For gorgeous summer tunes from Dirty Art Club – pop on over to my online jukebox High Tunes and listen for free. You’ll also find a selection of the very best in summer soundtracks, lovingly picked by me. Instant cool for the heatwave!
Posts Tagged With: album
Categories: Music, Random, Vibe Monitor
Tags: album, chillout, Dirty Art Club, downtempo, High Tunes, Sun Burn, Vermillion
Leave a comment
Sigur Rós – Wordless Beauty
Sigur Rós – Ekki múkk from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.
It’s the sound of wordless beauty, of dark majesty and joy. You’re probably hearing the future of classical music being crafted here and now. When I listen to Sigur Rós, the hairs on my neck stand up. There’s a warm intimacy to the way many tracks start, with the delicate ticking and scratching of life. But like the slow start of a roller coaster, a vast cinematic groundswell of emotion can rise beneath you and steal your breath. Somewhere between celebration and mourning, the choruses are often chaotic, subsiding in slow motion leaving you dazed, like you swam to shore in a storm. This is music which climbs out of the speakers and goes places.
Rufus Wainwright – Out of the Game
The new album is a funfair ride of dizzying choruses and dark, bleeding ballads. Mark Ronson’s brass swaggers joyfully through Welcome to the Ball and the bagpipes at the end of Candles are enough to make a grown man cry.
The voice is as pure as a choir boy or edgy and vengeful, depending on which song you’re listening to. Full of verve, if a little frayed by life, Rufus sings about love like a man who’s lost the receipt.
If Rufus wrote great songs before, and he certainly did, then he’s honed his craft, polished the silver and sharpened his walking cane to a deadly tip. Like a slightly debauched party in a glittering stately home, this album feels so richly produced it’s almost decadent.
And he made bagpipes cool.
My new Mixtapes page is here,
with free compilations
featuring Radio Vibes.
Categories: Music, Random, Vibe Monitor
Tags: album, Mark Ronson, new, review, reviews, Rufus Wainwright
2 Comments
The Avalanches – Since They Left Us
It’s official! To celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the iconic 2000 album Since I Left You, The Avalanches are reissuing their seminal work on blue vinyl.
Two years late.
This has been taken as a sign from on high that long-awaited album number two has wrapped and is waiting in the wings. Tweets from guest vocalists confirm the rumours and a picture of a stack of vinyl is believed to have been actually taken inside a studio! To play nicely, here, SILY was a masterpiece of cut and paste sampling, a crazy collage of musical madness which just glowed with good vibes. It also took a set of unique circumstances to produce, being a private project which was never meant to be released.
The clearance of over 3000 music samples took a long time, picking up kudos from Madonna on the way and permission to sample Holiday. Mixing took even longer as Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann perfected their vintage vinyl sound, a bizarre but beautiful mix of old soul records and modern hip-hop, much imitated but never bettered. It follows that creating a record even half as good would take a great deal of time and effort.
Like tuning between radio stations, the album is a timeless mixture of heart-felt nostalgia and pumping party spirit. Originally described by Chater as ‘an international search for love from country to country’ the initial concept was ‘the idea of a guy following a girl around the world and always being one port behind. And that was just because we had all these records from all over the world, and we’d like to use all that stuff.’ But party beats won the day, leaving just the ghost of a broken heart on the dance floor. Since I Left You has achieved classic status, probably due to the fact that it’s such rewarding music which appreciates with time.
Blue Vinyl reissue here.
Categories: Music, Random, Vibe Monitor
Tags: 2000, album, Avalanches, blue, collage, cut and paste, Darren Seltmann, double, hip hop, Madonna, Music, news, reissue, review, reviews, Robbie Chater, Since I Left You, soul, The Avalanches, vinyl
9 Comments
AIR – Le Voyage Dans La Lune, new album previewed.
Listen to the full album here ahead of tomorrow’s release.
Watch a clip from the movie here.
‘Le Voyage Dans La Lune’ (A Trip To The Moon) is a classic black & white silent film by revered French director Georges Méliès.
Released in 1902, this legendary 16-minute film is widely considered one of the most important works in film history, and the very first to use science fiction as its theme, incorporating special effects that were very state-of-the-art at the turn of the 19th century. It was loosely based on two popular novels of the time: Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ and H. G. Wells ‘The First Men In The Moon’.
A hand-coloured print, the only one known to survive, was rediscovered in 1993 by the Filmoteca de Catalunya. It was in a state of almost total decomposition, and many years of painstaking, manual restoration took place until 2010, when digital technology finally came to the rescue. Following another year at the Technicolor Lab of Los Angeles, it was finally ready to share with the world. Eager to put a contemporary spin on this classic silent film, the producers decided to approach AIR’s Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel, to compose an original modern soundtrack, an enormous honour for French musicians, considering the film’s place in the canon of French cinema.
Spurred on by their work on this short movie, AIR decided to develop the project into a full album inspired by the film. Expanding the original musical themes beyond cinematic instrumentals, the album also features the vocal talents and lyrics of Au Revoir Simone and Victoria Legrand (Beach House). The band’s lunar fascinations have been evident since the beginning of their career with the release of the seminal 1998 classic Moon Safari. Now in 2012 Nicolas and JB have returned to explore the further regions of their very unique musical “space.” From en.aircheology.com.
Categories: Music, Random, Vibe Monitor
Tags: Air, album, french band, Georges Méliès, Le Voyage dans la Lune, movie soundtrack, movies, Music, new, psychedelic
1 Comment
the vibes 