Soviet era electronica, recorded 1978 to 1980. Shades of Edgar Froese, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre. Music from Tallinn, Estonia on hand built synths...
Composed in the late 1970s and released in 1981, Hingus is a
fantastically grand album of astral pieces-for-synthesizer, created by
Estonian musician Sven Grünberg. The Talinn resident had previously led
prog outfit Mess, who were active in the late 1970s but, due to Soviet
censure, forbidden from actually releasing any recordings until many
years later. Mess’ music isn’t messy, per se, but it is haphazardly
structured and full of proggier-than-though flights of fancy. Hingus, though, is very different – an album of ecstatic cosmic dazzle.
Played on bespoke synthesisers (built by Mess member Härmo Härm), Hingus trades
mostly in mock-orchestral swells in a ‘Trans Europe Express’ mould,
decorated with chimes and harmonics. Pretty ambient passages,
reminiscent of Steve Hillage’s works for synthesizer, break up the
bombast, but the sense of high drama rarely lets up. The album is
effectively split down the middle: the A-side is a four-part suite,
whereas the flip centres around a long-form piece, ‘Valgusxis’. It’s
occasionally stern, but Grünberg plays with Riley-esque force and
exuberance throughout... Factmag
The nod to Mingus on "Green and Orange Night Park" is more than formal; it's an engagement with some of the same melodic constructs Mingus was working out in New Tijuana Moods.
In sum, this is an adventurous kind of jazz that still swings very hard
despite its dissonance and regards a written chart as something more
than a constraint to creative expression. Brilliant...
Norma Winstone : voice Mike Osborne : alto saxophone Art Themen : tenor saxophone Henry Lowther : flugelhorn Kenny Wheeler : trumpet Chris Pyne : trombone Malcolm Griffiths : trombone Paul Rutherford : euphonium John Taylor : piano Chris Laurence : bass Tony Levin : drums
Japanese New Wave techno-pop ...this was their first album release in the UK/US ...B52s meet Rezillos and Devo. This was a remake of their first album recorded for Island Records.
In the annals of Krautrock, Alcatraz's debut was one of the great
unknown classics. A sizzling hybrid of many influences all wrapped-up
into a unique style of their own. One part Faust (it is recorded at
Wümme by Faust's engineer after all), one part Frumpy, Nosferatu, Out Of
Focus, Xhol Caravan, and lots that is their own. There's also a jazz
standard adaptation thrown-in (also heard adapted by Nucleus on their
Elastic Rock album - so coincidental it's spooky), powerful white blues,
and some of the strongest hooks and grooves you could ever wish for,
plus tons of sizzling solos, great vocals, and more. What's not to like?
Or indeed be totally stunned by!
"Where The Wild Thing Are" may be the most cohesive piece here, in that
you've got a chunked and funked up Deep Purple-ish guitar and syncopated
sax chugging along for about a minute, before a swinging Jazzy build up
which goes back to the original rhythm with the guitar soloing to the
end!?
The title tune is a kinda mellow Jazz Funk thing for about
a minute, before a trippy synth and sax play over an almost Bolero
rhythm?! At 2 minutes the electric guitar and some seriously mind
blowing synth swoop in, which disappears in a flash about 45 seconds
later for a Jazz drum solo for about two and a half minutes. A new
section starts, made of a ghostly wind synthesizer and a twee guitar
lick, which leads to a most excellent section starting around 6:15 of
effected flute and cymbals for about a minute. This grows back into a
trippy lounge thing with vocals, and eventual flute and guitar solos
until 11:55, at which time we inexplicably return to the original Jazz
Funk thing?!... Discogs ...Alcatraz...
Dutch prog ... female lead from Jerney Kaagman and Mike Oldfield-ish fluid guitar from Chris Koerts, with symphonic mellotron backing... Interlude and Fanfare ...
The third Earth and Fire album "Atlantis" continued the symphonic
progressive rock style of the previous album. The title-track was
another side-long suite, but obviously pieced together from far more
bits, parts and different ideas than "Song of the Marching Children".
But it still hangs very well together, and the songwriting is just as
strong as we now could expect from the band. The Mellotron is always
present the whole way through, but a little bit more toned down and
better integrated along with the other instruments than on "Song of the
Marching Children". Side 2 is what makes the album in my opinion a tad
weaker than the previous one. Most because of the poppy "Maybe Tomorrow,
Maybe Tonight" (that was also the title of a German pressing of the
album that had side 1 and 2 exchanged) and the ballad "Love, Please
Close the Door". Both these tracks are good, but compared to their best
stuff they just don't quite hold up. But most of the rest of side 2 is
taken up by the excellent "Fanfare". This is a melodic symphonic track
in the vein of "Storm and Thunder". One of the themes from the
title-track is also repeated, giving the album a kind of a concept-album
feel. I think this is the Earth and Fire album to get after you've got
"Song of the Marching Children"... vintageprog.com
Jerney Kaagman - lead vocals Ton van de Kleij - drums, percussion Chris Koerts - acoustic & electric guitars, backing vocals Gerard Koerts - organ, piano, flute, Mellotron, synthesizers, virginal, backing vocals Hans Ziech - bass
Electronic suite by 'sound organiser' and electronic music composer Tod Dockstader. Originally released on Owl records in 1966, this is Dockstader's tour de force ...
