It seems like an age since we last heard from nineties French trip-hopping electronauts Air on the Music Project. Indeed it feels like an age since we heard any new music output from the band.
A major player in my personal soundtrack to the nineties along with Portishead, Bent and Massive Attack, Air were pretty much in most 1990’s twentysomethings record collections somewhere. They broke ground with the extra special Moon Safari then, after a flurry of mostly ignored albums, flashed up in 2012 with this nod to Georges Méliès silent epic – A Trip To the Moon before disappearing in a puff of pretention and a best-of-compilation.
A great shame really as I was quite fond of the guys and I did go and actually buy their stuff rather than download and steal evaluate.
Le Luci Di Hessdalen [The Hessdalen Lights]1 released in 2004 is the seventh(?) release of Argine (Queen) an Italian Neo-folk band formed in 1992.
I became aware of them after hearing them on the Looking For Europe Neofolk compendium where the track In Silenzio, which is on Le Luci Di Hessdalen, appears. It has that weird “I’ve heard this before somewhere” vibe, possibly it was on the radio in the UK once? I don’t know.
However on that vibe alone, I was convinced to “obtain” the album during the Great Internet Download Free-for-All of the early noughties. On further investigation though, I became more convinced that I’d heard a few other tracks too such as Lamento Funebre and Punti Invisibili– Absolutely no idea why, where or by what means. But the more I listen, the more I’m convinced I was subjected to the album some time in 2004.
1The Hessdalen Lights are a recurring aerial light thing in the Hessdalen Valley in Norway. Some attribute them to UFOs but most scientists attribute them to a reaction with a rare earth element with oxygen. For more info see Wikipedia
In the year 2000, the internet was fledgling and untrustworthy and magazines were still a thing. While wanting to attract the vast untapped market of the non-sex obsessed laid back single male twenty something professional demographic, some magazine publishers chucked buckets of cash at producing magazines aimed at them.
Yes, FHM was a thing but that was more laddish than most men felt comfortable with reading in public, with covers often boardering on the pornographic. Esquire was often too sophisticated – aimed at those confident in their presense and appearance. Empire was just about films and GQ had that metrosexual vibe that just didnt appeal to a lot of heteronormative types. Later bridged the gap – stylish, hip, with a cheeky undertone of implied sauce. It was the reading matter for gents who just wanted to stay in touch with what was cool in the world and how to portray that coolness without looking like a catalogue model or an overtly sculpted waxwork with clearly coded sexuality markers.
I loved Later. It appealed to me. I still have copies of every edition of the magazine mouldering in my loft along. It spoke to men like me and offered a guiding hand in the puzzling world of business, style and culture. It’s sad that the publication ended and more sad that nothing really replaced it. Sadly, it seems, people don’t read magazines the way they did preferring social media, websites, podcasts and Substacks instead
Perhaps the most prized possession from this time of my life along with the magazines themselves, are the free CDs that came with the publications. Two Serve Chilled volumes were released over the lifetime of the magazine, with two Later Lounge volumes.
The CDs were compilations of cool, hip music from across the ages, that would delight and provide the owner with that sense of “Hey I listen to cool hip quality music”. It was the kind of music you could pop on at a dinner party or perhaps after the night out at the club to impress that young lady you had brought back to the pad – stylishly decorated of course thanks to the guidance from the magazine .
Later Lounge Volume 1 latched onto that late nineties/early noughties 60’s revival vibe heralded by the likes of Oceans Eleven, Austin Powers and the remastering of old Michael Caine films. Not a great hit with me, I was far too dirty old goth by this time, but there was some Herbie Hancock, who’s music had already passed my ears on yet another Compilation cassete/CD conversion, the erroneously named Seventies Shit.
