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Neil Young and Daniel Lanois - what's not to like? Hopefully it will be one to savour. No band, just Neil and Daniel doing what they do.

JAW wrote:

Neil Young and Daniel Lanois - what's not to like? Hopefully it will be one to savour. No band, just Neil and Daniel doing what they do.

Had this in my hand earlier today in HMV! Let me know what it's like as I have a feeling it'll be similar to the Deadman Soundtrack but with vocals.... BTW why do I keep seeing Angus Young when I look at the sleeve :-)

Wow! Are you psychic? My first impression was that it was similiar to Mirror Ball, but as it progressed Dead Man came more and more to mind. A lot of space around the notes and the key word would be atmosphere. Not an album for everyday, but some standouts none the less. On the first first listen these were were Love and War and the autobiographical The Hitchiker. Slightly lacking the wow factor of Lanois work with Emmylou Harris on Wrecking Ball, but has strengths in other areas. Will definitely get rotation for a while. Anything where Neil whacks the amp to 11 and kicks in the distortion gets me going! :-)))

Just came across this interview from the Chicago Tribune on the interweb

Neil Young set out to make a solo acoustic album when he called up his friend Daniel Lanois to do some recording earlier this year at the producer’s home studio, an early 20th Century mansion overlooking Silver Lake in California.
When they finished, they came up with something beyond what either of them could have imagined. Young reaches for a new genre classification to describe the album, “Le Noise” (Reprise), due out Sept. 28.

“It’s folk-metal,” he says with a laugh. “We got this sound on the guitar that was very exciting to us. There’s the singularity of a folk performance on the guitar, but with a heavy-metal civilization of sound around it.”

If “Le Noise” has any antecedent in the Young catalog, it’s the electric guitar experiments he brought to “Arc,” the instrumental companion to his 1991 “Weld” live album.

“That was just a bunch of noise we were having fun with,” Young says. “This is about songs built on riffs. Dan loved those riffs, and they gave him something to hang the sound on.”

Lanois, who has worked with artists ranging from U2 and Bob Dylan to Willie Nelson and Peter Gabriel, had never recorded with Young before. He had been working on new approaches to shaping sound in the studio for several years with engineer Mark Howard when Young called. The singer was inspired by the way Lanois was simultaneously recording and video-taping performances in his home studio, creating a distinctive look and sound that straddled cutting-edge technology and organic, performance-based music.

Indeed, the video accompanying the “Le Noise” album is stunning – a shadowplay of stark black-and-white images that documents the live recording and enhances it with evocative lighting.

But the core of the album is its extraordinary sound: a wide-screen intimacy conjured by just a voice and a guitar. Lanois had a surprise waiting for Young when he walked into his studio for the first time. The producer handed the singer a tricked-out acoustic guitar that made it sound like a small orchestra: a beefed-up bass response on the lower two strings, a pickup that re-creates the sound of the human voice and allows it to loop and echo through the song, and a tremolo amplifier.

“You get four dimensions of sound out of one acoustic guitar, and I thought it might inspire him to play a certain way,” Lanois says. “We got the clarity of the guitar with a rich, beautiful bottom, a great subsonic sound with no mumbo-jumbo. It started with that sound on that guitar and we recorded two songs. Then, at the end of the first session, we went electric on the song ‘Hitchhiker.’ That’s when things really started getting interesting.”

The hollow-body electric guitar was channeled through two amplifiers, one clean-sounding and the other for tremolo effect. Lanois saw even greater potential: “We covered both ends of the sound spectrum with the guitar. It’s got this cutting, razor-drill sound and this beautiful bass tone with sweet melody on the other end.”

Young, not prone to hyperbole in interviews, was blown away by the guitar sounds Lanois was able to capture: “It sounded like God.”

The songwriter brought several songs into the session and then wrote a few more in between visits to Lanois’ house, each recording session taking place under a full moon.

“Neil has said he does good work when there’s a full moon,” Lanois says, “so who am I to argue?”

Whether it was the guitars, the setting or the alignment of the planets, “Le Noise” is one of Young’s finest recordings. Its merger of violence and plaintiveness provides a striking backdrop for the singer’s meditations on themes that have obsessed him for decades: on making love last past the first rush of romance, the corruption of the planet, his own search for redemption and clarity. On “Hitchhiker,” he chronicles his life as a string of abusive episodes with drugs, and winds up grateful that he’s still standing with a partner who loves him.

