Electronica - what are you listening to?
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
Love my own Lp cover but the one above is even better. Classic, timeless music especialy the three extremely slow variations of Pachelbel's Canon over on side two....jadarin wrote:
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
On vinyl...Two more modern classics. Adrian, you might like these too :)
Deaf Center - Pale Ravine
Deaf Center - Pale Ravine
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
My first Mark Van Hoen Lp (three sided) in almost 30 years! Arrived earlier today....
Revenant Diary
Revenant : a person who returns as a spirit after death. A ghost.
Sometimes, at night, I sense something, and then I don’t. I don’t know what exists in the dark, although I’m sure something does. A revenant, undoubtedly. A returner from the dark: just as Proust’s narrator finds his childhood through a madeleine dipped in tea or as Sebald’s Austerlitz finds his orphanhood in an abandoned room in an English railway station, a life already lived comes back unexpectedly. What more is a ghost, anyway, than the intimate realization of the past interrupting the present?
The Revenant Diary is Mark Van Hoen’s ghost story. “[The] record was already mostly done before I found out,” he said in a recent interview. The voices were added later. It is now well known that his adoption had been covered up and discovered accidentally during his emigration to the United States. But while his last album, Where Is The Truth, was an explicit attempt at processing what had been discovered, The Revenant Diary, composed in the darkness of unknowing, sounds more like a question weighed down in the unconscious, a sense, something before the words that speak articulate pain — buried deeply. It’s unsurprising, then, that from material already composed in the dark, he adds a voice. First, in “Look Into My Eyes,” a broken, unintelligible voice that drifts from right-to-left through the channels of a headphone. Second, in “Don’t Look Back,” the titular words repeated through the slow walk of the beat: “don’t look back, don’t look back (back).”
In the same interview, Van Hoen says, “I am a firm believer that your musical taste and identity is formed […] in your teenage years. The rest of my musical life will be spent trying to gain the expertise to communicate what’s in my head, or to get closer to the source, as it were.” In 1982, he recorded a song that, when happened upon nearly three decades later, would provide the aesthetic foundation for The Revenant Diary. Composed and recorded and produced, minimally, as though in a memory of his earliest recordings, as a teenager, he put together the album. There is an initial simplicity to the album that morphs, gracefully, into an understatement. The album is expressing a melancholy without sentimentality or histrionics, and a nostalgia without foundation in a gimmicky appropriation of cultural artifacts. The aural texture is a woven assemblage of ambient synth patterns, warm basses, cold arpeggios, and certain Kraut-psych sensibilities into a modest, but rich electronic music. It might be “teenage” in its orientation, but it is an adult album in its serious and mature rumination — and affirmation.
Throughout the final track, the voice sings out, over and over again over nine minutes of spectral praise, “holy me!” One voice becomes two, and then becomes three, and more, while a muddled organ plays sporadically. No narcissistic anthem, this is the subtle hymn of a displaced man, questioning in the dark, declaring himself, orphaned, teenage, all of it, in a singular, mature, and maturing whole. It’s as clear of a statement I can think of about what a good album he’s made.
Revenant Diary
Revenant : a person who returns as a spirit after death. A ghost.
Sometimes, at night, I sense something, and then I don’t. I don’t know what exists in the dark, although I’m sure something does. A revenant, undoubtedly. A returner from the dark: just as Proust’s narrator finds his childhood through a madeleine dipped in tea or as Sebald’s Austerlitz finds his orphanhood in an abandoned room in an English railway station, a life already lived comes back unexpectedly. What more is a ghost, anyway, than the intimate realization of the past interrupting the present?
The Revenant Diary is Mark Van Hoen’s ghost story. “[The] record was already mostly done before I found out,” he said in a recent interview. The voices were added later. It is now well known that his adoption had been covered up and discovered accidentally during his emigration to the United States. But while his last album, Where Is The Truth, was an explicit attempt at processing what had been discovered, The Revenant Diary, composed in the darkness of unknowing, sounds more like a question weighed down in the unconscious, a sense, something before the words that speak articulate pain — buried deeply. It’s unsurprising, then, that from material already composed in the dark, he adds a voice. First, in “Look Into My Eyes,” a broken, unintelligible voice that drifts from right-to-left through the channels of a headphone. Second, in “Don’t Look Back,” the titular words repeated through the slow walk of the beat: “don’t look back, don’t look back (back).”