If ever I wanted to out hipster Hipster Nick, I’d whack this on, put on a cravat and moan about “bloody beatniks” and now you too can pretend to be a lounge lizard by playing the entire playlist via the magic of Youtube below 🙂
Later: The Later Lounge Volume 2 [#661]
Later Lounge Volume 2 came some months later. I think possibly after Serve Chilled but definately after Later Lounge 1 and Serve Chilled 2. I think by this point Later, as a magazine, had become a little flaky. Not as stylish as it once was, perhaps the chaps in the office had been told there and then that the magazine’s days were numbered. Either way, I felt then that there wasn’t as much thought put into this particular compilation. However, with more mature ears, I can now appreciate fully what sort of vibe they were trying to create.
If you fancied pretending to be some 1970’s caberet club owner with your over priced cigars, chest hair and ladykiller white shoes – you know the kind of way you wouldn’t have dressed to impress in the year 2000 – driving through the rain soaked streets of a cosmopolitan and exotic city like say….Bradford (Detroit being too far away)…in your vinyl roof Ford Cortina Mk1 (1973 Oldsmobiles are too big for UK roads)….then this is the compilation for you.
Again, I’ve recreated it on Youtube because I love doing this kind of thing. I should really do a podcast but you know…it’s no good if it’s just me talking….
Later: Serve Chilled Volume 1 [#662]
Serve Chilled Volume 1 became the soundtrack to the early noughties for me. I had multiple copies made to play on my car stereo to accompany long car journeys to and from Yorkshire and I also had it ripped to MP3 when I got my Creative Jukebox 2. I cannot politely express how much I loved this compilation and still do.
A soundtrack to every summer trip to Wales, Brighton, Yorkshire and beyond with Mrs Gnomepants v1.0 who, I hope, reads this and remembers the music as well as I do.
Finally the December 2000 edition carried Volume 2 of the Serve Chilled compilations. Blissful audio earwashes to carry away the winter chills and return memories of warm summers in Ibiza. However I wasn’t an Ibiza kind of youth prefering more sedate trips to Wales over roudy lads weeks away getting STDs, drunk and regrettable tattoos so this just makes me think of driving through Snowdonia.
Track #
Track Name
Artist
1
Sunshine of Your Love (Bigga Batucada Mix)
Rockers Hifi Meet Ella Fitzgerald
2
Fusions Alright
Royksopp
3
Recipe fro the Perfect Afro
Feature Cast
4
Harry the Guitar
Dr Rubber Funk
5
Happiness (Ashley Beedles West Coast Beach Bossa Vocal Mix)
I recently worked with a guy who bore an uncanny resembelance to Colin Meloy, the lead singer of The Decemberists. He had no idea who Colin Meloy was and, for a young chap, was surprisingly lacking in music knowledge. I’d like to think that me purposefully calling him Colin or Mr Meloy either drove him to hating me outright or that it encouraged him to look into his look-a-like and perhaps on a musical path of self discovery.
That was in 2020, the year of the virus, when the world turned on its head and stability seemed like a memory. Indeed, only a few years previous in 2018, I had gone to Leeds with Mrs Gnomepants to see the band, something I’d really looked forward to, only to come down with a really bad bout of flu on the day. Like “get me to bed now I’m not well at all” bad. I still went to the gig though. It was great fun. But before that I’d really no idea what the Decemberists looked like or sounded like live. But now I know and I’m bloody glad I did go. Their support, Hop-a-long were good too.
The King is Dead is the next album chronologically from Hazards of Love which, if you’ve forgotten or missed it, I talked about here some time back. Look I’m a busy guy you know? I’m fifty next year, I have to work and do actual grown up shit these days so if I fall behind in my various content outputs its not because I don’t care, its because I can never find the time ok? I’d even do this as a podcast if I had someone to do it with me! Anyway, The King is Dead isn’t as catchy as previous Decemberist albums in my opinion. Its odd but the Decemberists sub-reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Decemberists/) did a Redditors vote for the best album and I seem to remember this one fareing quite well. Perhaps I’m just not a typical Decemberists fan?
Audibly, this album is very close in style to what Mike Scott’s The Waterboys were trying to achive in the Fisherman’s Blues days. Indeed, you can also detect influences of This is the Sea in previous Decemberist materials come to think of it. Happily though, the Decemberists dont go down the Room to Roam route and still churn out some good albums, which, hopefully we’ll see here when I get to them….
