continued as a trio. Though it would be five years before a
follow-up, Newton was kept busy with his visual project The Anti Group
(TAGC), and several singles. "Buried Dreams" finally arrived in 1989.
By the time of 1991's "Transitional Voices", Browse had been replaced by
Robert E. Baker, of TAGC. The departure of Dennis after the completion
of "Man Amplified" and "Digital Soundtracks" in 1992 left the remaining
duo of Newton and Baker to record "Sign".
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After some 15 years of silence, Adi Newton has reactivated Clock
DVA. Since 2011 the new line-up (feat. Maurizio "TeZ" Martinucci) has
performed at several festivals and venues throughout Europe. "Horology",
a vinyl box set compilation of early material (1978-1980) was released
2012. According to Newton, Mute Records are going to re-release the
Clock DVA albums remastered in a box set in the near future.
A "new" album, "Post-Sign", was released 2013; this album was
recorded already in 1994/95 by Newton as an instrumental companion album
to "Sign", but remained unreleased at the time due to problems with
record labels. "Clock 2", a USB release with all new material plus
remixes and videos, is scheduled for release in 2014, as well as a
limited 12" with two remixes, on Newton's own label Anterior Research
Media Comm. discogs
- download Clock Dva's first nine albums via torrent from here
Osbourne Ruddock, (28 January 1941 – 6 February 1989) better known as King Tubby, was a Jamaican electronics and sound engineer, known primarily for his influence on the development of dub in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tubby's innovative studio work, which saw him elevate the role of the mixing engineer
to a creative fame previously only reserved for composers and
musicians, would prove to be influential across many genres of popular
music. He is often cited as the inventor of the concept of the remix, and so may be seen as a direct antecedent of much dance and electronic music production. Singer Mikey Dread
stated, "King Tubby truly understood sound in a scientific sense. He
knew how the circuits worked and what the electrons did. That's why he
could do what he did"
Biography
King Tubby's music career began in the 1950s with the rising popularity of Jamaican sound systems, which were to be found all over Kingston
and which were developing into enterprising businesses. As a talented
radio repairman, Tubby soon found himself in great demand by most of the
major sound systems of Kingston, as the tropical weather of the
Caribbean island (often combined with sabotage by rival sound system
owners) led to malfunctions and equipment failure. Tubby owned an
electrical repair shop on Drumalie Avenue, Kingston, that fixed
televisions and radios. It was here that he built large amplifiers for
the local sound systems. In 1961-62, he built his own radio transmitter
and briefly ran a pirate radio station playing ska and rhythm and blues which he soon shut down when he heard that the police were looking for the perpetrators. Tubby would eventually form his own sound system, Tubby's Hometown Hi-Fi, in 1958. It became a crowd favourite due to the high quality sound of his equipment, exclusive releases and Tubby's own echo and reverb sound effects, at that point something of a novelty.
Remixes
Tubby began working as a disc cutter for producer Duke Reid in 1968. Reid, one of the major figures in early Jamaican music alongside rival Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, ran Treasure Isle studios, one of Jamaica's first independent production houses, and was a key producer of ska, rocksteady and eventually reggae
recordings. Before dub, most Jamaican 45s featured an instrumental
version of the main song on the flipside, which was called the
"version". When Tubby was asked to produce versions of songs for sound
system MCs or toasters,
Tubby initially worked to remove the vocal tracks with the faders on
Reid's mixing desk, but soon discovered that the various instrumental
tracks could be accentuated, reworked and emphasised through the
settings on the mixer and primitive early effects units. In time, Tubby
began to create wholly new pieces of music by shifting the emphasis in
the instrumentals, adding sounds and removing others and adding various
special effects, like extreme delays, echoes, reverb and phase effects. Partly due to the popularity of these early remixes,
in 1971, Tubby's soundsystem consolidated its position as one of the
most popular in Kingston and Tubby decided to open a studio of his own
in Waterhouse.
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Dub music production
King Tubby's production work in the 1970s made him one of the best-known celebrities in Jamaica,
and would generate interest in his production techniques from
producers, sound engineers and musicians across the world. Tubby built
on his considerable knowledge of electronics to repair, adapt and design
his own studio equipment, which made use of a combination of old
devices and new technologies to produce a studio capable of the precise,
atmospheric sounds which would become Tubby's trademark. With a variety
of effects units connected to his mixer, Tubby "played" the mixing desk
like an instrument, bringing instruments and vocals in and out of the
mix (literally "dubbing" them) to create an entirely new genre known as
dub music.