The ultimate Tod Dockstader creation however was the monu-mental 46
minute opus Quatermass (1964). Too long for an album originally, two of
the surplus edited-out works made it onto the CD release as a bonus: Two
Moons of Quatermass, these two 4 minute pieces offer a taster to the
awesome power of Quatermass itself. To quote Tod himself 'Quatermass was
intended, from the start, to be a very dense, massive, even
threatening, work of high levels and energy' - it was pure coincidence
that in Britain at the time there was a sci-fi TV series called
"Quatermass", as this would have made the ideal soundtrack. It's
scarcely believable that virtually none of the sound sources are
electronic, many of the textures are created by unlikely things like
balloons, vacuum cleaner hoses, toys and the like, as well as the stable
selection of percussive devices. This is dark nightmarish music, of
great power and phenomenally dynamic execution, with astonishingly
complex rhythmic and sequential passages, crescendos of such vigour, and
use of stereo panning and bouncing that's far too dizzying to listen to
on headphones... Alan Freeman, Audion magazine ...Audion#32
Katie English has released several critically acclaimed albums including 2010’s Protective Displacement (Rural Colours) and Unstable Equilibrium
(Home Normal, 2009). She has appeared at venues such as the National
Portrait Gallery and Union Chapel in London and has received extensive
play on Radio 3’s Late Junction and BBC 6 Music. She is a classically
trained flautist and has studied electroacoustic music, alternative
tunings and Balinese gamelan. Working without laptop processing, Katie
English uses the pure tones of concert and bass flutes alongside home
made dulcimers and electronics to create immersive yet restrained
textures that weave in and out of each other. As well as her solo work
she also plays in LITTLEBOW and has collaborated live and on record with
ORLA WREN, KONNTINENT, HYBERNATION and THE OWL SERVICE…
The result is four sides of blissed-out transcendence, galvanised by an
immediacy that anchors the ensemble to soul and free jazz even as its
joyous riffing takes it in the direction of psychedelic and progressive
rock. Opening with a hypnotic Fender Rhodes motif, 'Part 1' sees
vocalist Mariam Wallentin (Werliin's partner in Wildbirds &
Peacedrums) set out the Orchestra's vision in deep, soulful cries of
"Let us all go… let them all go… let it all go… feel it all go…"
Metallic sheets of electric guitar are joined by the Mellotron, no less,
its distinctive frosty tone harking back to the late '60s as surely as
do Wallentin's ecstatic vocals. 'Part 2' kicks in with another '60s
reference, as a deranged take on the Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows'
morphs into a livid collision between guitar and electronics before
giving way to a hymnal section for horns and brass... thequietus.com ...
A quality not unlike much of the music that came out of Canterbury in
the 1960/70s from groups like Egg, early Soft Machine and Hatfield and
the North—the latter, in particular, one of the more important of
Sanguine Hum's many touchstones (along with everything from Frank Zappa and Steve Reich to Bass Communion, Mahavishnu Orchestra and
ECM Records). While the members of Sanguine Hum are unmistakably
accomplished musicians who live in the world called post-progressive
rock, their music possesses the same lack of self-importance, excess and
"look at me" attitude that some say plagued many of progressive rock's
bigger names but which those Canterbury bands managed to largely avoid.
Sanguine
Hum may, in fact, be based in Oxford, England, but they're
Canterburians at heart...albeit Canterburians of an unmistakably modern
bent with a similarly bizarre sense of humour and a belief that, no
matter how complex the music gets, melody—albeit pushed to its greatest
extremes—remains paramount. Sanguine Hum may have many touchstones in
the past, but its music is undeniably 21st century...in the case of Now We Have Light,
perhaps, even farther ahead, as its story takes place at an
unidentified future time when the story's hero, Don (just Don), has been
the cause of an apocalyptic event that has reduced the earth to "The
Circle"—a gated community constructed by rich survivors to protect
themselves from the consequences of a ravaged planet—and the nearby
village of ramshackle homes that survive only due to its proximity to
"The Wheel." It's in one of these homes that Don lives, with both his
neighbors and those living in "The Wheel" thankfully (for him) unaware
that he was the singular creator of all their woes... allaboutjazz ...
That hovering dust-cloud of strings, which Levi referred to as "like a beehive" in her and Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer's recent Pitchfork interview,
pops up repeatedly throughout the score with minor additions and tweaks
representing the journey of Johansson's character: in "Meat to Maths",
there are clanging bell-like sounds behind it, while in "Mirror to
Vortex" it's half-submerged in the amplified sound of its own echo. In
the context of the film, these additions feel like the messiness of
lived experience muddying Johansson's template, the imprint of the lives
she begins to grapple with as her time on Earth extends. The hollow
knock of a single drum, like a single dragging foot, is another
repeating theme, giving the score a reiterative, hesitant quality.