When I began this music project in 2013 I was in a different place. I had a little more time on my hands than now, and I posted regularly to Livejournal. My intitial stance was that unawtil the project was completed there would be an out right embargo on new purchases until the project was complete.
Well 10 years is a long time to go without new music and I was bound to slip up. So when I was able to grab this on Apple Music, I was swift to do so. That’s right, King Con is a recent addition to my library and so is most of Winston’s catalogue. I’d first heard her, like most people in the UK, on the television advert for Tacky Micks well I think it was Tacky Micks. It may have been Next or some other tat vendor. It was a jaunty tune that had you slapping your thigh and cheerfully whistling along and you’d often catch people singing it in the office or whistling it in the town centre. However, what amused me most of all was the fact that the song used was about oral sex. But hey ho, thats the way it goes in marketing.
This aside, the whole album is a good old pop album, a mostly undiscovered classic with some really good tracks and I’m often surprised Winston’s career didnt sky rocket on the back of it. But I guess with all careers, you can shine bright but if you are shrouded by life things and stumble over those hiccups that we’re sent along the way, you can fall off the ledge. Take it from one who knows. But do you know what? She’s still pushing out content, albeit an EP here and there and every one is a banging tune.
I highly recommend Alex Winston. She’s talented and has a very distinctive sound.
So I heard Tanya Donelly play on some compilation CD I had, can’t remember what one it was, and thought to myself: “Hey, here’s a singer with a distinctive sound, I’d like to know more”.
I jumped on the next 86 bus into Liverpool City Centre, marched down Church Street and entered the palace of musical wonder that was HMV. I then flicked through the CD racks for D. No Donelly. Did the same for T incase some div had misfiled. No Tanya Donelly. Repeated this in Virgin and any other record store I could find. Nada.
During the Great Internet Download Free for All, I’d scour the listings on Usenet for Donelly and also come up with nothing. Then, a passing comment with someone, I forget who, asked if I had tried B for Belly. Belly? I asked. Yes Belly! What, Belly, the band from the early to mid 90s who did Feed the Tree and was somehow linked to 4AD records? Yes, they said, the very same.
I hadn’t. I had no idea that Tanya Donelly was part, if not lead singer with Belly. Punched Belly into my Usenet browser and Blam! There was Belly. I listened to a few tracks, decided I liked a few tracks, continued to listen to those few tracks and never beyond the album itself.
Sad that.
This is what stealing music did to my generation. We became super saturated with media and it stopped us absorbing the true sound. Moreover, streaming music and CDs killed the beating heart, the album. The ease of just playing the tracks we liked instead of sitting through the whole thing to get to the track we liked – that became the using a spoon to eat your roast potatoes of music.
Having first heard two tracks from this album on Complete Mike Oldfield and having a teaser clip for the 1984 film on an old video cassette, I was keen to see this film. However this was in a time when films rarely made their way to TV at an acceptable time and there was no internets or Nutflux and Jeff Bezos was still scrounging $1 from his pals to buy a pack of Twinkies. So it wasn’t until probably the mid-90s when I eventually caught this film tucked away late one night on Channel 4. By which time I was holed up in my stinky little bachelor pad trying to make £140 last a month.
The Bruce Robinson directed film The Killing Fields starred Julian Sands, John Malkovich and Haing S Ngor and is a harrowing account of journalists Sydney Schanburg and Dith Pran’s experiences in Cambodia during the rise of the Kamer Rouge in the 1970s. If you ever want to see how quickly things can go to shit in a country, especially in a part of the world where there is dodgy goings on conducted by Western forces and the impact these actions can have on a people, then The Killing Fields is your required viewing. It’s what made me want to do Journalism at University.
The soundtrack, however, is by Mike Oldfield and was specifically written for the film on his Fairlight CMI, it is almost as atmospheric and as chilling as the film itself.
