Electronica - what are you listening to?

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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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This is typical soundtrack music but my, oh my, it's absolutely enthralling :-) Remember you can
only get it from here


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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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Another Experimedia mp3 special download. Lp to follow....

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Foregoing traditional genre boundaries, defying categorization, and embracing the distinct talents of its 19 participants, Luup involves a reexamination of convention by a thorough exploration of the instrument. Led by flautist Stelios Romaliadis, whose direction of the musicians allows for shimmering folk tendencies to mingle with fragile string arrangements and uplifting voice, Luup combines disparate elements of modern musical tendencies to examine man’s primitive nature. Meadow Rituals presents 8 paeans to unite man’s overwhelming distance from nature and self and a celebration of the reunion. Lilting melodies mix with ambient and new age directions; propulsive swells of strings and effervescent electronics make way for profound vocal harmonies to create a universal and timeless experience.

Lüüp is: Stelios Romaliadis, Lisa Isaksson (Lisa o Piu), David Svedmyr (Lisa o Piu), Fotini Kallianou, Katerina Papachristou, Fotis Siotas, Lefteris Moumtzis (J.Kriste, Master of Disguise, Snakecharmer), Alex Bolpasis, Pavlos Michaelides, Andria Degens (Pantaleimon/Current 93), Giorgos Varoutas, David Jackson (Van Der Graaf Generator/Peter Hammill/Peter Gabriel), Elsa Kundig, Nikos Fokas, Nikos Papanagiotou, Greg Haines (Sonic Pieces), Georgia Smerou, Georgia Konstadopoulou, and Jennie Ståbis (Lisa o Piu).
Last edited by cybot on Mon Apr 04, 2011 1:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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*Strictly limited pressing* Following on from a cover feature in this month's The Wire magazine, Richard Skelton makes this beautiful and scarce CD album available on a limited edition vinyl pressing. 'Black Swallow & Other Songs' was originally released on Skelton's own Sustain Release imprint in a criminally low run of 100 CDs, so this will be the first chance many will get to hear this material. The album unfolds to reveal a soft and sparse study in understated melodies, with the nine minute "Artery" opening the album and building from a fractured whisper to leave its mark on your skin with blurry violin notes stretching to breaking point. The title track continues the theme, adding a heavy dose of melancholy to proceedings. But on the closing suite, "Owl Lanterns" and "The Clearing," we get a full dose of hopefulness: vocal traces flicker by while the bowed strings add an unfaltering lightness, with Skelton's guitar plucks passing by with a buoyant spirit. As Autumn Grieve's wordless vocals bring everything to a close, there's nowhere else to go but up. Her voice is the exclamation mark, powerful and restrained as it leads the strings to rest. Black Swallow & Other Songs is a potent mix of darkness and light, expertly crafted by one of the UK's most interesting composers.
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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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The 1956 soundtrack to sci-fi classic 'Forbidden Planet' is possibly one of the best known, yet least owned pieces of tape music in history. Long unavailable on vinyl, it's definitively evocative 'electronic tonalities' were crafted by husband/wife duo Louis and Bebe Barron using the earliest tape recording techniques. Louis, a playwright, and Bebe, a researcher for Life magazine had gained some experience with tape through an early Telefunken model given by a German friend as a wedding present. When the couple moved to New York's artistic haven, Greenwich Village around 1950 they encountered John Cage who commissioned them and their tape machine to work with him and David Tudor, resulting one year later in Cage's Williams Mix, a four minute composition comprised from spliced fragments of over 600 recordings. Because they were one of a very select few to own such equipment at the time, their studio was frequently visited by the likes of Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, and Edgard Varèse, while their writing connection also lead to them making spoken-word recordings of Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley and Tennessee Williams. Commissions for IBM and Ford followed, before a meeting with MGM's Dore Schary lead to the creation of the 'Forbidden Planet' soundtrack, which at the time was considered by John Cage to be "disgustingly orchestral and musical" and ironically not even recognised as music by the Musicians' Union who decreed it be credited as "Electronic Tonalities". At the time, MGM didn't even release the original soundtrack, instead opting for an orchestrated version of the theme by the David Rose Orchestra, which begs the question what may have come if the general public at large were able to own a copy of the fantastical sounds they had just been exposed to at the cinema, and what this may have inspired from them, and Louis and Bebe Barron? Aside from a slight pressing fault at the start of Side B in 'Krell Shuttle Ride and Power Station', the mastering and sound recreation by Norman Blake is faithful and near flawless, enhancing what is surely one of the most essential purchases of the year for fans of electronic music.
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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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Having another listen tonight. Amazing for 1956!


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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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Followed by this Radiophonic effort....


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It's always nice to have a good story behind a record (especially if you're writing a review) and this one has a corker of a tale. Apparently Johnny Trunk (of Trunk records and having a pornstar for a sister fame) had been looking into licensing this soundtrack for a long time and came to the conclusion that it would be too much of a pain in the proverbial bottom to track down all the pieces of music used in the classic television series. On the DVD release of the series last year, however, he discovered to his surprise that the entire soundtrack was lifted from a library record called ESL 104, featuring the anonymous work of electronic music pioneers Delia Derbyshire, Dudley Simpson and Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as David Vorhaus of White Noise. All the original tracks are here, in the same order featured on the original record, with the tone set early on with a cocophany of gorgeous over-saturated tapey sounds that are very similar to the sort of atmospheric and incidental music used in classic period Doctor Who. As anyone familiar with this field knows, some of the most important and influential early electronic music was produced by this small cluster of pioneers, and some of these pieces are really as good as it gets - often short, but always sweet. It's when you realise how long it took to create each and every sound here that you appreciate how much effort went into assembling even the shortest of tracks - something that's explained brilliantly in the liner notes. Featuring some classic and ultra rare Delia moments such as the blip-tastic 'Way Out' and sub aquatic 'Gothic Submarines', this is just about as essential as it gets.
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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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Have always loved this soundtrack. Still sounding unbelievable on vinyl with the Croft hybrid pairing doing it full justice and then some.....


