Hello and welcome to Vinyl-O-Matic. It's me, Your Old Pal Will back to bring you a wide range of music to help take your mind to other places. This time around we continue our journey through albums that begin with letter B as in Bravo.
Before we get underway, I'd like to remind you that you can find show notes for this episode at vinylomatic(dot)com(slash)s05e07. While you're there, drop a note in the comments section and tell me what your Top 3 songs that make you happy are. You know, the kind that, when you hear the first few notes you think, oh hell yeah! I'll share the results in next week's issue of the Amplifier newsletter. Speaking of songs that make me happy, here is one by Guided by Voices.

How was that for some Teutonic tuneage, with a little bit of lo-fi thrown in for good measure? We just heard Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in a 1958 performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93:, namely the second movement, Allegretto Scherzando. And yes, classic TV nerds will know that Otto is the father of Werner Klemperer, the actor who portrayed Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes, and was actually quite the classical music aficionado. Before that, there was the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra performing the Scherzo-Allegro/Allegro and Presto movements of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 from 1953. This was a bit of a surprise since the cover is for a recording of Beethoven's Eroica. Whoops. Starting the whole thing off, we heard "Echos Myron" from a fine translucent blue copy of Guided By Voices glorious lo-fi landmark album Bee Thousand from 1994 on Scat Records. Next up, we have a Dylan song that is not 17 minutes long.

Welcome back, dear listeners. If you cast your minds back to the top of that last set, you will recall that we heard from Bob Dylan and the Band from their 1974 release Before the Flood bringing us a pretty great rendition of All Along the Watchtower. The Rolling Stones brought us Stray Cat Blues from their 1968 album Beggars Banquet. Poor Brian Jones is relegated to a mixed-down mellotron on this one. Rounding things out, we had Cannonball Adderley with Nat Adderley on cornet, Junior Mance on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums in a Feb 6, 1975 recording of a tune called Spectacular. And now, just in case you didn't get enough Bartók from the last episode of Vinyl-O-Matic, here is the Fine Arts Quartet bringing us the first two movements of String Quartet No. 6.

Fun fact about this record is that it has a label on the front that says it belongs to the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside CA. Famous for their residency program, I prefer to think that some artist liberated it from the program's collection.
It seems like now is a good time for everyone's favorite witchy woman.

Now that was some excellent sonic bliss. We just heard the dreamy duo Nadja with a piece called Skin Like Sand from their 2009 Beta-lactam Ring Records release Belles Bêtes. This track is a reinterpretation of a solo project by member Aidan Baker entitled Songs of Flowers & Skin. I'll put a link in show notes for those of you who might like to hear more from Nadja and believe there is plenty yet to come over the rest of this season. We also heard from Stevie Nicks with "Edge of Seventeen" from her quadruple-platinum album Bella Donna on her very own Modern Records from 1981.
This concludes our sojourn for today. If you have questions or comments, please drop me a line: will(at)vinylomatic(dot)com. As always, you can find show notes, archived episodes, signup for the Amplifier newsletter and more by pointing your browser in the direction of vinylomatic(dot)com.
When next we meet, we will continue down the river of albums that begin with the letter B as in Bravo. Join me, won't you?