In rotation: AIR's 'Le Voyage Dans la Lune'

In rotation: AIR's 'Le Voyage Dans la Lune.' A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

With Martin Scorsese's “Hugo” and now AIR's release of its score to “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” (A Trip to the Moon), this winter has given the world two loving tributes to the work of French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Each approach the cinema pioneer and his work with wonderment, and the expanded edition of this album comes complete with a DVD of the recent restoration to “Le Voyage Dans la Lune.”

Watching the film with AIR's accompanying music is a delight. The spacey French duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel have crafted a score that's equally vintage and fresh, be it the toyish rhythms and alien effects of “Astronomic Club” or the intergalactic doodles of the celebratory “Parade.” By the time the duo gets to the cosmic funk of “Sonic Armada,” it's impossible to discern whether AIR is playing with guitars, synths or lasers. The music, like the film, feels as if it's conjured from a dream.

AIR
Le Voyage Dans la Lune
(Astralwerks)

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—Todd Martens

Nicolas Godin, left, and Jean-Benoit Dunckel of the band AIR. Credit: EMI

 

In rotation: Goldfrapp's 'The Singles'

In rotation: Goldfrapp's 'The Singles.' A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

Alison Goldfrapp has exhibited two personas in her last decade-plus as the frontwoman of the electro-chic collaboration with composer Will Gregory that bears her name. Over the course of five albums, the British singer has been a blackberry-lipped robot-vixen, the kind that might throat you with her heel, only to drift away uninterested a minute later. She’s also been a pagan goddess, drawing wisdom from unlikely sources, like the fugue of the dance floor. It’s most exciting when she combines the two, but no matter what mode she’s operating in, there’s a mesmerizing detachment to it all, her breathy soprano on the verge of slipping into a trance.

Goldfrapp’s first singles collection, due in early February, is a tour through the outfit’s luxe disco hits and the more conceptual pockets of dance music in the ’00s (which also means some unavoidable flashes of datedness). Two new songs at the end of the batch — especially the drowsily rapturous “Yellow Halo” — bode well for Goldfrapp’s next step, which, if these are any indication, might be more ambient music in the vein of 2008’s “Seventh Tree.”

Goldfrapp

'The Singles'

(Astralwerks)

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--Margaret Wappler

In rotation: 'The Original Sound of Cumbia: The History of Colombian Cumbia & Porro'

In rotation: 'The Original Sound of Cumbia: The History of Colombian Cumbia & Porro.' A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

The profoundly sexy rhythms that permeate “The Original Sound of Cumbia” stretch back generations and share a common ancestor with the sound that sprung from New Orleans in the early 1800s and gradually spread across North America. When the slave ships on both the Caribbean coast of Colombia and the Louisiana Gulf Coast brought in men and women from Africa, they imported music, too, and that (immoral) seed over the centuries has wended its way like a morning glory through South and Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico.

Cumbia has since had arguably as much influence on the music of the Americas as rock ’n’ roll, and producer, DJ and musical archivist Will “Quantic” Holland has, with this double-disc/triple LP/55-track collection, offered overwhelming evidence of its power. The curator spent five years immersed in Colombian culture, during which time he searched the country’s markets and shops for early music on 78s, 45s and LPs, seeking to retrieve a vanishing history of both cumbia and its cousin, the slower-tempoed porro.

The result is a collection that lives up to its subtitle: “The History of Columbian Cumbia and Porro as Told by the Phonograph, 1948-1979.” Not only instructive but absolutely swinging and dynamic, “The Original Sound of Cumbia” is rich and varied; congas and various rhythmic accents — what Holland in his fantastic liner notes perfectly describes as “the percussive ‘shuck shucka shuck’ of cumbia” — drives the songs. The other key instrument, the diatonic accordion, peppers many of the pieces with magical riffs and improvised solos — as do trumpet bursts, jazz-suggestive saxophone lines, and the occasional Yiddish-accented clarinet run.

In fact, what’s most surprising is the range on the collection: a chaotic stomp like Banda Bajera de San Pelayo’s “Descarga en Cumbia” sounds like a New Orleans brass band standard played by a drunken Tex-Mex group, and Rafael Yepes Crespo con sus Negros de la Región’s seductive “Nubia en la Playa” is tailor made for a late-night seduction. What’s best though, is that any time the compilation threatens to repeat itself, Holland drops in a song — like the washboard-click and clave breakdown of Carlos Ramon’s “El 4 y 5” — that completely redefines what cumbia can be.

