Exclusive Daily Download: "This Lamb Sells Condos," Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy is the musical persona of video game-obsessed Toronto native Owen Pallett, whose new album, "He Poos Clouds," is a dazzlingly sophisticated and assured song suite composed for string quartet, piano and percussion. There's a skittishness to these songs that is both exhilarating and maddening, a kind of coltish shyness, as if they might spook if you try to get close too quickly, and they zip by with a facile, virtuosic sheen, clearly the product of a deliberate aesthetic decision both sonic (the whole record has a thin, plastic, somewhat antiseptic sound) and compositional. Download "Song Song Song" and this Salon exclusive of "This Lamb Sells Condos" to get a taste, but this is definitely an album that deserves to be heard in its entirety.
-- T.B.
Great literary podcasts:
"In Walked Bud"
Amiri Baraka
"The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"
Charles Bukowski
"The House on Mango Street"
Sandra Cisneros
"A Reporter's Life,"
Walter Cronkite
"An Open Heart," by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
"Robert Frost Reads"
Robert Frost
"In Harry's Bar in Venice"
Ernest Hemingway
"The War on Drugs"
Bill Hicks
"I Have a Dream"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"King of Horror"
Read by Stephen King
"Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
"Long Walk to Freedom," by Nelson Mandela
Read by Danny Glover
"Shopgirl"
Steve Martin
"All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Brad Pitt
"The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison
"Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
"The Bell Jar,"
Sylvia Plath
"The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe
Read by Basil Rathbone
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," by JK Rowling
Read by Jim Dale
"Everything"
Henry Rollins
"Fast Food Nation," By Eric Schlosser
Read by Rick Adamson
"Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Dylan Thomas
"Slaughterhouse Five"
Kurt Vonnegut
"Hooking Up"
Tom Wolfe
Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
