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Post by jk on Feb 23, 2020 17:50:12 GMT -5
This was the name of a topic on a now deleted forum and it's gratifying to resurrect it over here. The title says it all, really. I believe this was my last post before the soft stuff hit the fan last March. To restart this thread in what can only be less turbulent times, here is the second, marimba-heavy part of Steve Reich's Drumming, the work that opened my ears to the wonders of Minimal Music in the mid '70s. Music to float off on: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drumming_(Reich)
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Post by jk on Feb 29, 2020 17:13:56 GMT -5
The KLF are perhaps best known for their non-musical antics but they produced some wonderful pop along the way. Chill Out is their stab at Ambient House. To paraphrase Mark Prendergast off the top of my head, the aural tapestry they weave here occasionally parts to briefly reveal a house beat before it closes again. One of the duo described the process that produced the album as akin to spinning plates--if one falls you have to start all over again. In other words, it was all done in one take. I think it makes a fascinating listen. Love the pedal steel and the Oberheim. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chill_Out_(KLF_album)
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Post by jk on Mar 3, 2020 9:18:19 GMT -5
I first heard "Swastika Girls" by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno on John Peel's legendary Sunday afternoon show on BBC radio. The things is, it was delivered to the studio as a tape--only the tape was the wrong reel. It hadn't been spooled back to the beginning. So we lucky folks in radio listening land first heard it backwards.
Not that we were any the wiser--except of course those who had rushed out and bought the LP. No Pussyfooting boasted a track per side, with "Swastika Girls" taking up all of side two. That first listen was... very interesting. But why, so many decades and state-of-the-art techniques later, this 19-minute track is currently unavailable in any form on YouTube is a complete mystery. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(No_Pussyfooting)
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Post by jk on Mar 7, 2020 16:52:27 GMT -5
Getting back to Steve Reich and Minimal Music, this is my candidate for the absolute pinnacle of the genre. His Music for 18 Musicians reminds me of what Mahler once said about the symphony, that it "must be like the world. It must embrace everything". Music for 18 Musicians does just that. The only version you need to hear, ever, is this one, the original ECM recording from 1978 by Steve Reich and Musicians: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_18_Musicians
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Post by jk on Mar 29, 2020 15:36:36 GMT -5
This atmospheric and extremely moving modern "classical" work by Gavin Bryars was originally released on Eno's Obscure label. It's this first (1975) version of The Sinking of the Titanic you want: "...from aft came the tunes of the band..... The ship was gradually turning on her nose - just like a duck that goes down for a dive. I had only one thing on my mind - to get away from the suction. The band was still playing. I guess all of the band went down. They were playing 'Autumn' then. I swam with all my might. I suppose I was 150 feet away when the Titanic, on her nose, with her afterquarter sticking straight up in the air, began to settle slowly.... The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while we were still working wireless, when there was a ragtime tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing 'Autumn'. How they ever did it I cannot imagine." Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, in an interview for the New York Times of April 19th 1912 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sinking_of_the_Titanic
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Post by jk on Apr 4, 2020 3:47:18 GMT -5
It was my son who introduced me to Orbital's stunning landscape-of-an-album In Sides (1996). The organ entry in the first track (here at 6:10) is worth the price of admission alone. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Sides
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Post by jk on Apr 5, 2020 5:29:07 GMT -5
Mark Prendergast's book The Ambient Century runs the gamut of all 20th-century music that can be described as ambient. The list is long and varied (yes, the Boys are in there too) and includes all the more ambient strands of dance music, most notably trance. Accident in Paradise, the 1992 debut of the German DJ/producer Sven Väth (pronounced "fate"), itself runs the gamut from driving techno to gentle atmospheric stuff. From that album, this is "L'Esperanza"--hope, something we could do with right now. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_in_Paradise
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Post by jk on Apr 8, 2020 16:10:20 GMT -5
