News from the darkest corners...

Maurice Jarre, Oscar-winning composer of music for films including “Doctor Zhivago” and “Lawrence of Arabia”, died in Los Angeles aged 84.

The death of Jarre, who won a third Oscar for his score for “A Passage to India”, was announced by the manager of his son, electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre.

The elder Jarre wrote the music for more than 150 films by great directors including John Frankenheimer, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston and Luchino Visconti.

In 1952 he wrote his first score, for the short “Hotel des Invalides,” at the request of director Georges Franju.

Maurice Jarre, who settled in the United States in the mid-1960s, also wrote symphonic music and music for theatre, ballet and television, including the 1970s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.

Our friends Joe and Darlene Lacey report the following:

One of the great pleasures in life for music lovers is not so much to find a great recording, but to have a great recording find you. We first heard “Two Sides of the Trilogy” through a vinyl sharing site. The album was rare: it was a souvenir made to be sold at the Trilogy’s South Florida shows in 1973, and only 500 copies were pressed.

Intrigued by its high level of musicianship and the charisma of its three members, Kurt, Lori, and Ike, we decided to create a tribute site to the album and the band. We contacted Kurt and Ike and they turned out to be two great guys: they collaborated with us to make an awesome website, and personally digitally re-mastered the album to CD with all new artwork and liner notes.

Sadly, Lori, Kurt’s wife and lead singer, passed away a few years ago. The memory of her, however, lives on in her music, which is beautifully restored for this release.

Be sure to check out the Trilogy’s site at: www.twosidesofthetrilogy.com for samples of their cool lounge music, two free downloads, stories about the band, the 70s South Florida music scene and lots of groovy photos! And don’t forget to order a copy of this collectable CD!

German Rock-Pop-Indie-Grunge-Prog band Guilty Guitars will release a new album on March 20th: Guilty Guitars – RMXD.

Guilty Guitars have screwed up several smash hits from their first two albums. What emerges are ten tracks, ranging from extremely experimental up to extremely danceable, coming along in such a crisp and fresh manner that your loudspeakers will bounce in delight!

With this new release Guilty Guitars don’t merely show their interest in music apart from guitar-oriented genres, they even get serious about it (or rather, they get funny about it). Of course, an album like this is nothing special in itself in the era of remixes. Nevertheless, it is a noticeable fact when a band, normally realising its creative potentials within the fields of a classic rock-trio, completely deconstructs and tears apart their own material, finding a new context to build up new structures and songs that function perfectly without any reference to the original compositions, that way defining a new dimension of their music… or even reinventing themselves?

The album will be available as a free download for a limited period of time, directly from the band’s website: www.guiltyguitars.com. It is also available on Last.fm.