Using existing multitrack
master tapes—his small studio in fact had no capacity to record session
musicians—Tubby would re-tape or "dub" the original after passing it
through his 12-channel, custom-built MCI
mixing desk, twisting the songs into unexpected configurations which
highlighted the heavy rhythms of their bass and drum parts with minute
snatches of vocals, horns, piano and organ. These techniques mirrored
the actions of the sound system selectors, who had long used EQ
equipment to emphasise certain aspects of particular records, but Tubby
used his custom-built studio to take this technique into new areas,
often transforming a hit song to the point where it was almost
unrecognisable from the original version. One unique aspect of his
remixes or dubs was the result of creative manipulating of the built-in high-pass filter on the MCI mixer he had bought from Dynamic Studios. The filter was a parametric EQ
which was controllable by a large knob—aka the "big knob" – which
allowed Tubby to introduce a dramatic narrowing sweep of any signal,
such as the horns, until the sound disappeared into a thin squeal.
Tubby engineered/remixed songs for Jamaica's top producers such as Lee Perry, Bunny Lee, Augustus Pablo and Vivian Jackson, that featured artists such as Johnny Clarke, Cornell Campbell, Linval Thompson, Horace Andy, Big Joe, Delroy Wilson, Jah Stitch and many others.
In 1973, he built a vocal booth at his studio so he could record vocal
tracks onto the instrumental tapes brought to him by various producers.
This process is known as "voicing" in Jamaican recording parlance. It is
unlikely that a complete discography of Tubby's production work could
be created based on the number of labels, artists and producers with
whom he worked, and also subsequent repressings of these releases
sometimes contained contradictory information. His name is credited on
hundreds of B-side labels, with the possibility that many others were by his hand yet uncredited, due to similarities with his known work.
His most famous dub and one of the most popular dubs of all time was "King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown" from 1974. The original session was for a Jacob Miller song called "Baby I Love You So", which featured Bob Marley's drummer Carlton Barrett playing a traditional one drop rhythm. When Tubby completed the dub, which also featured Augustus Pablo on melodica,
Barrett's drums regenerated several times and created a totally new
rhythm which was later tagged "rockers". This seminal track later also
appeared on Pablo's 1976 album King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown.
By the later part of the 1970s, King Tubby had mostly retired from
music, still occasionally mixing dubs and tutoring a new generation of
artists, including King Jammy and perhaps his greatest protege, Hopeton Brown aka Scientist.
In the 1980s. he built a new, larger studio in the Waterhouse
neighbourhood of Kingston with increased capabilities, and focused on
the management of his labels Firehouse, Waterhouse and Taurus, which
released the work of Anthony Red Rose, Sugar Minott, Conroy Smith, King Everald and other popular musicians.
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Death
King Tubby was shot and killed on 6 February 1989, outside his home
in Duhaney Park, Kingston, upon returning from a session at his
Waterhouse studio.
Limite (Brazilian Portuguese: [lĩˈmitʃi], meaning "Limit" or "Border") is a film by Brazilian director and writer Mário Peixoto (1908–92), filmed in 1930 and first screened in 1931.
Sometimes cited as the greatest of all Brazilian films, this 120-minute silentexperimental feature by novelist Peixoto, who never completed another film, was seen by Orson Welles and won the admiration of everyone from Sergei Eisenstein to Georges Sadoul to Walter Salles.
Plot and analysis
A man and two women lost at sea in a rowboat. Their pasts are
conveyed in flashbacks throughout the film. The unusual structure has
kept the film in the margins of most film histories, where it has been
known mainly as a provocative and legendary cult film.
For Peixoto, the experience offered by Limite cannot be
adequately captured by language, but was made to be felt. Therefore, the
audience is left with images of a synthetic and pure language of
cinema. According to the director, his film is meticulously precise as
invisible wheels of a clock, where long shots are surrounded and linked
by shorter ones as in a planetary system.
Peixoto characterizes Limite as a 'desperate scream' aiming
for resonance instead of comprehension. The movie shows without words
and without analysis. The film projects itself as a tuning fork, a
pitch, a resonance of time itself, capturing the flow between past and
present, object details and contingence as if it had always existed in
the living and in the inanimate, or detaching itself tacitly from them.
