I was just listening to a podcast where the hosts were debating what type of music they needed during this crisis. One wanted peppy, upbeat songs to lift them from their funk. The other wanted downcast, inward-looking songs to match their current mood. No wrong answers. If you want something blissful and ambient to relax to, Amelia Devoid’s got you covered. Continue reading »
Kane Sweeney’s last single addressed ancient mythology, and his follow-up stays in that old world, this time riffing on the Roman Empire. His thundering wail of a voice suits the subject, as does his “doom-folk” genre styling. If Game of Thrones were still going, he would have fit right in with the wildlings north of The Wall. Continue reading »
I’m going to try to write something longer about Allison Fay Brown’s marvelous new EP later this week, so I’ll just leave the lead track here as a teaser. Like a good short-story writer, Brown offers just enough narrative details to intrigue while leaving plenty of gaps to fill in yourself. For instance…what’s in that box on the doorstep?? Continue reading »
If you’re a churchgoer, your first association with the organ might be someone guiding tone-deaf congregants through “How Great Thou Art.” If you’re a soul-music fan, you probably jump to Booker T. backing the Stax greats. Either way, I can almost guarantee you won’t predict the organ sounds that composer Henry Birdsey produces on new album CONCERTINA – WIRE.
Rather than channeling gospel or soul, Birdsey’s organ playing is ambient music at its ambient-ist. Brian Eno’s Music for Airports sounds like dance music compared to this. If you’ve ever seen that video of Justin Bieber slowed down 800%, it sounds kind of like that.
I mean all of that as a compliment, by the way. Birdsey’s beautiful, haunting, molasses-moves-fast-compared-to-this album echoes artists like Tim Hecker or Julianna Barwick. Ambient music often gets derided as “boring” and, sure, there aren’t lyrics or melodies you could sing along with here. But it takes you on a journey nevertheless. Continue reading »
Artist residencies have been around for decades. A musician or painter or filmmaker will set up shop in a new place for a limited period of time. Most of those places, understandably, tend to be on land.
The Vermont pianist and composer Ben Cosgrove has never taken obvious paths though, and last fall he did his work sailing from Vietnam to Australia on the massive research vessel Falkor. While onboard, he wrote and recorded songs inspired by his aquatic surroundings, some of which appear on his new record Salt. “It was my first time at sea, and I was deeply fascinated by the way one has to orient oneself in a place like that,” he says now. “I’d never been anywhere that simultaneously felt so still and so in motion.” Continue reading »
Many musicians aspire to blend the old and the new, but few do so as dramatically as Alexander Vitzthum. What he considers the “old” on his upcoming album is not ’60s soul or ’50s beach-pop. He went centuries further back, to the monks’ vocal tradition of Gregorian Chant. And for the “new” side of the equation, he used the latest in electronics: vocoders, samples, computer effects.
It makes for a wild and surprising combination, hearing Gregorian chanting sounding like if Aphex Twin joined a monastery. Vitzthum has released one song so far in what he calls The Electric Requiem, his version of the traditional “Requiem Aeternam (Introit),” and promises more to come.
“I had this concept of mixing the classical music I studied in school with the electronic music that I’ve come to love since graduating,” he tells us. “These two things haven’t been blended before as far as I know, and so I wanted to push the idea further with this piece – the idea of combining the oldest western music we have with the newest. It’s set up as a call-and-response between the solo voice (cantus firmus) and the vocoder ensemble with some musical ideas interspersed. I sampled myself singing the traditional hymn tones, then added the vocoder and effects.” Continue reading »