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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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Just in case someone shows a modicum of interest :

180 Gram Color Vinyl Gatefold LP with Download Coupon

'Vryashn' was revisited for a vinyl-only reissue. It was initially released as a small batch of CDR's on the Gears of Sand label in 2008 and went out-of-print soon thereafter.

Limited to 500 copies. 400 on white, 100 on baby blue vinyl. Blue vinyl exclusive to Infraction mail-order and Experimedia.

Gatefold sleeve, 180 gram vinyl, OBI strip.

Mastered by Taylor Deupree.

Includes download coupon for an extended version of the album with options for 24BIT WAV, FLAC, or MP3 formats.

"Two lengthy, sonorous tracks with looming, viscous currents offset by a seductive parade of pattering detail. Fluttering piano notes pierce shifting planes of texture, catspaws of white noise skip across the swell, and Echoplexed flurries float, like distant birdsong, back and forth across the threshold of audibility. Vryashn reveals a perfect balance between fluidity and architecture before disappearing into a haze of chiming bells." - The Wire

"Here be the sad sounds of drowning. This Ohio-based pair has quietly amassed an intriguing catalogue of digitally treated dronemusic and manipulated field recordings, with Vryashn being maybe the best so far, oozing with a gorgeous subaquatic melancholia. Aside from all of their sound design tricks, the piano is the central instrument on Vryashn with its notes stretched and elongated into sinewy tones. When wrapped into the slow-motion whirlpool of oceanic reverb and and cyclical drone construction, the brooding notes of the piano sound as if they are the last notes being played by some madman trapped on the ship slowly sinking into the depths of the Black Sea. Tactile bits of organic scrapes and cracklings sweep across the stereo field and dissolve into the ever deeper and blacker void of the waters below. Like Gavin Bryars' similar opus on oceanic collapse, The Sinking Of The Titanic, there is a sublime beauty to these sinking sounds. Recommended, for sure!" - aquariusrecords.org

"Jeremy Bible & Jason Henry harness an array of electro-acoustics in forging Vryashn, a work of great depth and subtle eloquence. JB&JH propose a theme of the sensation of a dream within a dream; of being surrounded by snow, becoming numb and falling asleep only to awake in the rain in another dream and location. Various phases of such an experience are depicted, from elated to disorientated. Various sound sources – piano, water line pipes, wine glasses, rain on a window, and a garage lamp – articulate Vryashn's variations; a two-part immersion zone of fragmentation and re-moulding that shuns the delicacy of a Budd bath for riskier reefs towards Andrew Liles' The Dying Submariner and Aloof Proof's Piano Text. JB&JH curate a descent into a drowned world of wrecked and wracked elegiacs, attended by envelopes of trills pushed into spills, redrawn revenants distended in a quest for new euphony. The duo's design is to pique to poke in textural caverns and inlets of accidental harmonics. They achieve this, "Vrashyn I" exemplifying the warmth and spacious movements of their reverberant Satie dissolution – a fine exhibit of well-treated piano." - alan lockett for furthernoise.org
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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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Dreaming about this one, not listening. On order...


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Boomkat:

*Lawrence English's epic masterpiece - finally available on vinyl for the first time. Strictly limited edition - Initial copies come on white vinyl* One of the most memorable and absorbing albums released by the wonderful Touch label in recent years, "Kiri No Oto" was first released by them on CD in 2008 and has spent much of the intervening time lodged in our minds as one of the finer drone/field recording albums to have been made this century. Kiri No Oto (a Japanese phrase meaning 'sound of fog') takes both instrumental and found sounds cultivated from English's travels around Poland, New Zealand, Australia and Japan and submits them to filtering, harmonic distortion and other processes that would shroud or otherwise obscure the original signals. Consequently, the record sets out to study a kind of auditory fog, and the richness of sound that comes about from this misting achieves the most compelling results when there's an essential quietness to the central sound mass itself: 'Figure's Lone Static' serves as a good example of this, placing emphasis on the auditory details of the blur itself rather than the sound that gave birth to it, and it's the peripheral elements and side-effects that are the real subject matter of this album. Over the span of Kiri No Oto you'll encounter the towering, borderline fuzz of 'Organs Lost At Sea', the Popul Vuh-like tones of 'Allay', but also gentler moments, as on the pure vapour of 'Soft Fuse', or the dazzling, overloaded shimmer effervesced from 'Waves Sheer Light'. Although this might initially seem entirely disconnected from the miniaturised sound world of earlier triumphs in the Lawrence English discography, these sound studies are no less detailed, no less experimental, and no less beguiling. A huge recommendation.
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cybot
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Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?

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Can't stop listening to this Lp! It's beautiful in an 'end of the world' kind of way...


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