Since Limite is more of a state than an analysis, characters and
narrative lines emerge, followed by a probing camera exploring angels,
details, possibilities of access and fixation, only then to fade out
back into the unknown, a visual stream with certain densifications or
illustrations within the continues flow of time. According to Peixoto,
all these poetic transpositions find despair and impossibilities; a
luminous pain which unfolds in rhythm and coordinates the images of rare
precision and structure.
Preservation status
The film has been restored, with the latest restored version to have its American premiere in Brooklyn, New York in November 2010.
Siouxsie and the Banshees were an English rock band formed in London in 1976 by vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bass guitarist Steven Severin. Initially associated with the English punk rock scene, the band rapidly evolved to create "a form of post-punk discord full of daring rhythmic and sonic experimentation".The Times cited Siouxsie and the Banshees as "one of the most audacious and uncompromising musical adventurers of the post-punk era."
With the release of Juju in 1981, the group also became an important influence on the emerging gothic rock scene. They disbanded in 1996, with Siouxsie and drummer Budgie continuing to record music as The Creatures, a second band they had formed in the early 1980s. In 2004, Siouxsie began a solo career.
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Formation (1976–1977)
Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin met at a Roxy Music concert in September 1975, at a time when glam rock had faded and there was nothing new coming through with which they could identify. From February 1976, Siouxsie, Severin and some friends began to follow an unsigned band, the Sex Pistols. Journalist Caroline Coon dubbed them the "Bromley Contingent", as most of them came from the Bromley region of Kent,
a label Severin came to despise. "There was no such thing, it was just a
bunch of people drawn together by the way they felt and they looked." They were all inspired by the Sex Pistols – from watching them, they realised that anyone could do it. When they learned that one of the bands scheduled to play the 100 Club Punk Festival, organised by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren,
pulled out from the bill at the last minute, Siouxsie suggested that
she and Severin play, even though they had no band name or additional
members.
Two days later, the pair appeared at the festival held in London on 20
September 1976. With two borrowed musicians at their side, Marco Pirroni on guitars and John Simon Ritchie (already commonly known as Sid Vicious) on drums, their set consisted of a 20-minute improvisation based on "The Lord's Prayer".
While the band intended to split up after the gig, they were asked to
play again. Two months later, Siouxsie and Severin recruited drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist Peter Fenton. After playing several gigs in early 1977, the band realised that Fenton did not fit in because he was "a real rock guitarist". John McKay finally took his place in July.
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Legacy and influence
Siouxsie and the Banshees have inspired many musicians of different genres.
The group have been cited by their peers. Morrissey said that "Siouxsie and the Banshees were excellent". "They were one of the great groups of the late 70s, early 80s".
He also said in 1994, "If you study modern groups, those who gain press
coverage and chart action, none of them are as good as Siouxsie and the
Banshees at full pelt. That's not dusty nostalgia, that's fact." Another ex-member of The Smiths, Johnny Marr, mentioned his liking for Banshees guitarist John McGeoch and his composition on "Spellbound". Marr qualified it as "clever" with "really good picky thing going on which is very un-rock'n'roll."Joy Division producer Martin Hannett
saw a difference between Siouxsie and the Banshees Mk1 and the other
bands of 1977 : "Any harmonies you got were stark, to say the least,
except for the odd exception, like Siouxsie. They were interesting".U2 cited Siouxsie and the Banshees as a major influence and selected "Christine" for a Mojo compilation.The Edge was the presenter of an award given to Siouxsie at the Mojo ceremony in 2005.The Cure leader Robert Smith declared in 2003: "Siouxsie and the Banshees and Wire were the two bands I really admired. They meant something." He also pinpointed what the 1979 Join Hands
tour brought him musically. "On stage that first night with the
Banshees, I was blown away by how powerful I felt playing that kind of
music. It was so different to what we were doing with The Cure. Before
that, I'd wanted us to be like the Buzzcocks or Elvis Costello, the punk Beatles. Being a Banshee really changed my attitude to what I was doing."Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode hailed the single "Candyman" at its release: "This is a great Banshees record[...], I like their sound".Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth cited "Hong Kong Garden" in his top 25 all-time favourite songs, and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine also mentioned them in his early influences.Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction
once made a parallel between his band and the Banshees: "There are so
many similar threads: melody, use of sound, attitude, sex-appeal. I
always saw Jane's Addiction as the masculine Siouxsie and the Banshees."