In Happy Days fandom it is often agreed that the moment Fonz water skis over a shark the decline in the quality of the show began. Some argue that the appearance of a poundshop Bertie Basset like villan marks the end of “quality” in Doctor Who.
Me? I ascertain that 1997s Open Your Eyes is where the rot began to set in for Yes. Others say Union, or 90125. But Open Your Eyes is where its at. A terrible album, yet to make an appearance on the Music Project.
Fortunately the albums following the release of Open Your Eyes showed how much of a driving force Steve Howe could be in the band. Having lost Rabin to music production and realising that Sherwood was better as a producer than a performer, the albums that followed: The Ladder and House of Blues, showed that the band when it consisted of Wakeman, White, Anderson, Squire and Howe could bash out some amazing tunes. Think Tormato, Going for the One and Tales from Topographic Oceans.
However this 2001 release on the Castle label, described as a compilation of studio tracks from the Keys to Ascensionalbums, not only showed what the band was capable of when they weren’t trying to recapture the Lonely Heart era without Rabin or Horn as a guiding hand. But it also sowed the seeds for the albums to follow.
There are some really catchy tunes on this album and I am often surprised that I don’t listen to it more often. The track Mind Drive is a banging tune and Be the One has foreshadows of Magnification floating around it. The album also features Children of the Light which credits Vangelis as one of the writers. This truly is an album from Yes’ renaissance – capturing and blending all the bits and sounds that made the bands post-Bruford line up often referred to as the classic line up.
Sadly, in 2001, my ears were elsewhere. The Great Download was starting to begin and I was discovering new genres, new sounds and new aural pleasures. Music was becoming freely available and visits to Virgin and HMV were beginning to wane. It wouldn’t be until a chance visit to the fledgling Yes website that the realisation there were new albums available AND A TOUR on the horizon that I realised that there was new stuff for me out there.
One lesson to learn when curating a large collection of music is to make regular backups. Last week I had to make an emergency restore of my Mac’s OS which meant having to resort to a backup from the iCloud. Unfortunately, this meant that only the files I’ve managed to upload via my very slow 21st Century rural broadband or those matched via iTunes are currently available for me to listen to. Indeed, today’s album, Islands, is not available on iTunes and my iCloud library does not have the files uploaded, which is a shame. Fortunately, I did manage to listen and pencil together a brief draft of observations for today’s entry but it means there may be a slight decline in posting regularity for the next couple of weeks. Please stay with me though!
Good old “x for £xx” deals. If it wasn’t for “x CDs for £xx” deals my music library would probably have been very sparse and I’d have a lot of money. I first obtained Oldfield’s Islands on CD during a 3 for £20 deal at the Virgin Megastore in Liverpool (now Claus Ohlson) in the early nineties, I think I was still at school.
When Islands was released, computer graphics were, by today’s standards, a little bit shit. But that didn’t stop artists like Mike Oldfield from using visual media to add to their output. So when I came across the music video that accompanied this album, Wind Chimes, I was blown away. “WOW!” I would say, “Look at the detail on that vector graphic!” something I would struggle to recreate on my Commodore 64 even if I had the right programme to do something like that.
So a career in computer graphics passed me by because the technology I had to hand was insufficient to help tease me towards such an occupation. The self-realisation that already older people are often better at things than you is a big train not to miss.
The Wind Chimes is the long piece in this album and is riven with melodies, rhythms and motifs with a heavy eastern and international influences pretty much like most Avante Garde and artistic music of the time (see also the African influences in Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe). The other tracks are songs performed by the likes of Bonny “Total Eclipse” Tyler and Kevin “Nick Drake” Ayres. Also, curiously, Yes alumni Geoff Downes and Enigma’s Micheal Cretu also assisted with the production which just sends chills down my spine as trying to visualise the way my music tastes are connected is what inspired this whole project in the first place.
If you are enjoying this project, please share and tell your social media pals. Publicity is key to any successful blog or online project. I’m not asking for cash and I’m not asking for fame, just an appreciative readership.