Inasmuch as you can be invited into Johansson's character's head in Under the Skin,
the music does the heavy lifting. The score has the feel of a thought
process, albeit one conducted by a being you have no genetic relation
to. pitchfork.com ...
The sound of The Little Match Girl boasts both the group’s
firm grasp on the classical composing of music and a duo who wants to
push “music” beyond any category in which it is currently comfortable.
The title track is their sonic reimagining of the classic Hans Christian
Andersen tale of finding hope only in death and the rest of the album
is equally high-minded, telling a profoundly existential, and often
somber, tale with each of the 9 tracks. But while each track stands
alone as a concise narrative, when strung together, as an album they
would seem to serve as a broader commentary on a single theme, much like
Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. And like Paris Spleen,
that theme would seem to be the beauty that can be found in the
wretchedness of the world by those who best understand the circumstances
of humanity... philthymag ...
'To Sleep’ is just a beautiful song, a carefully-crafted piece of
moving electronica and euphoric guitar drifts which is mesmerising; it’s
a suitably pastoral accompaniment to Conway’s poetry, which comes and
goes like waves onto the shore. Entrancing and enchanting – you get the
idea. ‘Looks Like’ is delivered in warped waltz time and, with its
simple melodic synth pad swells could be a Vince Clarke composition were
it not for the occasional intrusion of rippling guitar sounds.
‘Sometime’ is dark and edgy, a throbbing bass pulse and a ratchety sound
culled straight from Wire’s ‘Advantage In Height’ offset by a pleasant
strummed melody and a divine layered chorus of Conway’s voice(s). ‘One
Of Our Girls Has Gone Missing’, released as a single, concludes the
cassette and vinyl editions, while the CD includes the warped cover of
Canned Heat’s ‘Time Was’, also released as a single... Documentary Road ...
The Penguin Cafe Orchestra was a collective of performing
musicians created by classically trained British guitarist, composer and
arranger Simon Jeffes. Jeffes and cellist co-founder Helen Liebmann
were core members throughout its life and a number of other musicians
joined as the band grew and developed, many of whom appear on the PCO's
six studio albums...
The idea of the Penguin Cafe came to Jeffes in a dream he had
following a bout of food poisoning in 1972. It would become a sort of
creative zone in which all the subconscious instincts we suppress so as
to maintain order in our daily lives were allowed free and easy play.
This could be a formula for chaos but, for all its unexpectedness, its
juxtapositions of high classical and rustic folk, Penguin Cafe music is
warm, tonal, accessible, generally brings a smile to the face in its
playful and unlikely resolutions of opposites. Its benign simplicity
also belies the quite astonishing lateral leaps of thinking it takes.
Random example; ‘The Snake And The Lotus’ from ‘Signs Of Life’, whose
main riff ascends unassumingly up and down the fretboard as if it were a
flight of stairs. Yet for all its modesty, it's one of the treasures of
the PCO canon. From what depths of his pysche did Jeffes pull this tiny
pearl?... Quietus ...
The rightful hype about composer Holly Herndon
is that she skips along the often-broad line between academic and
accessible electronica-- that is, the music on her proper debut, Movement, suits a club as much as a classroom. On "Fade",
for instance, she lattices complex vocal layers around a beat with a
verifiably big bottom-end. "Dilato," the record's final piece, forces
the issue with a completely unimaginable scheme, as baritone vocalist
Bruce Rameker-- himself a classical crossover singer, having worked not
only with direct Herndon predecessor Meredith Monk but also with
conservatories and operas across the world-- intones the word "dilato,"
meaning to extend or dilate... pitchfork.com
For "Chorus," Herndon "sampled her daily
browsing experience," using a software patch that recorded snippets of
audio coming from her web browser and throw them together. The result is
an anarchic jumble of sounds—pristine chords, garbled scraps of
percussion and, of course, lots of voices, re-pitched and layered to
form the titular ensemble. Its jump-cut logic and fleeting moments of
static gorgeousness bring to mind Oneohtrix Point Never's recent R Plus Seven.
But rather than presenting these sounds as abstract delights, Herndon
wrings a song from them, a jumpy electro pop number that's propelled by
its dense arrangement. As a conceptual exercise it's as striking as
anything on Movement; as a piece of music it's quite a bit better... residentadvisor.net ...
Steven and Timothy Quay's tribute to Leos Janacek... This film is not included in the BFI DVD collection, though possibly available on a Japanese collection ...
Animators Brothers Quay, with their unique macro stop-motion surrealist puppetry, were asked to provide visuals for 4AD group His Name Is Alive. The third film here, Dog Door is for Sparklehorse ...
