I held back on releases through the holiday season, and now have a backlog of 20 really, really fantastic albums. I'm switching for a few weeks to a weekly release cycle so we can catch up.
New blood! All four albums this week are from musicians new to Magnatune.
- Vidia Wesenlund comes to me courtesy of radio show "Hearts of Space" producer Stephen Hill, who himself received Vidia's CD, loved it, and told me hers was one of the albums that he was most impressed with that desperately needed to be marketed. This is gorgeous, ambient, textured music with a stunning voice.
- Master's Monkeys is very quirky blues/folk/rock/bossa-nova and eminently compelling.
- Harlan Williams' stark, dramatic, layered contemporary acoustic guitar compositions stunned me. In no way New Age or Classical, more like something that John McLaughlin might do if he were cross-bred with Robert Fripp and Andres Segovia.
- Charlie Beresford music is a dark, brooding kind of acoustic prog rock. Gorgeous vocal melodies and built-up tension.
I remember these Scandinavian lullabies from growing up in Norway, but singing
them now gives me an experience of how the depth of darkness and the clarity of
light can exist at the same time in one song. And in this way it reflects what
is so much a part of the northern countries, - light and darkness that show up
in such extreme ways.
The songs have brought these two opposites together for
me, letting our dark and light sides exist in the same space, through the
tenderness of the lullabye. I hope you will have your own unique experience as
you listen to these songs from the land where the days are dark and the nights
are light.
Description:
street ballads, crime stories and traumatic dreamworlds
Master's Monkeys' longplayer debut "Under the Shade Of A Pine" has already earned a lot of good feedback from all corners of the earth.
The 17 songs from the album cover a wide range of musical styles - From Blues over Rock and Songwriter to Bossa.
By this time, many listeners and several representatives of the music industry
have shown their interest in this new extravagant band from Germany.
The compositions on The Glass Desert are instrumental and range in moods from
ambient and celestial to darkened and tragic, always with a layering of
harmonies and an intricate structure. The writings are usually in minor key and
can sometimes end up gothic sounding. The style is very unlike traditional
classical guitar music, using multiple instrument parts, elaborate arrangements,
and unusual timings.
The front cover artwork is one of Harlan's original paintings. These detailed
works have been on display in galleries in North Carolina and Louisiana. The
subjects are all structural or things that don't actually exist, sometimes
taking as long as an entire year to finish.
All of the song titles on this recording are found somewhere in the scope of
Christian history or directly in the Bible itself. For example, "In Nomine
Domini" is Latin for "In the Name of the Lord", "Gregory IX" was the pope who
instituted the inquisition, and "The Limb of the Fiend" is 16th century
reference that's another way of saying "The Arm of Satan".
Dark Transport is a 10-track song cycle written in Gozo (a small island off Malta) at a time of great emotional change. The record is soaked in the sounds of the Mediterranean, with its heady mix of crossing cultures between mainland Europe and North Africa. Lyrically influenced by the concept haiku, without adhering to its strict rules, the words sketch ambiguous instructions and images that sit within music, acknowledging textures over strict tempos.
'DARK TRANSPORT' is coming off the back of the last album 'The Room is Empty', an album which, in 2007, spent 9 weeks in the US CMJ music chart and was licensed to MTV's news and documentaries dept, as well as to numerous shows on the same station and Oxygen.
