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Baker's Dozen

A Babylonian Tower: Marc Hollander's Favourite Music
David McKenna , June 17th, 2020 08:34

Marc Hollander's Aksak Maboul have released one of the albums of the year and his Crammed Discs label have consistently provided a wide-ranging soundtrack to the globe. He guides David McKenna through favourite albums in this week's Baker's Dozen

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Terry Riley – A Rainbow In Curved Air
I feel close to this because of the organ and the tape loops and the trance feeling, but this is a different way of doing it - suddenly he was part of classical music, him and Steve Reich and Philip Glass. They all came more or less from jazz and became accepted and it was like a revolution in classical music, in terms of tonality and rhythm, inspired by African and Balinese music. This record was my first introduction to that. And that obviously had a huge influence on pop and electronic music.

And his composition In C… with some musicians in Brussels, I was part of a collective when the first Aksak Maboul came out and we set up a band with 25 musicians to perform that piece, which we did three or four times but in a rockier way, with synths and guitars and it was a lot of fun.