by SHANE SINNOTT

The new year brings a desire for new things, so the plan this week is to branch out a little from the rock/pop/indie juggernaut, for what is the Internet, friends, if not a place to download strange and unfamiliar things that we wouldn’t dare pay for?

A great place to start is a blog called Classical Connection (classicalconnection.blogspot.com), proclaiming itself “your home for out-of-print classical music.” I don’t know what exactly happened, but the blog has strayed far from this mandate, turning into a sort of catch-all for anything avant-garde and/or weird, and has lots of full albums for download—evidently, this sort of stuff doesn’t attract the attention of copyright owners. The real find here (scroll down a bit) is a rare, 1964 bootleg of the Dream Syndicate (not the ’80s band, but rather a predecessor to the Velvet Ungerground) called “2 IV 64, Day of the Holy Mountain.” This is the good stuff: LaMonte Young, Tony Conrad and John Cale, making some seminal drone-noise. The influence of Young, Cale and Conrad’s interest in all things prolonged is hard to overstate, but let’s try. It is the most important element that John Cale brought to VU, and therefore the primary reason that rock music can be thought of as art.

Now, back to the classical. Here’s a pretty amazing find: skafunkrastapunk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=130718. You have to register first to view this, but it’s quick, and well worth it: the entire list from Piero Scaruffi’s “A Brief History of Classical Music through its Essential Compositions,” boasting a few hundred compositions. You can also find the list on the Italian poet/historian/cognitive scientist/free thinker’s site, at www.scaruffi.com/music/classica.html, but at skafunkrastapunk.com, a good third or so of the “essential compositions” are downloadable gratis.

GATHERING ALL THE NEWS THAT I NEED... ssinnott@gmail.com

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