Ooohh, I've been looking for this for ages! I borrowed the Virgin LP of the first two parts of Philip Glass's Music in Twelve Parts from the Amsterdam record-lending library in the late '70s and taped it. Later I used the tape for something else. It appeared very briefly on YouTube about ten years ago--that's the last I saw of it until today. Glass has done lots of great things but I have a soft spot for this LP. I like the way it changes from Part I to Part II on side one of the LP--after a while this Part II speeds up and then stops dead in its tracks, only to be resumed on side two with a slightly different texture. Absolutely gorgeous! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_in_Twelve_Parts
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Post by jk on Jun 6, 2020 3:14:27 GMT -5
My first taste of minimal music before it got itself a label was on John Peel's show in, I should imagine, 1970. Terry Riley's blissed-out A Rainbow in Curved Air was one of the first long pieces he played after the BBC dropped its ridiculous no-more-than-ten-minutes-a-track ruling: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rainbow_in_Curved_Air
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Post by jk on Jun 13, 2020 7:09:14 GMT -5
I'd been looking for this ever since hearing an excerpt from it a couple of years back. Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato is traditionally performed on four pianos but I find all that pianistic activity too abrasive. (Maybe this derives from my years training in vain to become a piano tuner, a job a lot closer to science than to music.) So I was overjoyed to discover this version for multi-tracked marimba, although for a while there was only an ad for it on YouTube. Now you can hear seven major sections uploaded by the performer, the Dutch percussionist Peter Elbertse. "Section 88" gives you a nice big chunk to digest. I love the sound of the marimba! Here's how this 74-minute version starts: www.vanveenproductions.com/cds/page41/page41.html
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Post by jk on Jun 14, 2020 9:36:55 GMT -5
Ever heard of vaporwave? No? Well, a short while ago my work led me into this rarefied cultural region by way of cyberpunk and solarpunk. Vaporwave music definitely falls under "mood before melody", exemplified by what I'm told is a classic of this microgenre, 2814's 2015 album Birth of a New Day. You probably heard it here first: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave
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Post by jk on Oct 23, 2020 5:37:30 GMT -5
Four months on... After reading Mark Prendergast's encyclopaedic The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby some twenty years ago, I went to various shops in the UK and NL and bought, over a period of weeks, the following albums discussed within its pages (here in alphabetical order): Air ~ Premiers SymptômesAphex Twin ~ Selected Ambient Works Volume II The Chemical Brothers ~ Dig Your Own HoleThe Chemical Brothers ~ Surrender
Miles Davis ~ Sketches of SpainEnigma ~ MCMXC a.D.The KLF ~ Chill Out
Kraftwerk ~ Trans-Europe Express Van Morrison ~ Astral WeeksPete Namlook & Klaus Schulze ~ Dark Side of the Moog IXNew Order ~ Power, Corruption and Lies
Spacemen 3 ~ The Perfect Prescription
The Stone Roses ~ S/TTangerine Dream ~ Phaedra
Sven Väth ~ Accident in Paradise
This is the first in the list, French duo Air's Premiers Symptômes, "a seamless segue of dream music", to quote Prendergast. The album I bought of it has some less laid-back stuff tacked on at the end to fill it up -- this original five-track EP is all you need. If one passage sounds familiar, that's because it was also used on Air's two-million-selling 1998 album Moon Safari. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiers_Symptômes
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Post by jk on Dec 25, 2020 5:51:34 GMT -5
Here's something I bumped into by sheer chance on YouTube last night. The blurb explains it well, and you might like to check out some of the often very imaginative comments. This dreamy album suits both the low-key Christmas mood this year and my own contemplative mood right now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruomi_Hosono
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Post by highllama on Dec 25, 2020 7:14:02 GMT -5
Getting back to Steve Reich and Minimal Music, this is my candidate for the absolute pinnacle of the genre. His Music for 18 Musicians reminds me of what Mahler once said about the symphony, that it "must be like the world. It must embrace everything". Music for 18 Musicians does just that. The only version you need to hear, ever, is this one, the original ECM recording from 1978 by Steve Reich and Musicians: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_18_MusiciansThis is a great recording. My favorite Reich is Octet.
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Post by jk on Dec 25, 2020 15:46:04 GMT -5
Getting back to Steve Reich and Minimal Music, this is my candidate for the absolute pinnacle of the genre. His Music for 18 Musicians reminds me of what Mahler once said about the symphony, that it "must be like the world. It must embrace everything". Music for 18 Musicians does just that. The only version you need to hear, ever, is the original ECM recording from 1978 by Steve Reich and Musicians. This is a great recording. My favorite Reich is Octet. Thanks for the tip. Any particular recording of Octet you would recommend, HL? Reich's Drumming was my way into the fascinating world of minimal music.
