TIN HAT
The Sad Machinery Of Spring - (2007)

For its fifth album, the former Tin Hat Trio is minus one founding member, accordionist Rob Burger, but takes in three new musicians: harpist Zeena Parkins (who has recorded with the group before), clarinetist Ben Goldberg (who has recorded several jazz and klezmer albums under his own name) and multi-instrumentalist Ara Anderson, who contributes a number of horns and keyboards to the mix and has played before with Tom Waits and others. Despite the personnel shift — founders Mark Orton (guitar, piano and other instruments) and Carla Kihlstedt (violins, voice and more) remain — and the wider canvas, the basic M.O. of Tin Hat remains relatively intact. The group has been described in the past as "acoustic chamber music," and while that is as apt a tag as any, it's also rather limiting. Tin Hat draws from a number of not-always-compatible genres — among them various branches of classical music, world elements and the freeness of jazz — but then blurs the lines until none are particularly recognizable as such. But for The Sad Machinery of Spring the reconfigured, largely instrumental group specifically looked for inspiration in the works of surrealist Polish writer Bruno Schulz, who was killed by the Nazis in 1942. The essence of klezmer and related Eastern European sounds hover over Sad Machinery's compositions and improvisations, but Tin Hat is too unorthodox and resourceful to be so obvious. There is a balance of many moods and sonic variations among these tracks, ranging from playful and carefree to bucolic to jarringly eccentric. Whether that reflects Schulz's own creations most listeners will probably never know, but no matter: Sad Machinery is hardly a passive listening experience, but it's never boring.

http://www.mediafire.com/?5jh2znzmmuz

TIN HAT TRIO
Helium - (2000)

You know you've got a strange sort of magic going on when a scratchy vocal by Tom Waits (on the reprise of the hypnotic, chamber music meets French cafe and spaghetti western title track) is the least bizarre element. The trio of Rob Burger (accordion, piano, pump organ, marxophone, harmonica), Carla Kihlstedt (violin, viola), and Mark Orton (guitar, Dobro, banjo) offer a vision of what a chamber music group might sound like if they mixed a studio session for a Western film with a rhythmically diverse, often atonal classical excursion. The opening track "A Life in East Poultney" finds a banjo plucking over a droning violin as bells ring in the background. That same violin does a seductive dance over a plucky organ base and accordion harmonies on the title track, which evolves into the image of a train blowing harmonica steam across the land. "Scrap" rolls like a schizophrenic fiddle tune, and then the fiddling slows down into a mosey on the wacky and atonal "Sand Dog Blues." And by that point, when the craziness is just beginning, you're either tripping and enjoying or wondering who these three are and just why they think this is commercial music. The New Yorker put it best when it said their music is "a soundtrack for the kind of puzzling dream which leaves you sitting awake in the middle of the night." You will love it or loathe it, but you can't just shrug and ignore it. (allmusic.com)

http://www.mediafire.com/?titgfzwnzov