Posts Tagged With: Music

The Avalanches – Since They Left Us

The Avalanches vinyl stack

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.

The Avalanches - Since I Left You album artworkBlue Vinyl reissue here.The Avalanches - Since I Left You Blue Vinyl Reissue

Watch the title track video here

Hear my Avalanches mix tape, Halo’s and Heartstrings here

Categories: Music, Random, Vibe Monitor | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The Doctor Who Experience

Handsome man in the tardis

It’s amazing that The Vibes is nearly one year old, and yet you’ve all been spared one of my great obsessions. I just got back from London, where Panos and I went to The Doctor Who Experience, part thrill-ride, part exhibition. It’s the nearest you can get to actually being in the fifty-year-old BBC sic-fi show. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the world of the Tardis, Doctor Who is the perfect story: an infinite format which can be applied to just about anything that’s happened, and everything that hasn’t. It’s all about an alien with a stolen time/spacecraft, roaming the universe in search of trouble, saving lives and planets and fighting evil.

This is a short film of our trip to space, which includes a remix of Delia Derbyshire’s ground-breaking electronic theme, which is widely regarded as the earliest example of techno. She recorded it in 1962. Read it and weep, Detroit.

Watch in high definition and full screen…

“All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was. Where do you want to start?” as the Doctor says to his companion. When it comes to travel, he’s universally free range. The sheer scope of this format means that the show keeps regenerating, much like the Time Lord himself. It never gets boring and big hitters like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are eyeing the film rights as the Doctor’s profile continues to grow. For the madman with a box, this is going to be a great year. There, that was painless, wasn’t it?


The remix from the video can be listened to here,

doctor who theme remix artwork

Or download here (right click)

I decided to remix Delia Derbyshire’s iconic and pioneering version of the Doctor Who theme to get me out of copyright wrangles when I posted the above video on YouTube. I took three samples, a ‘seething’ sound which was a kind of slithering hiss, the Tardis wheezing and a single bass note, which sounds a bit like a drum. It turned into an epic project and I stalled halfway through. Rather than go insane, I re-recorded the complete half of the track in reverse, and stuck it on the end of the first half, effectively doubling the length of the track and making it sound like I’d done twice the work. George Martin would love me. Delia, however would probably not join me on the dance floor as I threw shapes to the funked up version of her tune. And rightly so: her thundering realisation of Ron Grainer’s theme was the very first example of electronic dance music and about 20 years ahead of it’s time. It’s definitive and unique. No other piece of music has sounded like it before or since, and like a siren it excites and unsettles. It’s interesting to note that this version has never been successfully improved upon, in 50 years of Doctor Who.


Other Doctor Who posts: Art Deco Dalek, Doctor WhoTube and Who Tune Remixed

Categories: Music, Photography, Travel, Vibe Monitor, Video | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 22 Comments

AIR – Le Voyage Dans La Lune, new album previewed.

air album cover Le Voyage dans le lune

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: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Cosmic Jukebox

Exclusive! The Flaming Lips remixed.

It Overtakes Me The Flaming Lips Slow Lane mix CoverIt Overtakes Me – The Flaming lips (Slow Lane Mix)

It’s a huge cosmic sigh, the sound of a man staring into space trying to make sense of it all, and also the sound of me in the bath (stop laughing please, this is serious) imagining new layers to a stark track which needed some starlight. Originally the second half of the single It Overtakes Me, which you may remember from the famous beer commercial (Beck’s 4-Step), The Stars are so Big…I am so Small…Do I Stand a Chance? was the celestial second act which contrasted so much with it’s brother. I took the acoustic guitar from the end and built the whole track around it, taking samples of vocal and making them echo in the style of 10cc’s I’m Not in Love. I also played the flute over most of the song, resulting in richer, warmer layers of sound. As far as I know, I’m the only person to remix this track.

Taken from The Cosmic Jukebox, my remixes, mashups and original music.

Categories: Music, Random, Vibe Monitor | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Air – Return Journey to the Moon

air french band le voyage dans la lune

Air, the iconic French band, travel back in time to 1902 for a return visit to the moon. They hit the big time with modern classic Moon Safari in 1998, and this time they’re soundtracking one of the first big silent movies from the dawn of cinema. As bright and playful as the movie itself, it looks like Dunckel and Godin have distilled their style into a kind of Telstar-flavoured psychedelic prog-rock.

“It’s not something boring from a museum – it’s alive!” says Nicolas Godin, of their new project which has inspired a full album, released on February 7, 2012.

Watch this short clip from BBC News.

Categories: Music, Random, Vibe Monitor, Video | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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