‘A kind of musical road movie, shifting gears through time, space, and reverie, with an itinerary and cast of characters looming in and out of focus. Post-punk chanson with an ear for micro-tonality. The balance of mutant music-boxes and dewy miniatures recalls otherworldly hits from Gareth Williams’ Flaming Tunes, The Residents, and the catchier corners of the Lovely Music catalogue.’
Two fabled, previously unreleased soundtracks — hallucinogenic orchestral music for Patrick Chaput, and a waltzing, rhythmic onslaught for Robert Benayoun — complete with an extensive booklet of essays, interviews, secrets and rare images from both films.
Recorded by Jean Michel Jarre in 1972, during his work experience at G.R.M. (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), for a commission to provide sound for public spaces like airports and libraries. Fifteen tracks made with only two synthesizers (EMS VCS3 & Farfisa organ) in an experimental and very minimal style.
‘It was a crazy album, totally homemade, with rhythms that I made in my student room, with a minimum of equipment and at the same time electronic sounds that I stole from the GRM where I went at night after stealing the keys to the studios. It is a pirate record, in every sense of the word, in which we find what I did afterwards.’
‘The Musiques Vertes project began in south east France during the late 1970s, spearheaded by Christine Armengaud, who was investigating a long tradition of musical instruments made with organic materials and plants. With the help of elderly people in the region, she was able to construct 240 instruments, long used for bird calling, dancing, as the toys of young shepherds and children, and much more, but which had been lost to common usage following the First World War.
‘In 1980 Jean-Yves Bosseur initiated a programme of collective music-making using the instruments reconstructed by Armengaud. Rather than working with professional musicians, he preferred locals and children he encountered in Aix-en-Provence between 1981 and 1982. Recorded by the legendary French ornithologist and wildlife field recordist Jean-Claude Roché, the Musiques Vertes album presents eleven musical excursions, utilising a series of instructions or games set up by the composer to encourage collective musical exchange, as well as a dialogic exchange between this practice and active listening within a natural environment.
‘Bubbling textures and atonalities, blended with sounds from the natural environment, intermingle with staggering birdsong-alike tonalities and rattling percussive passages, producing striking moments of abstraction that retain a remarkable sense of humanity and ease. A document of pure sonic magic and stunningly organic creativity.’
‘A wobbly loop of found sound. Almost inaudible speech from an unidentified documentary. Lapping waves of folk guitar created at the edges of the player’s ability. A haunted melodica. Mumbled vocals that reinvent the singer’s uncertainties as a deliciously glum pose. Layer these up in the recording software of your choice. Labour in a back bedroom overlooking the railway line to summon ghosts.
‘Spirits arrive from West Yorkshire, from Glasgow and Dunedin, from the suburban Midwest. Rising from squats and university accommodation past, from damp rooms filled with old paperbacks, stale hash smoke and abandoned mugs of tea.
‘Even as you listen to this collection of home recordings, made over the last few years by South London duo Jemima, these ghosts crowd around. Born in the Seventies to chase the tape experiments and gentle strumming of the Sixties they crane their necks and edge closer to the laptop. When something this perfect comes along, even the most tranquillised must stir their stumps.
‘It’s lonely music created around a wine bottle with a candle in it, made too late to appear via Xpressway or Cordelia. Don’t imagine though, that it has no home in the now. These spectres remain close because they know they are still wanted. We need them as much as they need us.
‘This spell-binding LP is a window onto a half-lit world on a deeper plane of consciousness.’
Intensely evocative, meditative duets by modular synthesizer and viola, interwoven with field recordings — birds, the sound of forests — encapsulating sojourns on the Åland archipelago in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland.
‘Joanna Brouk’s most ambitious recording, Sounds of the Sea is a concept album full of mystery and eroticism. A conch shell bookends this journey into the deep, going down and down and down further, never reaching bottom. Drawing inspiration from various legends of mermaids and sailors, Brouk weaves circling flutes, vocals, drones and whale songs to describe a sense of unfathomable longing more clearly than words could ever express. Sounds of the Sea is a hypnotic and profound achievement by one of new age’s greatest composers.’
The beloved 1974 hit with Help Me, Free Man In Paris and co.
Folk-rock with jazzy flavours — Joe Sample and Wilton Felder alongside Graham Nash and David Crosby…
The LP is newly remastered by Bernie Grundman under the supervision of Joni Mitchell.
Her mid-seventies turn to jazz, bringing in the Drummers of Burundi. Prince loved it.
The LP is newly remastered by Bernie Grundman under the supervision of Joni Mitchell.
Her third, 1970 album, the brilliant summation of her folky start — with favourites like Woodstock, Big Yellow Taxi and The Circle Game.
The LP is newly remastered by Bernie Grundman under the supervision of Joni Mitchell.