Various Artists

"The Original Sound of Cumbia: The History of Colombian Cumbia & Porro"

(Soundway Recordings)

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--Randall Roberts

In rotation: Ruthie Foster's 'Let It Burn'

In rotation: Ruthie Foster's 'Let It Burn.' A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

To call Ruthie Foster a blues singer is to miss a big chunk of her allure as a vocal stylist, one who draws from a range of influences on her deep, soulful new album “Let It Burn.” Recording in New Orleans with Grammy-winning producer John Chelew (who used to book McCabe's Guitar Shop), Foster, a Texan by birth, tackles classics, new originals and a few surprises, with simmering takes on the Black Keys' “Everlasting Light,” the Band's “It Makes No Difference” and Adele's “Set Fire to the Rain.” Her rendition of William Bell's perfect lament, “You Don't Miss Your Water,” features Bell, in fine vocal form at 71, dueting with Foster while organist Ike Stubblefield mixes in the riff from Miles Davis' classic “All Blues” and tenor sax player James Rivers punctuates it all with a slithery-smooth run.

In rotation: The Weeknd's 'Echoes of Silence'

In rotation: The Weeknd's 'Echoes of Silence.' A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

R&B rarely produces villains to rival its romantic heroes, but 2011 saw the arrival of a bad guy worth loving (to hate): 21-year-old Canadian singer Abel Tesfaye, who under the name the Weeknd released three albums of stark, predatory avant-soul music in which suspicion and recrimination take the place of tenderness and devotion. The records appeared (and are still available) as free downloads from the Weeknd's website; “Echoes of Silence,” the most recent, was posted Dec. 21.

In rotation: Dinosaur L's '24 by 24'

In rotation: Dinosaur L's "24 by 24." A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

New York by way of Iowa composer Arthur Russell, who died in 1992, worked in an odd intersection of sounds when he started making music in the mid-1970s. A classically trained violinist who ran with Allen Ginsberg, Russell became obsessed with the nascent loft scene in the East Village, where DJs like David Mancuso, Tom Moulton and Nicky Siano were experimenting with disco and funk, and helping to birth modern dance music. Russell was soon making his own disco tracks under the monikers Indian Ocean, Dinosaur L and Bonzo Goes to Washington and releasing them on Sleeping Bag Records.

In rotation: Julia Holter's 'Tragedy'

In rotation: Julia Holter's 'Tragedy.' A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

Local experimental musician Julia Holter had a banner year in 2011. Her full-length album, “Tragedy,” inspired by Euripides’ “Hippolytus,” found its way onto a few influential year-end lists, including NPR’s Best Outer Sound Albums of 2011.Released on the tiny Leaving label in the fall, “Tragedy” is 50 minutes of collage, soaked in neo-classical atmosphere.

In Rotation: The Roots' 'Undun'

A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

If the Roots ever decide to slow down, one of them should write a business book, because over the course of their varied and inspired musical life, the East Coast hip-hop band has gradually and impressively built a career unmatched in the realm of popular music, let alone rap. From its rise as the go-to live rap act to its career as a backing unit for singers and rappers such as Jay-Z, John Legend and Betty Wright, to its current pop culture peak as the house band on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” the Roots have not only survived but prevailed.

More impressively, the Roots have stayed vital over 25 years, and the evidence lies in their 10th studio recording, “Undun,” a rolling concept album whose central character is based on the protagonist within indie pop singer Sufjan Stevens’ song “Redmond,” which the Roots cover on the new record. Long committed to pushing at the edges of the relatively conservative major-label hip-hop offerings, the Roots draw from not only the loop-based world of commercial rap, but understand — and honor — the more far-reaching connections on “Undun.” From the weird quiet rhythms of the opener, “Sleep,” to the hard rock funk of “Kool On,” whose backing track and guitar sounds suggest Jimi Hendrix’s work with Band of Gypsies, the band’s chops are as tight and solid as ever.

In Rotation: Kids These Days' 'Hard Times'

A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

The youth today, they grow up so fast and so cynical. On this self-released, five-track EP, Kids These Days are bummed about love, stressed about the economy and suffering from a Midwest case of seasonal depression. The days just “drag on” for this college-aged seven-piece from Chicago, or, to be more precise, “Haterville, Illinois,” as the act declares on the title track.

Yet this glimpse into what Kids These Days can do offers plenty of cause for optimism. At its core, the band falls somewhere between a jazz outfit and a blues combo, but the emphasis on rapping and nightclub vamping keeps the group’s intentions a mystery, and the songs surprisingly fluid.

In Rotation: Charlotte Gainsbourg's 'Stage Whisper'

A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...

Charlotte Gainsbourg has appeared in more than 40 films, including her recent turn as Kirsten Dunst’s beleaguered sister in Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” but that experience still doesn’t prevent her from getting major stage jitters in concert, as she’s admitted in many interviews. On the double CD, “Stage Whisper,” released last month, Jane Birken and Serge Gainsbourg’s rendezvous child only sounds occasionally nervous but lucky for her, that twitchy quality only reinforces the captivating edge in these songs, half of which were performed live on her European tour in 2010.