Mortality drapes itself over the songs. In the last nine months, two of Young’s closest collaborators died: filmmaker Larry “L.A.” Johnson and multi-instrumentalist and producer Ben Keith.

Keith’s death leaves a hole in Young’s touring band that the singer believes he can never fill.

“There is about 70 percent of my repertoire that I will never do again (with a band),” Young says. “There is no sense in trying to redo what was already great. There’s no payoff in that. That’s not what I’m about. I’m thankful to have known Ben and played with him for 40 years. He was one of my best friends and I miss him very much. I don’t see myself playing those songs with a band in the future. I can play them by myself, but I can’t play them with a band. I just don’t think I could handle it. I don’t know anybody who can do what he did. It closes a door on a period of my life, and it also opens up a giant space for me to be creative in the future.”

“Le Noise” is in many ways the first step into that future, an album unlike any the 64-year-old artist has ever made.

“It started out as this simple, acoustic record,” Lanois said, “and it became this other thing, a fabulous body of work.”

Johnny, thank you so much for all that!! I really enjoyed it and it sounds like the album I've been waiting for Neil to make since whenever :-) Say a prayer it's coming out on vinyl....

cybot wrote:Johnny, thank you so much for all that!! I really enjoyed it and it sounds like the album I've been waiting for Neil to make since whenever :-) Say a prayer it's coming out on vinyl....

This from Rolling Stone (got to be true so!).

Neil Young has announced on Facebook that his new album will be called Le Noise, and that it will be released on CD, vinyl and iTunes on September 28th. In late November it will then become available on Blu-Ray, and in the form of an iPhone and iPad app. "The app will be free," Young wrote. "It gives you an interactive album cover. Forgive my use of the word 'album.' I am old school. When you buy the songs/movies from I-tunes they show up in your APP."

JAW wrote:

cybot wrote:Johnny, thank you so much for all that!! I really enjoyed it and it sounds like the album I've been waiting for Neil to make since whenever :-) Say a prayer it's coming out on vinyl....

This from Rolling Stone (got to be true so!).

Neil Young has announced on Facebook that his new album will be called Le Noise, and that it will be released on CD, vinyl and iTunes on September 28th. In late November it will then become available on Blu-Ray, and in the form of an iPhone and iPad app. "The app will be free," Young wrote. "It gives you an interactive album cover. Forgive my use of the word 'album.' I am old school. When you buy the songs/movies from I-tunes they show up in your APP."

Thanks for the info Johnny :-)

Mojo are streaming the new Neil Young album

When I heard it was solo I thought it was going to be acoustic , how wrong I was!!

Sounds great though....

http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2010/09/ ... e_moj.html

djadams wrote:Mojo are streaming the new Neil Young album

When I heard it was solo I thought it was going to be acoustic , how wrong I was!!

Sounds great though....

http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2010/09/ ... e_moj.html

Thanks for the link dj :)

Arrived today from America :-)



Peter Kolovos - New Bodies


"Peter Kolovos, guitarist in Los Angeles trio Open City, presents here three tracks of electric guitar improvisations. Each features successively recorded left- and right-channel guitars, in which the overdub responds asynchronously to the original. While Open City explored the electroacoustic interplay afforded by the two-guitar and drums line-up, in New Bodies, his first solo release, Kolovos lets rip with all the skronk and blurt he's been holding in for the last decade, in tiny, tightly gated segments.

His sound vocabulary is very broad, and his control of texture and timing is masterful. Using equalisation, reverb, envelope shaping and volume control... He rapidly opens and closes the volume window on a dizzying series of extended guitar techniques, creating the inescapable impression of Derek Bailey covering The Residents' Duck Stab. If that won't sell records, I don't know what will.

This electrifying effect is enhanced by the crisp digital recording and the superb Dubplates and Mastering pressing job - every clang and buzz is right up in your grill. Released on Kolovos's own imprint, the packaging continues the good work. The cover features a magnificent photograph of the guitarist taken by Joyce Campbell using the mid-19th century tin type process, which requires a sitting of over three minutes. The resulting image is as physically 'time based' as the recording it encloses, and has the distinctive look of a Victorian death mask - no 'posing' or even facial expression is possible. In this regard the cover is an exact metaphor of the recording - what you perceive is exactly what you get."