Tír Na HiFi

Ivor wrote:This is all a bit "samey" but brilliant.

Great album, and bonus track.
As great as Manafon - same but different !

On the tt,



Ist album - 2001



"...this ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin' around..." Talking Heads, from Fear Of Music
This ain't no fooling around, indeed! Infraction Records' second disk is the debut of Andrew Liles, an Englishman who has brought back notice of another world to our ears, an un world. Thin and wispy, disturbing and dissonant, the music Liles has recorded sketches out a multitude of unearthly visions, all heavily processed, eerie and electronic but avoiding all clichés to date. This is original, surprising music and is not the least bit derivative, at least to my ears. The disk starts with a jarring intro that could easily come from the soundtrack of an ax murder with you as the surprised guest. Surprise! Then, the music skates between lush analog and harsh digital confetti to find a home on the borderland of smooth and fractured sounds. Two note loops provide the sole backdrop on several cuts while electronic voices and samples pop up elsewhere, including either harshly processed rain or frying, I can't tell which. Voices speak and we feel their urgency but we can't understand them. Noises, tones and voices come and go. The main operative word, my primary reaction, is summed up by the word "eerie" with enough "disturbing" added to the mix which keeps this well away from the term "new age". No, this is mature, adult music so put the kiddies to bed. And this is not sleepy music, this demands attention on almost every other cut but rewards attention on all of them. This is the sort of disk you might not "like" right away but find yourself playing again and again. Liles has brewed some primordial stuff here that some will need badly in this mediocre age. I don't recommend headphones on your first listen but I do recommend a listen. Liles has said a lot here with, I understand, more to come. Just be careful with that ax, Andrew.

Even the tt feels weird with this spinning on it's axis ;-)






  
A review of sorts by Alasdair Swanson:

Simply astounding -- every "theme" produced by a hand-crafted circuit in the days before electronic music *was* music yet it still feels alive and breathing. An incredibly powerful sense of place and time, one of the most genuinely alien scores ever produced, synthetic yet organic.

One of the Barrons was told by a listener that their music was "what their dreams sound like".

On the spinner and still sounding great! Completely instrumental set.



Bill Nelson - Close Encounters in the Garden of Lights - Double vinyl...

More arcana from the garden of delights :-) For laters....



4 Lp box set I bought from Gerry in Comet back in the day....1984 to be precise!

Who needs Harry Potter when I can listen to this!



Double Lp

Notes for Dr. Caligari:

In 1919, German film director Robert Weine made what was to become one of the classics of the silent cinema, 'The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari'. Using stark, expressionistic sets and highly stylised acting techniques, Weine created a nightmare world with insanity and murder at its core.
The two central characters in the story are the evil Doctor Caligari and Cesare the Sonambulist, a zombie-like creature who (from within the confines of Doctor Caligari's Cabinet) is exhibited as a bizarre fairground attraction by day, but by night, becomes an instrument of murder orchestrated by Caligari's demonic powers.
To quote Lotte Eisner from her book 'The Haunted Screen': "The characters of Caligari and Cesare conform to expressionist conception; The Sonambulist, detached from his everyday ambience, deprived of all individuality, an abstract creature, kills without motive or logic. And his master, the mysterious Dr. Caligari, who lacks the merest shadow of human scruple, acts with the criminal insensibility and defiance of conventional morality which the expressionists exalted" (with kind permission of Martin Secker & Warburg, Publishers).
Some sixty-two years later, early in 1981, I was approached by the Yorkshire Actors Company, to provide a musicial score for a modern adaptation of the Caligari story. The company's director, Andy Winters, wanted to preserve the stylised, expressionistic gestures of the film whilst introducing elements of mime and even dance. The production would rely heavily on the performers acting techniques as very few stage settings or effects were to be employed. Although this was not the first play I had been involved in musically (I provided an electronic score for a production of Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" in 1966), I found the whole idea extremely challenging and set to work taking notes and timings during the play's early rehearsals.
The story starts and ends in an asylum presided over by Dr. Caligari. The action in between involves, amongst other things, a fairground, a caravan, a prison and the crooked streets and rooftops of a small medieval town known as Holstenwall.
The music was recorded on the same domestic four track machine I had previously used to create the 'Sounding The Ritual Echo' album and as the music had to be delivered to the Yorkshire Actors Company in time for them to complete their final rehearsals, a high degree of self discipline was in order. After several days intense work and a certain amount of last minute editing the 'Soundtrack' was complete.
The Yorkshire Actors Company have since taken the production all over England and have played a residency at the Edinburgh festival. For those who have seen and enjoyed 'The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari' this record is a souvenir. For those who haven't I hope that the music will convey some of the strange beauty and corrupt power of the story. Bill Nelson 1981

On the tt...



Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol. 2

All samples Xerroxed by Carston Nicolai...
Samples from Stephen O'Malley,Michael Nyman,Ryuichi Sakamoto, Continental Airline Malfunctioning Inflight Program, Metaphysical Function 1 & 2.....


Some words:
Carsten Nicolai once again shuns the pinpoint precision for which he's become renowned, turning to a more abstract yet harmony-driven working methodology. As with the first Xerrox album, the starting point is a set of samples culled from external sources; this time around, snippets and recordings of SunnO))) dronesmith Stephen O'Malley and composer Michael Nyman feature, as does an excerpt from the 2004 Insen tour with Ryuichi Sakamoto. All these elements melt together beautifully under a unified banner of widescreen, washed-out digital ambiences, molten electronics and in the case of pieces like the outstanding 'Monophaser 1', an ambitiously symphonic scale. If the main thread of Alva Noto's music (as exemplified by last year's Unitxt) inhabits the domain of all things 'micro', the Xerrox albums surely represent a bold venture into the realm of 'macro', making grand yet utterly intimate gestures that would find a kindred spirit in the stately neo-classical drones of Fennesz's Black Sea or Deaf Center's 'Pale Ravine'. While floods of strings and sustained electrical signals compound the amorphous feel of the album, tracks like 'Teion Acat 1' draw attention to familiarly process-heavy, more rhythmically organised elements - the music in this instance embraces a fissure-ridden post-dub feel that recalls Pole's first three albums. Elsewhere, 'Sora' sounds like a mournful orchestra being pumped into some fatally broken digital mixer, while 'Meta Phaser' flirts with a sound that might best be accounted for by imagining a KTL album filtered through a bad telephone connection. While Noto's oeuvre is predominantly associated with pristine and prodigiously precise sound designs, Xerrox is governed by a more chaotic, emotional sensibility, and this second volume feels like an even greater step away from the comforting orderliness of prior successes, opening up exciting new avenues paved with noise, melody and a big pulsing heart.

On the tt,











"Piano Piano" is a very soft, quiet album – meandering fantasies and improvisations on the grand piano. Dreamlike and stylistically self-assured. Roedelius assumes the role of a fairytale character with his piano music, transported to a strange, fantastical landscape where, filled with awe and amazement, he tries to get his bearings. What he sees, feels and senses here is not always of this world.

fergus wrote:

The forgotten Vangelis album....it's not half bad either!