In the same interview, Van Hoen says, “I am a firm believer that your musical taste and identity is formed […] in your teenage years. The rest of my musical life will be spent trying to gain the expertise to communicate what’s in my head, or to get closer to the source, as it were.” In 1982, he recorded a song that, when happened upon nearly three decades later, would provide the aesthetic foundation for The Revenant Diary. Composed and recorded and produced, minimally, as though in a memory of his earliest recordings, as a teenager, he put together the album. There is an initial simplicity to the album that morphs, gracefully, into an understatement. The album is expressing a melancholy without sentimentality or histrionics, and a nostalgia without foundation in a gimmicky appropriation of cultural artifacts. The aural texture is a woven assemblage of ambient synth patterns, warm basses, cold arpeggios, and certain Kraut-psych sensibilities into a modest, but rich electronic music. It might be “teenage” in its orientation, but it is an adult album in its serious and mature rumination — and affirmation.
Throughout the final track, the voice sings out, over and over again over nine minutes of spectral praise, “holy me!” One voice becomes two, and then becomes three, and more, while a muddled organ plays sporadically. No narcissistic anthem, this is the subtle hymn of a displaced man, questioning in the dark, declaring himself, orphaned, teenage, all of it, in a singular, mature, and maturing whole. It’s as clear of a statement I can think of about what a good album he’s made.
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
Excuse the ignorance Dermot but what is a three sided LP as opposed to a triple LP???cybot wrote:My first Mark Van Hoen Lp (three sided) in almost 30 years! Arrived earlier today....
Revenant Diary
To be is to do: Socrates
To do is to be: Sartre
Do be do be do: Sinatra
To do is to be: Sartre
Do be do be do: Sinatra
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
It's a double Lp that only plays on three sides instead of four. Usually the fourth side is either blank or has an etching on it....fergus wrote:Excuse the ignorance Dermot but what is a three sided LP as opposed to a triple LP???cybot wrote:My first Mark Van Hoen Lp (three sided) in almost 30 years! Arrived earlier today....
Revenant Diary
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
I am obliged to you Dermot and that is what I thought was the case but it seems like such a waste to me. Surely they could issue some bonus music on the vinyl editions as an added attraction to the medium?!cybot wrote:It's a double Lp that only plays on three sides instead of four. Usually the fourth side is either blank or has an etching on it....fergus wrote:
Excuse the ignorance Dermot but what is a three sided LP as opposed to a triple LP???
To be is to do: Socrates
To do is to be: Sartre
Do be do be do: Sinatra
To do is to be: Sartre
Do be do be do: Sinatra
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
Nice album Dermot..Timeless is the word for it..cybot wrote:Love my own Lp cover but the one above is even better. Classic, timeless music especialy the three extremely slow variations of Pachelbel's Canon over on side two....jadarin wrote:
Re: Electronica - what are you listening to?
Thanks for the recommendations Dermot, I will be checking those out in due course..
Now for one which is definitely one of the heavier albums I have bought, way out left!!
Blue Daisy... The Sunday Gift..
Excerpt from boomkat.com..
**Double LP plus the full album included on CD for good measure** Impressive debut album from Blue Daisy, sidestepping post-dubstep, post-FlyLo trip-hop cliche and fashioning his own distinct sound, one that's surprisingly full of harsh textures and hard angles. There are some lovely moments on here; we're instantly drawn to 'Spinning Channels', featuring amorphous vocals from Anneka, which begins in synthetic drift-psychedelia mode before organising itself into a nicely nocturnal, dubbed, boogie-house groove. Heidi Vogel's vocals are also treated and cut up to the point of abstraction, a wail of humanity echoing through the cavernous reverb of 'Fallin'. The Stac-sung 'Only For You' is the only outwardly pop number, and even that's weighed down by a palpable veil of melancholy. It's really refreshing to hear a contemporary debut from the beat-head sphere that's unafraid to wallow in emotional ambiguity and, at times, out-and-out darkness. Engrossing stuff, and definitely worth checking.
The Radiance track was definitely one to be used when on the threadmill in the gym!!
Now for one which is definitely one of the heavier albums I have bought, way out left!!
Blue Daisy... The Sunday Gift..
Excerpt from boomkat.com..
**Double LP plus the full album included on CD for good measure** Impressive debut album from Blue Daisy, sidestepping post-dubstep, post-FlyLo trip-hop cliche and fashioning his own distinct sound, one that's surprisingly full of harsh textures and hard angles. There are some lovely moments on here; we're instantly drawn to 'Spinning Channels', featuring amorphous vocals from Anneka, which begins in synthetic drift-psychedelia mode before organising itself into a nicely nocturnal, dubbed, boogie-house groove. Heidi Vogel's vocals are also treated and cut up to the point of abstraction, a wail of humanity echoing through the cavernous reverb of 'Fallin'. The Stac-sung 'Only For You' is the only outwardly pop number, and even that's weighed down by a palpable veil of melancholy. It's really refreshing to hear a contemporary debut from the beat-head sphere that's unafraid to wallow in emotional ambiguity and, at times, out-and-out darkness. Engrossing stuff, and definitely worth checking.
The Radiance track was definitely one to be used when on the threadmill in the gym!!
Let the Good Times Roll...................