The Banshees have been hailed by other acts. Radiohead cited John McGeoch-era Siouxsie records when mentioning the recording of the song "There There".Jim Reid of The Jesus and Mary Chain selected "Jigsaw Feeling" from The Scream amongst his favourite songs.Jeff Buckley, who took inspiration in several female voices, covered "Killing Time" on various occasions.Suede's singer Brett Anderson named Juju as one of his favourite records in 2011 and also cited three other albums by the band on his website, The Scream, Kaleidoscope and Tinderbox.Red Hot Chili Peppers performed "Christine" in concert and their guitarist John Frusciante cited the Banshees in interviews.Garbage singer Shirley Manson wrote in the foreword to Paytress' Banshees biography, "I learned how to sing listening to The Scream and Kaleidoscope. Today, I can see and hear the Banshees' influence all over the place." Siouxsie has also been praised by various female singers including PJ Harvey and Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters. PJ Harvey selected Siouxsie's album Anima Animus in her top ten albums of year 1999. The band had a strong effect on two main trip hop acts.Tricky covered "Tattoo" to open his second album, Nearly God: the 1983's proto trip-hop version of that song helped Tricky in the creation of his style. Another group of Bristol, Massive Attack, sampled "Metal Postcard" on the song "Superpredators", recorded prior to their Mezzanine album.
The Banshees continue to influence younger musicians. Singer James Murphy was marked by certain Banshees albums during his childhood. His band LCD Soundsystem covered "Slowdive" as a B-side to the single "Disco Infiltrator". The Beta Band sampled "Painted Bird" on their track "Liquid Bird" from the Heroes to Zeros album.TV on the Radio said they have always tried to make a song that begins like "Kiss Them for Me" where all of a sudden, there's an "element of surprise" with "a giant drum coming in".[97]Electronica singer Santigold based one of her songs on the music of "Red Light". "'My Superman' is an interpolation of 'Red Light,'" she explained.[Indie folk group DeVotchKa covered the ballad "The Last Beat of My Heart" on the suggestion of Arcade Fire singer Win Butler; it was released on the Curse Your Little Heart EP.Gossip named the Banshees as one of their major influences during the promotion of their single "Heavy Cross".[ British indie band Bloc Party
took inspiration from "Peek-a-Boo" and their singer Kele Okereke stated
about that Banshees' single: "it sounded like nothing else on this
planet. This is just a pop song that they put out in the middle of their
career that nobody knows about, but to me it sounded like the most
current but most futuristic bit of guitar-pop music I've heard."The Weeknd sampled different parts of "Happy House" for his song "House of Balloons", and also used the chorus of the initial version. wikipedia discography
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Cocteau Twins were a Scottish rock band active from 1979 to 1997. The original members were singer Elizabeth Fraser, guitarist Robin Guthrie and bassist Will Heggie, who was replaced by multi-instrumentalist Simon Raymonde in 1983. The group has earned much critical praise for its innovative, ethereal sound and the distinctive soprano vocals of Fraser, which often seemed to veer into glossolalia and mouth music .
They were a phenomenon. Not necessarily the kind that plays to stadiums or fills MTV's timeslots or even sells millions of records. Rather, the kind that quietly causes a fundamental shift in perception, exerting a seminal influence that is universally felt if not always seen. Even after having called it quits in 1998—ending a 15-year career together that was impressive by any measure—their mark continues to be recognized everywhere, and legions of fans still hunger for more. But more is not likely to come soon.
In the midst of recording their ninth proper LP as a group—the follow-up to the 1996 release Milk & Kisses—Cocteau Twins decided "enough was enough." Elizabeth Fraser, the group's beguiling, singularly distinctive singer, took her leave and moved away from London to pursue a promising solo career. Her long-time collaborators—Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde—continue to focus on their own musical pursuits. Simon's solo work and involvement in developing new talent and Robin's new project, Violet Indiana—along with their successful independent record label, Bella Union—have proven that life beyond Cocteau Twins can be fruitful indeed.
It is ironic, of course, that Bella Union should have been founded as a vehicle for Cocteau Twins music. It was so named in honor of the trio's success and determination to stay together through difficult circumstances, to continue to make music that defied description and ignored prevailing music trends. Music that transcended boundaries into a realm uniquely their own.
But change, as they say, is inevitable, and even such stunning beauty as that created by Cocteau Twins could not—and, perhaps should not—go on indefinitely. But their music and their contribution to the art form, thankfully, will last forever. Cocteau Twins are among the very few artists whose music withstands the test of time: even in 2001, an eleven year-old Cocteau Twins song like "Fifty-fifty Clown" sounds as fresh and new as if it were recorded only yesterday.