A four volume compilation of various works by the band Dead Can Dance.
Being a bit of a DCD nerd, I couldn’t turn my nose up at this. Sure I have most of the tracks already on other albums but there are some tracks on here that aren’t available on conventional releases.
Radio recordings and rare songs appear here along with the foetal essence of some well known DCD songs. It also came with a DVD of the live Toward the Within concert which will appear here on the music project in a few years time.
Cammell Laird Social Club is possibly one of my most favourite albums. Not only is it a sly dig at Buena Vista Social Club but it’s possibly the finest bit of musical wit and whimsy that has ever existed.
People say that pop stars today have no regard for decency or the effect they’ll have on the youth. Similarly, people say that music these days is a load of shite. The same people say that songs today have too many sexual connotations and nothing in the way of political vitriol or appeasement of folk culture.
In one of those odd little moments of synchronicity the day my beloved asked me to write about this it was mentioned in a book I was reading ‘the unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ where a bridge by a West Country pub is credited with being the inspiration behind the name. This may not be true, but Paul Simon is well known for his affection for England (and his English girlfriend who couldn’t face life in the limelight).
This album takes me back to my father’s office, filled with his diving treasures, a fascinating roll- top desk my mother later worked at (with an old cheque book in pounds shillings and pence in the drawer) and his drawing table where he would draft out plans. Oh, and the hi-fi, a futuristic silver thing that played my favourites on a Saturday morning when I wasn’t listening to Junior Choice with Tony Blackburn and Arnold the dog (woof woof) on the radio.
This album is exactly what I’m doing the Music Project for.
My music collection is so vast it is impossible for me to have listened to every single album. The point of this project is to listen, filter and discuss with others what the albums mean to me, them and the rest of history. It is also there for me to delete albums that I have no wish to listen to again. However it is also there for me to discover albums I didn’t know I had. This is like that.
Bodkin is a gem. A prize in Prog-ism. Heavy in Hammond organ. Crazy drug inspired lyrics and wild wild instrument solo breaks. What more could a prog fan want?
Bodkin were a Scottish progressive rock band from the 1970s Doug Rome (Hammond organ), Mick Riddle (guitar), Bill Anderson (bass), Dick Sneddon on drums and Zeik Hume on vocals. A smooth mix of dirty blues (much like the Groundhogs) and Heavy Prog (King Crimson). Unique sound. An absolute pleasure to listen to and almost akin to Thotch
Unfortunately, Bodkin is the only album Bodkin made and it leaves you wanting more. Considering I heard this for the first time the other week, the album has already gone up my personal charts and nuzzled itself between Illusions on A Double Dimple (Triumvirat) and Animals(Pink Floyd).
Sometimes I wonder if anyone is still actually reading these entries as I persevere to listen to my album collection in alphabetical order. But do you know? Part of me like to think that long forgotten LJ flisters might still be reading or random people might be coming across these posts many years into the future on WordPress. I also like to think that this is kind of a historical record and in a far off distant future scores of academics and philosophers are debating not only what I meant by vampiresses with comedy inflatable breasts but also why did I have such a massive cock collection of music and were people actually interested in this and if so why?
Ritual purposes.
Simple.
Anyway, as I plunge on through the “A”s missing out only a couple of two track EPs as they don’t really count as full albums (If you’re really interested they are “Abandoner” by some bloke out of Porcupine Tree and “Absence and Plenum” by Lux Interna who none of you will have heard of anyway. I was also wearing my khaki short sleeved shirt and there are 7 cards in the card holder on the mantelpiece) we arrive at an unusual choice.
I’d never heard of Santana until they appeared on a soundtrack for a film I liked. So as I liked one of their tracks I did my usual thing of downloading their entire back catalogue. Yes. It was getting a bit silly doing that. Anyway, Abraxas contains Black Magic Woman and Oye Como Va which always makes me feel like I should be in some seedy Spanish restaurant in the 1980s. Surrounded by bullet ridden corpses having just survived a Spanish Mafia attack by hiding behind the fake plastic plant in the corner.
