The two hundred and thirty-second album: #232 Janis Joplin - Pearl
I am certain that the initial reaction to this album was coloured by Janis Joplin's death a few months prior. Further removed from her and her work, my first thoughts went to my time in a supermarket where, for various reasons, the ambient music track that played wasn't swapped out for almost a year. As the tape played two or three times a day, you got to know the songs intimately, and even now, nearly twenty years later, I associate the pop of Burt Bacharach and the gentler soul songs on this album with those days.
Janis Joplin has a great blues voice in these songs and the lament in her voice is real - not raw and unpolished, but she carries a lot of emotion in her songs. While these are on well produced tracks, they genuinely feel hollow without her and instead feel a lot more shallow. There's a lot of emotion in her voice that carries through and knowing the circumstances of the album's production, it becomes that much more harrowing.
The eighty-eighth classical recording: #898 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
It's interesting how in the 20th century, especially after the second world war, classical music became more experimental. Metastatis has a lot of theory behind it, based on mathematical constructs, and uses 61 musicians playing different parts to create an uncertain, chaotic work. There's no single melody, it's unsettling, but there's a method to how the music combines - not by repetition, but by overlapping at the right time to create these moments. It's probably not a piece to just listen to, but it's an interesting experience and I can see how live, this would be even more amazing.