Devoted fans and newcomers alike are sometimes filled with questions about this often-mysterious, sometimes media-shy trio, who were influential in not only defining the post-punk sound of the 1980's (and 4AD in the process) but also influenced generations of musicians in the 1990's and beyond. To-date, they have been cited as notable influences by such diverse artists as Prince, Madonna, Annie Lennox and Perfect Circle, not to mention bands such as Slowdive, Lush, My Bloody Valentine, Chapterhouse and Curve (just to name a few), who all worked in musical territory pioneered by Cocteau Twins.
As recently as 2000—nearly twenty years after Robin and Liz first started to make music with their friend Will Heggie in a small, dirty industrial town in Scotland—a two-CD collection of radio show performances (BBC Sessions) was released on Bella Union in conjunction with the BBC. That was followed in late 2001 by an eighteen-track digitally remastered retrospective from 4AD entitled Stars and Topsoil, which chronicled highlights from their career with their long-time record label from 1982 to 1990. The story continued in 2003, as remastered early LPs Garlands, Head Over Heels, Treasure and Victorialand were reissued by 4AD. In 2005—an ill-fated year in which the band nearly reunited—4AD released a new limited-edition box-set, Lullabies to Violaine, a compilation of digitally remastered EPs, singles and b-sides spanning the entire Cocteau Twins catalog (including non-4AD music) from 1982 to 1996.
So, like a compilation of songs from various records, this chronological series of articles is intended to give the reader some insight and perspective on Cocteau Twins, and document the span of their remarkable career together. Readers can look forward to a book-format biography of Cocteau Twins, written by fan extraordinaire Leesa Beales, which is due sometime in the near future. Visit www.cocteautwins.org for more details and the latest news on that.
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Cocteau Twins have proven to be one of the most prolific bands in modern music, with dozens of releases spanning their 15-year career—nearly 140 individual songs.
This Discography and Videography focuses on the basic information about each release, with details concerning UK, Canadian and US releases, with some information about Japanese or other international versions of material. For a more exhaustive discographic analysis, visit the 4AD/Eyesore Database (for information up to 1991).
An extensive discography and gigography are also available at www.cocteautwins.org.
David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie (/ˈboʊ.i/),
was an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record
producer, arranger, painter, and actor. Bowie was a figure in popular
music for over four decades, and was known as an innovator, particularly
for his work in the 1970s. His androgynous appearance was an iconic element of his image, principally in the 1970s and 1980s.
Born and raised in South London,
Bowie developed an early interest in music although his attempts to
succeed as a pop star during much of the 1960s were frustrated. Bowie's
first hit song, "Space Oddity", reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart after its release in July 1969. After a three-year period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley,
"challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created
perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture".[4]
The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved to be one facet of a
career marked by reinvention, musical innovation and visual
presentation.
In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the hit album Young Americans, which the singer characterised as "plastic soul".
The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated
many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both
his record label and his American audiences by recording the electronic-inflected album Low, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno. Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977), and Lodger
(1979)—the so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums—all reached the UK top
five and received lasting critical praise. After uneven commercial
success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single
"Ashes to Ashes", its parent album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), and "Under Pressure", a 1981 collaboration with Queen. He then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with Let's Dance,
which yielded several hit singles. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s,
Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. He stopped touring after his 2003–04 Reality Tour, and last performed live at a charity event in 2006. Bowie released the studio album Blackstar on 8 January 2016, his 69th birthday, just two days before his death from liver cancer.
Bowie also had a successful, but sporadic film career. His acting roles include the eponymous character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos.
David Buckley said of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in
popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any
comparable figure." In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million records worldwide.
In the UK, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications,
eleven Gold and eight Silver, and in the US, five Platinum and seven
Gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. wikipedia
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- download discography via torrent from here - download blackstar (2016) via torrent from here
It has for most of its history been a male-voice choir of tenors and basses, based in Moscow and directed and conducted
by Alexander V. Alexandrov from 1926 to 1946, by his son Boris A.
Alexandrov from 1946 to 1987, and by various directors up to the
present. It has always consisted of Soviet and then Russian Red Army
personnel, and has been held to represent that army at home and abroad.
Since the 1990s, female army personnel have occasionally been included
in the choir as sopranos. Since 2007 boy sopranos and altos from the associated choir school have joined the choir for some of the time. On December 25, 2016, a plane containing 92 people, including over 60 members of the choir, crashed while en route to Latakia, Syria.
