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‘This third solo album is a deep, widescreen exploration in classic Brazilian song with all the subtlety and delicacy you’d expect from the pioneers of Musica Popular Brasileira, coupled with a thoroughly 21st century sensibility and sonic innovativeness. Layers of intricate instrumentation and arrangement make for spellbound, excavatory listening.
‘Recorded following Gomes’ move from Rio to Lisbon, the album is imbued with a sense of unease and cultural dislocation. A number of songs based on the Samba Ostinato explicitly celebrate Brazil’s musical heritage and culture.
‘Led by Gomes’ gentle and dreamy voice, the music is often reminiscent of mighty trailblazers like Caetano Veloso, João Bosco, or Edu Lobo, though it takes unexpected lines of flight into more experimental territory. An element of drone underpinning the whole album takes full charge on Fllux and Transição; and the finale is molten, raging hardcore.
‘A sun-drenched, balmy dream from start to finish.’
Legendary, underground French rock from 1980, ranging from lo-fi fuzz to full-blown prog. Each song is presented as the hallucination of a possessed six-year-old. Featuring the fourteen-minute Theme Guerre.
Late-60s, minimal, ambient classic, with Riley’s lovely synth and organ-playing deftly elucidating seven phases scored here for large orchestra with extra percussion and electronics.
Taut horror soundtrack from 1963: dramatically orchestral, with jazzy intervals.
“We entered the shadowy mouth of a new space, descending into a realm that precedes the underworld, the arcane, far from our time. We met beasts that gave us lessons about their language which we started learning without grammar.”
Bocca D’ombra is built on a series of whispers and breaths, panting and rustling. A closeness sometimes verging on claustrophobia is fissured with the sounds of crackling fireworks, birdsong, church bells, muffled cries from a children’s playground, like shafts of faraway light, or an insurgent subconscious. A kind of musical animism — influenced by ecological writers like Timothy Morton and Gregory Bateson — with a heavy heart it haunts the porous limits of human and natural realms. Improvisations with traditional instruments like electric and acoustic guitars, monophonic synths, horns or flutes meet natural noise-making tools like branches, nuts, and rocks.
Heady, intoxicating, highly personal, thought-provoking music from Milan. Check it out.
The soundtrack to the French TV series adapting Henri de Monfreid’s account of his travels in the Middle East. The music for the first series in 1967 features various flutes and marine conches; for underwater settings a celesta or a crystal xylophone. For the later 1975 series, de Roubaix composed a new music score, mixing old and new sounds, his EMS VCS3 synthesizer subtly mixed with acoustic instruments.
Moss-green, rooted, bodily crossings of Folk, Ambient, Drone, and experimental electroacoustic music, using violin, woodwind, percussion, voice, and various effects. Captivatingly story-based and ancient as fairy tales. The inner life of a pearl of sap in song. Warmly recommended.
‘The compilation that started the renaissance… twelve tracks of Buddhist Bubblegum Alt Disco Pop recorded during Arthur’s prime years 1985-90.’
‘An intimate unedited solo live performance recorded at Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation in Downtown NYC on 12/20/85. Arthur titled this performance Open Vocal Phrases, Where Songs Come In and Out. He would later edit sections from this performance merging it with studio material recorded at Battery Sound to finalize the World of Echo album released in 1986.’
“Some of it sounds so pure and clear and I am picturing him huddled around all that gear, simply magical. In my memory he didn’t play “for” the audience but was rather trying to perfect these various permutations of sound within himself…and a few of us just happened to be present” - Tom Lee
The double vinyl LP includes the complete nineteen-minutes-plus version of Tower of Meaning/Rabbit’s Ear/Home Away along with the previously unreleased songs That’s The Very Reason and Too Early To Tell. Also two instrumental tracks from Sketches For World Of Echo, originally published in 2020 as a cassette.
The double CD includes both Open Vocal Phrases and Sketches For World Of Echo, in full.