Listen to the album at Miasmah

Late last  year a friend rang up in the middle of the night (well that’s what it seemed like) and played some music down the phone and asked me “who the hell is this”.

The answer turned out to be Rafael Anton Irisarri’s album “Daydreaming“. I hadn’t heard of him then (that took an hour or two’s research) but I have listened to him a hell of a lot since then.

“Daydreaming” is a mix of piano, electronics and some of the most gorgeous production you are likly to hear for a while. This is one of those works that just go straight for the emotional jugular and will have you transfixed.

OK I can hear you out there going “Piano, electonic, production – been there. What else you got?”

Well as it turns out around seven beautifully executed ideas. Don’t believe me?  Just Click on player just below and see what you think. We’ll wait

This album is all about the piano, all the other stuff surrounding it provide a context for the piano’s notes. In places murky and in others the acoustic palletes used are so stark and stripped back, you will wonder how Rafael is able to eke out such a deep emotional response.

I remember the first time I heard George Winston playing piano on a Windham Hill recording a long, long time ago. The music he created stayed with me, here is another artist and album that will do the same.

Highly Recommended

[UPDATE]
There is some new material over at Soundcloud soundcloud.com/studio-irisarri

Listen to the album at Bandcamp

It’s Saturday night and I have been listening to Crux, Emmalee Crane’s debut album. It seems to inhabit the same sort of place that Rafael Anton Irassari is occupying.  A curious mix of textural washes, real instruments, circuit bent electronics, found sounds and a ton of imagination. It is helping me lose my birthday blues. Or at least move them to a better place,

Emmalee calls her music “drone” but she is kidding herself. There is wonderful melody, clever arrangement and more than a passing nod to analog electronic music pioneers.

Here is the hype from her website

Like most children, Emmalee’s first experience of making music was with a plastic recorder and a number of other ill-advised toy whistles and trumpets. It was from here that she followed a not unpredictable but quite successful progression to the oboe, clarinet, and English and French horns. She studied (and is a great lover of) Romantic and Modern classical music, with a particular fondness for Debussy.

Perhaps the most important twist in this so far dull history involves Emmalee’s other fascination: electronics. Being adept at dismantling all manner of gadgets from an early age, she naturally developed a secondary musical affinity for analog synthesizers and other voltage-driven trinkets of noise making. She is now equally at home with a soldering iron as a woodwind, and is a great believer in circuit-bending*. Today, Emmalee blends woodwinds, horns and analog synthesizers with found sounds and bent circuits to create ambient, orchestral drone music reminiscent of Mark Hollis and Stars Of The Lid. Emmalee Crane was born in Toronto in 1983. She now lives in San Francisco with an unruly collection of instruments and her dog, Bash.

* as long as you don’t mention the time she totally wrecked a Juno 106

I have a soft spot for music like this (big suprise there) and look forward to hearing more from Emmalee (I believe her new one is due shortly). Highly recommended – have a listen here

For more information visit her at www.emmaleecrane.com/ or her Bandcamp site music.emmaleecrane.com/

(gotta love bandcamp)

[UPDATE]

Tim Hecker

Tim Hecker is an electronic/ambient artist based in Montreal, Canada. He mad a name for himself as Jetone creating techno/dance music, but his ambient works have garnered him a heap more interest.

His music has been described as “structured ambient,” and “cathedral electronic music” (I like that one), his soundscapes dance along the line that separates noise and melody and he creates complex, truly beautiful and thought-provoking songs.

So lets chat a bit about his album “An Imaginary Country“, the best way to approach this is possibly imagine Tim as a tour guide through a aural landscape. Each of the tracks is a different region and he is pointing out some of the interesting possibilities that are available.

“Borderlands”  sounds like a huge cathedral like space, populated with shimmering , piano-like synths and  samples of organic noise that just wander around. The sounds are so wonderfully rendered that you cant see how it was done, the illusion is just perfect. The combination of fantasy and natural sounds make this a really enjoyable experience.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, but it has been definitely entertaining me.

Recommended

Websites at  sunblind.net/ and www.myspace.com/rainbowbloodx

Lindsay Buckland

I first ran into Lindsay Buckland years ago when he was busking here in Melbourne, his music would stop me cold every time and more than once I was late for a meeting or would miss the tram because of him.

Lindsay plays dulcimer and we aren’t talking simple folk accompaniments here (altough I am sure he can do them brilliantly. No siree, we are talking electric, amplified, signal processed, digitally looped and spat out dulcimer. And it’s brilliant.

Here is some hype from his site…

Lindsay Buckland is internationally renown for his legendary street performances around the globe. Undisputed as the worlds foremost electric dulcimer player, Lindsay has successfully crafted a unique original melodic sound emanating from a simple folk instrument, the Appalachian dulcimer.

Merged with the latest electronics he has been at the forefront of contemporary world music & composition over the past decade.

His multi-cultural audiences and mass appeal, to such a diverse age group are testament to the popularity of his infectious style of music. As a result his CD’s have sold in numbers previously unheard of for a totally independent recording artist.

Now that’s all very cool and to hear what he can do head over to www.myspace.com/lindsaybuckland and have a listen to his studio work and then have a look at this video of one of his street performances from YouTube.

I love his music and always seem to have a few of his tracks on the MP3 player. One of my faves is of one of his older albums, “Eclipse Of Common Sense”. Have a listen to “Trans Amazonian Highway

I haven’t seen him in Melbourne for a while but it would seem he is playing all over the world now (our loss – their gain).  If you should see him busking, make sure you stop and have a listen. You won’t regret it.

