What’s on top of the pile?

Wednesday 13 June 2007

Luc Ferrari, Collection de petites pièces ou 36 enfilades, Jeu du hasard et de la détermination (Michel Maurer, Françoise Rivalland)
While I was in Waterloo I also finally visited Gramex, in Lower Marsh, and found it pretty much as everyone describes it: a group of old men scrabbling through piles of CDs randomly stacked on a couple of large coffee tables. The main difference was that the two leather armchairs in the shop were unoccupied. They were being used as impromptu shelving for several more boxes of unsorted CDs, and so their usual occupants had had to find somewhere else to continue their day-long discussion of cricket.
One gent informed me he was searching for a Czech recording of Joplin’s rags played on a harpsichord, which had eluded him for the past eighteen months. I stopped myself from mentioning searching for it on the internet, figuring that he had probably heard and ignored that advice from younger people several times before. Besides, all my books and CDs have been found by hunting and gathering, so I’m not going to tell anyone else to be more systematic.
I didn’t expect to find much of interest. Over half the shelf-space was taken up with opera, and in most record shops opera is inversely proportional to 20th century stuff. I picked up a couple of discounted Naxos discs (yeah, that’s how cheap I am) and found this Luc Ferrari disc, which I hadn’t heard of before. Gramex also has a basement full of vinyl, which I didn’t dare look at because I haven’t replaced my turntable yet.
It’s another set of his disconcertingly jaunty and menacing piano pieces, with various taped and electronic sounds inexplicably popping up every now and then. I almost forgot to include that description of the music itself before posting this thing.

(What used to be on top of the pile?)