Leon Theremin and the Orchestra I’m showing my age with today’s Al compás del mundo playlist. Most all the music represented here is from 20-50 years ago. A couple exceptions are Iranian-Canadian Sina Bathaie and Chile’s Föllakzoid, both a nod towards rave culture…which has its origins in the mid -1980s, an old school trip out which lingers on to this day. Experimental music has been around for who knows how long. Rebels always come out of the woodwork when popular taste imposes limitations.  And electronics have influenced and become the medium as far back as the theremin, invented circa 1918. There’s one more ringer in this group (experimental yes, electronic, no) and that’s Steve Reich’s piece, an excerpt from “Pulse.” The chorus and instruments are organic and live – no recorded sounds and no overdubs. That this sort of music has drawn devotees in great numbers and from all parts of the world would make a case for a commonality in human artistic perception and acceptance. Who s...

Mother Falcon Not sure exactly how to label all of the music in this week’s program. I tried out international “semi-classical” and that sort of, kind of, works for some cuts. The London Symphony Orchestra, Philip Glass, the Kronos Quartet, Lou Harrison are/were all unabashed classical musicians in the Western sense, yet are found here participating in the creation of worldly strains unrestrained by European precedents. Lambarena at the start, a tribute to Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s work in West Africa, crunches the boundaries of what you might hear in Bach’s home in Germany or back home in Gabon. Two stirring repertoires are better than one! Put Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass together (in their album “Passages”) and dueling cultures turn into a sweet embrace. Javad Maroufi plays classical music as well, Iranian classical. He does it all alone here with a piano and a noble strut. Play it at double-time and it might just recall a little ragtime…I wonder. Mother Falcon defines a sound all th...