Highly Recommended

Websites at www.myspace.com/lindsaybuckland and www.lindsaybuckland.com

Aborea

Now I know most of you saw the word banjo, freaked out and were loath to continue BUT you really should head over to www.myspace.com/arborea2 and have a listen to them. This isn’t a the folk/bluegrass act but a clever blend of old time music and new ambient improvisations.

Here is a review from “Dirty Linen”

Combining the common emotional thread running through ancient British murder ballads and the more evocative music found deep in the Appalachian Mountains, Maine folk duo Arborea creates timeless music, haunted by deep shadows. Named after a species of trees, Arborea comprises Buck Curran on acoustic, slide, and electric guitars, flutes, banjo, and vocals, along with Shanti Curran, who sings lead and plays banjo, percussion, guitar, bowed strings, and ukulele. Their songs are bathed in shimmering harmonics, spectral slide, and positively spooky banjo. The songs also evoke a kind of mysterious quality, in which you are never quite sure what the songs are about, but they seem to touch a place in your soul that instinctively understands.

So with the acoustic instruments of backwoods Americana, songs written in the style of English murder ballads and tons of improvisations all anchored by Shanti Curran’s hypnotic voice and surrounded by a truly spacious ambience.

I truly love this band and it’s Highly Recommended

Website at www.myspace.com/arborea2

Low Pressure Productions

So back when I was a lot younger , I used to go and watch movies about  surfing.  There was something about the visuals, the music and the whole “pushing the envelope” attitude the surfers I had thaat was seriously attractive.  This was also back in the days when you could smoke in theatres.

I should add I didn’t surf. I played at windsurfing a lifetime back and that was very cool, I even treid surfing… I am even more in awe of these people now.

Today’s post sort of takes me back to that period with some really interesting music.

I will just rip of the stuff from the website.

Low Pressure Productions

The next release for Low Pressure Productions is the sound track to Life Like Liquid, a film by Dave Rastovich. Available now at Switch-foot.com

Life Like Liquid” is an exploration into the creative realms of surfing, sound and fluidity. This is what happened when a group of sonic surfers came together with no other intention than to ride sound waves, ocean waves and record the thrill of the ride. The plan was to have no plan at all. To allow intuition, chance and circumstance be our compass within every moment. The improvisational aspect shared by these two art forms is the escence of the Life Like Liquid experience.

The soundtrack was played and recorded in a beach house that was converted into a makeshift studio right on the dunes with views over the best waves in the region. The crew that were present just jammed, surfed, ate and slept every day for a two wk period. Heaven.

Life Like Liquid Trailer

Recommended.

There is a website at www.myspace.com/lowpressureproductions

Deus

Head over to www.myspace.com/deusking and have a listen to “Game Over” (this is from a more recent album). An even better idea would be to head to Jamendo and check out the whole of the “There’s Nothing Impossible” album, this has been around on my player for ages now.

The sounds and textures are well chosen and rhythmically the music is an absolute joy to listen to. Most of the pieces are hypnotically relaxing, if you wanted an analog, I find that these tracks remind me a bit of Enigma (and vice versa).

Highly Recommended

Website at www.myspace.com/deusking and Jamendo

They have a really interesting take on minimal, wonderfully under produced songs, Ramona Bopper is a wonderful example, dripping in reverb and ambience. It wafts along like feather on a breeze. This is from their 2005 album “Dogs”

The band was originally a bedroom recording project of Joshua Barton, self-releasing cassettes starting in 1999. From 2000-2002, Fields of Industry performed throughout Michigan as a full band, while Barton recorded the band’s first self-titled full length. In 2003, Eric Gallippo, of Man At Arms and Joel Schrauben, of Bear Mountain Picnic , became steady members of the band. Barton and Gallippo recorded and self-released the 3-song EP, Dogs in 2005.

And then for something different, over at NPR’s Second Stage there is a podcast of “Point of Contention”.  An ambitious piece of work about “Life, The Universe and Everything”. It grows on you. This is off their current album “Two Dogs, A Television”.

Here is the video for “Point of Contention”…

Not for everyone, but for the brave ones amongst you – Highly Recommended

Websites at www.fieldsofindustry.com/ and www.myspace.com/fieldsofindustry

I have been listening to “Lullaby” by _Ghost for a few weeks now and find my self coming back to it. It really only has the one idea but it’s not bad one. Everything in this piece revolves around the voice and it’s ethereal treatment. The chime tones are pretty and the washes in the background are captivating.

_ghost has a slim biography, read non existent.  OK, he’s from Poland and “Lullaby” was used for the game Crayon Physics Deluxe. His songs can be found and downloaded at ccMixter or his MySpace profile. Not really a lot , is it.

What’s ccmixter, I hear you ask? Here’s a bit about them…

ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want. Remixers If you’re into sampling, remixing and mash-ups grab the sample packs and a cappellas for download and you can upload your version back into ccMixter, for others to enjoy and re-sample. All legal.

Head over and have a listen, despite “Lullaby’s” title, it’s a chaotic piece, rough in places, way to busy in other and you know what? I don’t care, nor it seems do a lot of other people.

Recommended

Websites at www.myspace.com/ghostrust and ccmixter.org/media/files/_ghost/3631

This is certainly trippy, quite a road trip through a disparate sonic landscape.  A wonderful combination of synths, electronic drums and some yummy industrial metal textures, and then there is the torrent of guitar sounds that just dump on you near the end, absolutely glorious.

The rest of the album is just as interesting and varied. There are psuedo soundtrack bits that remind me of some of the things that “The Morrighan” are doing.