Every so often I come across a band in my library and I think “How the hell did I ever get this?”
Twilight Garden are one of those bands.
They are a curious cross of Depeche Mode, the Cure and maybe a tiny bit of Bauhaus. Lots of echoey guitar, forlorn vocals and the kind of production that makes it sound like they’re recording in some disused quarry. In the rain. After a group of smack head punks from the 80’s have been and daubed the walls with political slogans.
Perhaps they recorded in the foot tunnel depicted in their album cover?
Possibly one of the best compilations I have in my library. The Metal Tribue To Abba compilation never fails to raise a smile on faces as a group of (mostly) European metal bands rip into some of Abba’s popular pop songs with the power of a force ten gale. And it works.
Starting with Summer Night City performed by choral metal group Therion the listener is carried through Thank you for the Music, Voulez-Vouz and Chiquitita by bands whose names probably won’t be familiar to people inside the UK. Really, this is a treat. I urge anybody with even the slightest penchant for chugga-chugga guitars, thrash drums and chicks in latex with long hair and comedy inflatable breasts to find and listen to this album.
A Thousand Roads is a film by Chris Eyre released in 2005. This is the soundtrack for it.
I’m very fond of soundtracks and there are many in my collection. Mostly they are of films that I have seen but this is one of 2 film soundtracks of films I’ve not seen.
I’m also very fond of Lisa Gerrard’s music including Dead Can Dance (but more about them in a later post).
So there’s two things: Lisa Gerrard and Soundtracks. What more could I want? Well there is a third thing. World music. I first got into World Music as a teenager when I was taken on a school trip to see the Gamelan at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool. Initially I was resistant but an hour into the performance I began to recognise repetitions, subtleties and changes in rhythm which none of my classmates seemed to appreciate. On the back of that experience I embraced World Music and, over the years, have collected some interesting music (again, more of that in a later post).
A Thousand Roads is a lovely mix of etherical wailing, tribal chants and haunting synths. A rare treat for travellers and explorers of the musical soundscape.
I first came across Renaissance in 2002 when I used to subscribe to Last.fm’s radio service.
In case you didn’t know, Last.fm supposedly checks what you listen to and then finds artists you might like and plays samples of their music mixed in with yours.
The song that kept being played was Northern Lights. It was one of those songs that made me think “Here! I’ve heard this before!”. It was more than probable that I had.
Keen to find out more, I spent a week downloading their catalogue and rapidly falling in love with their music. Bewildered by the fact that I hadn’t actually heard of them before that day.
They’re a mix of folk and prog. Prog folk? Maybe. Kind of like Fairport Convention meets Yes.
No..that’s not it.
It’s similar. But not.
Anyway, make your own mind up and, as usual, I would be interested to hear what you think about them too.
There is a certain sound that conjures up memories of the 1990’s. Granted, I spent most of the 1990s in a haze of solitude and unemployment. Indeed, I did not really venture much further musically than the compilation album Shine 9. Instead I spent most of the 90s listening to Mike Oldfield, Yes, Triumvirat and whatever I happened upon on my cassette tapes. Those were the days. Days of sitting round, doing nothing. Wasting time.
I suspect that The Divine Comedy’s greatest hits, this album, appears in my music library due to Gay Jamie who no doubt put it on one of his many MP3 CDs he wrote for me back in the early noughties.
The Divine Comedy are that sound. The sound of the nineties. I’d not listened to this album before I began this project and, apart from a couple of tunes I’d heard on the radio or in other compilations, I’m not all that familiar nor enamoured with the band or their work. I was also surprised by the fact that they wrote the theme tune to Father Ted. So that was a surprise when it started playing midway through the listen.
Anyway, I think I’ll just keep the tracks I like off this album and bin the rest.
Album 40 was A Saucerful of Pinkone of the many Floyd tribute albums. This, however, is the real deal. The second Floyd album and the first without Syd Barratt, although he did write the track Jugband Blues, which features on this album.
