Daily Drops · Vol.039每日唱片 · Vol.039
The Monday after a Friday flood: noise-rock kids playing piano, and four classical records about going back to what the composer first wrote down May 11, 2026｜Vol.039
Friko — Something Worth Waiting For
Friko's first record landed them on a Pitchfork year-end list, which is the sort of thing that hardens a band's habits if it doesn't first dissolve them. For the second, the Chicago four-piece handed the controls to John Congleton, and Congleton's gift, as he demonstrated on records by St. Vincent and Lana Del Rey and a dozen others, is to convince a band that the cautious version of a song is never the right version. "Hot Air Balloon" smolders for five minutes; "Dear Bicycle" pushes past six. The frontman Niko Kapetan is writing about the unglamorous fatigue of post-breakout existence — too many airports, not enough trains — and the album earns its title by refusing to deliver its catharsis on schedule. It's an indie rock record that has read enough avant-garde classical to know that resolution is, in fact, optional. Friko 首作《Where we've been, Where we go from here》上 Pitchfork 年榜後，二專請來 John Congleton。Congleton 這幾年幫 St. Vincent、Lana Del Rey 製作過，他擅長的事很具體：說服樂團「保險的那個版本永遠是錯的版本」。
Sarah Fox / Roberto Forés Veses / Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León / Malcolm Martineau — Mozart Concert Arias
The concert aria is the form, in Mozart's output, that we tend to walk straight past in the gift shop. It lives between the opera aria — which it resembles in vocal scale and orchestral weight — and the art song, which it resembles in the intimacy of its dedication. Mozart wrote his for specific singers, on specific evenings, as a kind of operatic letter: Ch'io mi scordi di te? for Nancy Storace as she left Vienna; Nehmt meinen Dank for Aloysia Weber. They are gifts, in other words, dressed up as performances. The British soprano Sarah Fox — Kathleen Ferrier laureate, a Susanna at Glyndebourne and a Zerlina at the Royal Opera — finds the right register for them, which is to say neither operatic nor recital but somewhere quieter and more privately addressed. The Spanish orchestra is alert. Malcolm Martineau, on piano for two of the eight, is doing what he always does, which is to make the singer sound smarter than she already is. Concert aria 是 Mozart 那一格我們經過時最容易視而不見的形式。編制像歌劇詠歎調，題獻又像藝術歌曲——它介於兩者之間。
What You May Call It — Da Qi
A New York quartet, picked up by Bandcamp Daily's May 8 column the way you get pulled out of a thrift bin: by sheer happenstance, and then with growing conviction. The drummer is Charles Downs, who used to play under the name Rashid Bakr alongside Cecil Taylor and Billy Bang in the loft scene of the seventies, and whose presence behind the kit is the kind of credential that buys an album a lot of patience. Rose Tang's guitar is microtonal and structurally unstable, Steve Holtje plays keyboards and trombone with equal mischief, and Chris Kelsey on saxophone is what holds the whole thing in shape. Four long tracks. It is not background music. It rewards the kind of listening you give a long short story by Lydia Davis, where you read a sentence twice not because you missed it but because you can. 紐約四重奏，《Bandcamp Daily》5/8 那一期補推上來的。
Ted Black, Sascha El Mouissi — Florence B. Price: Hold Fast To Dreams
Florence Price's rehabilitation in the concert hall has, over the past few years, become one of the more legible projects in classical music. The symphonies are catching on; the chamber music is getting its second hearing. The art songs, though — the dozens of small intimate settings of Langston Hughes and Ogden Nash and Byron — remain mostly in manuscript. The British tenor Ted Black, fresh out of the Wiener Staatsoper young artist program, has now made the first full recital devoted to them, with the German pianist Sascha El Mouissi. The performance is unmannered: Black trusts the songs enough not to over-decorate, and El Mouissi accompanies the way a good editor edits, which is to say invisibly. It is the rare record of recovered repertoire that does not feel like homework. Florence Price 在 2020 年代的「重新發現」已經成為產業共識。交響曲跑得快，室內樂也補上，但藝術歌曲這塊——幾十首 Langston Hughes、Ogden Nash、Byron 的小型獨唱——一直留在手稿裡沒人正式錄。
Sophie Rennert, Joseph Middleton — Irrlichter: Songs By Franz Schubert
An Austrian mezzo with English diction so clean she could double as a chamber linguist; the most in-demand lieder pianist working today; a BIS SACD that pulls a recital's worth of Schubert from "Erlkönig" (the song everyone knows) to "Die Taubenpost" (the one most don't). The title — Irrlichter, "will-o'-the-wisp" — is borrowed from Rennert's favorite Schubert song, "Des Fischers Liebesglück," and it functions less as a marketing line than as a thesis: these songs are meant to flicker, not glow. Rennert lets them. There is no breathy reverence here, no curatorial hush, just a singer who has clearly read the texts at least as carefully as the score. Limelight called her an "instinctive storyteller," which is the right phrase even if you might wish it were less reviewerly. 奧地利女中音 + 當代最炙手可熱的 lieder 伴奏。Rennert 第一張 BIS——專輯名「Irrlichter」（鬼火）來自她最愛的〈Des Fischers Liebesglück〉，更像論點不像文案：Schubert 這幾首歌的本意是閃爍不是發光。
Nelson Goerner — Handel, R. Schumann & Schulz-Evler
阿根廷鋼琴家在 Alpha 的第十張。核心是 Schumann《Davidsbündlertänze》Op.6——十八首小舞曲，寫於他和 Clara 訂婚後一週，題給虛構音樂社團「大衛同盟」，宗旨是對抗 Rossini、Bellini、Donizetti 那種他看不上的「裝飾派」。