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Post by highllama on Dec 25, 2020 18:52:02 GMT -5
This is a great recording. My favorite Reich is Octet. Thanks for the tip. Any particular recording of Octet you would recommend, HL? Reich's Drumming was my way into the fascinating world of minimal music. I have the recording he did on ECM. There's a cheap boxset with the album with Octet, as well as Music for 18 Musicians and Tehellim. He later remade Octet as Eight Lines, but I prefer Octet.
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Post by jk on Dec 26, 2020 4:44:06 GMT -5
Thanks for the tip. Any particular recording of Octet you would recommend, HL? Reich's Drumming was my way into the fascinating world of minimal music. I have the recording he did on ECM. There's a cheap boxset with the album with Octet, as well as Music for 18 Musicians and Tehellim. He later remade Octet as Eight Lines, but I prefer Octet. Is this the one? It sounds great anyway.
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Post by highllama on Dec 26, 2020 5:42:05 GMT -5
That is "Eight Lines," the remake. It is beautiful, but not quite the same. "Octet" is on an album with "Music for a Large Ensemble" and "Violin Phase."
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Post by jk on Dec 26, 2020 6:05:00 GMT -5
That is "Eight Lines," the remake. It is beautiful, but not quite the same. "Octet" is on an album with "Music for a Large Ensemble" and "Violin Phase."That's the one I was looking for. It may still turn up somewhere.
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Post by jk on Jan 8, 2021 16:48:15 GMT -5
Repetition is one facet of ambient music. Back at PSF I was introduced to OSTs from computer games. Often their YouTube uploaders would take a short piece and loop it, maybe for half an hour, maybe longer. The repetition could be quite mesmerising -- of course not everything lends itself equally well to such treatment. This is one piece that fits the bill perfectly. The sumptuous "Mary's Theme" from the 1969 Italian film Femina Ridens (The Laughing Woman) lasts just over two minutes. Here it has been looped from the moment it marginally slows down at 2:05 and repeated another 28 times before ending an hour later with the as yet unheard last chord of the original piece. Nice work, Poribukuro_Music&Film!
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Post by jk on Jan 18, 2021 10:13:47 GMT -5
I have this gorgeous track on a cassette tape somewhere. I discovered Popol Vuh not in Prendergast's The Ambient Century but in a book about so-called krautrock, an absurdly broad categorization. (It's like having a house at the zoo for German animals.) One side of the tape in question (the other side, incongruously, was given over to the best of Funkadelic and Parliament) was mainly taken up with In den Gärten Pharaos (1971), Popol Vuh's extraordinary second album (it's on page three of the "Obscure Albums" topic). The title track from its successor, Hosanna Mantra (1972), filled the remaining space perfectly. The contrast between the two albums could scarcely be greater (over the space of a year!) yet the progression from one to the other feels utterly natural. In my opinion, Popol Vuh mastermind Florian Fricke qualifies for the G-word. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosianna_Mantrawww.furious.com/perfect/populvuh.html
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Post by jk on Jan 21, 2021 7:42:53 GMT -5
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Post by kds on Jan 21, 2021 10:21:26 GMT -5
I'm not too much on ambient music for the most part.
But, the final album released by Pink Floyd - The Endless River - almost falls into this category.
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Post by jk on Jan 21, 2021 11:57:28 GMT -5
I'm not too much on ambient music for the most part. But, the final album released by Pink Floyd - The Endless River - almost falls into this category. Twenty hours later: It held my interest until the sax kicked in in the seventh track. Some interesting and evocative textures before then, though.
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Post by jk on Mar 3, 2021 6:51:21 GMT -5
Techno Animal's Re-Entry (1995) technically falls under ambient but blissed out it is not. The hair-raising cover art aptly reflects the utterly alien music on its two CDs. That said, it is a magnificent achievement and a thrilling listening experience. From the second CD, entitled Heavy Lids, this is "Evil Spirits/Angel Dust": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-Entry_(Techno_Animal_album)
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