It shows as early Floyd. Bizarre lyrics, lots of moog and weirdness. Just my cup of tea.
It’s also interesting to contrast albums from this era of Floyd to later eras such as A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
See, if it was this, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Ummagumma that was my introduction to Floyd, I would have gotten into them a lot earlier. It’s so far away from The Wall it’s practically down the garden path, across the road and under the tree in the neighbouring field. Right up my street.
I never did the Coldplay thing. To me they were too mainstream, boring, bland, over exposed and overused. Listening to this album again did nothing to change that opinion.
While listening I kept expecting the soothing tones of Kirsty Wark or Prof Brian COCKs to pipe in over the top and tell me about the illusionary one armed orphan made of atoms that was in need of some respite or donations so they could buy a camel to dig a waterhole in their flooded landscape with their one eyed baby. Or someone like Lenny Henry to start telling me about Samanfa from Barnes who has over come her addiction to jam and has returned to the area where her abuse of jam started only to be reunited with Kelly her old friend who has now lost a leg. Or something.
If you’ve watched any documentaries or charity programmes since this album was released, there is no doubt you have already heard this album. I don’t know why. Perhaps it just brings to mind unbearable mental images of depression, deprivation and false hope.
Anyway, for you guys, I listened to the whole album. I didn’t want to. I wanted to gloss over it but I am loyal to you and so I tortured myself by listening to it. Please don’t make me do it again…..I can’t. I’ve recycle binned it…
Sometimes on a musical journey you unearth a treat. On one such foray into the musical world I was fortunate to come across this delightful live set which introduced me to the bands rather unusual works. On first listen I was hooked and listening to it again I’m still filled with warm squishy feelings and squees. Radical Recital is a good starting point for those interested in exploring Rasputina.
If you are unaware of Rasputina, which I suspect quite a few people are, they’re usually a trio of musicians, 2 cellists and a percussionist (onetime Brian from Dresden Dolls) who play a weird Country/goth/rock fusion. It works. I believe the genre is New Weird America. It would be interesting to hear your opinions…..
One lesson to learn when curating a large collection of music is to make regular backups. Last week I had to make an emergency restore of my Mac’s OS which meant having to resort to a backup from the iCloud. Unfortunately, this meant that only the files I’ve managed to upload via my very slow 21st Century rural broadband or those matched via iTunes are currently available for me to listen to. Indeed, today’s album, Islands, is not available on iTunes and my iCloud library does not have the files uploaded, which is a shame. Fortunately, I did manage to listen and pencil together a brief draft of observations for today’s entry but it means there may be a slight decline in posting regularity for the next couple of weeks. Please stay with me though!
Cammel Laird Social Club – 
Bridge over troubled waters – Simon and Garfunkel
Abraxas by Santana
A Metal Tribute to Abba – Various Artists
Stegzy's Music Project 
Le Voyage Dans La Lune – Air [#665]
by stegzyIt seems like an age since we last heard from nineties French trip-hopping electronauts Air on the Music Project. Indeed it feels like an age since we heard any new music output from the band.
A major player in my personal soundtrack to the nineties along with Portishead, Bent and Massive Attack, Air were pretty much in most 1990’s twentysomethings record collections somewhere. They broke ground with the extra special Moon Safari then, after a flurry of mostly ignored albums, flashed up in 2012 with this nod to Georges Méliès silent epic – A Trip To the Moon before disappearing in a puff of pretention and a best-of-compilation.
A great shame really as I was quite fond of the guys and I did go and actually buy their stuff rather than download and
stealevaluate.Moreover, I am also a fan of the whole “Mash an album over a classic film” thing, you know like syncing Floyd’s Dark Side with Wizard of Oz, Oldfield‘s Tubular Bells with the Exorcist and Belle & Sebastian‘s Boy With the Arab Strap and David Leland’s 1987 film Wish You Were Here 1
You can listen to the album on:
Amazon
Youtube Music
Apple Music
Spottyarse
1 – May be untrue
Share this:
Like this:
2012 Air Soundtracks