...here with All Hands_Make Light, he finally teams up with old friend and erstwhile Broken Social Scene vocalist Ariel Engle for a series of dawn-related gestures that hint at the drifting work with Kevin Doria, but allies that vibe with a kind of astral sea shanty atmosphere that finds the listener drifting with the pair through uncharted melodies and unexpected depths.
Monthly archives: April 2023
7 posts
Discus This is the sixth Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere release in ten or so years, and the distant adventures on which they embark are always welcome. Still an eight-piece, Theta Six finds the ensemble distilling their ideas into shorter pieces, although where some of them end and some of them start is not always so obvious. But the essence of spatial exploration and yearning for ways to […]
They were recorded live at the NRK Studio and in places you can hear the appreciative audience. The list of personnel for Kork amounts to forty or so and that is players alone; so you would imagine that their sheer numbers would overwhelm the trio, but thankfully there is an incredible subtlety as well as variation to their additions which enhance and, if anything, draw fresh thoughts from Rymden.
As with every year, the turning of the seasons brings excitable crowds thronging to a new arena in another European city for an extended musical popularity jamboree, and Kev Nickells turns gimlet eyes and ears on the entries for 2023’s Eurovision Song Contest, sparing no blushes in the process. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Not only do we get all the fun of good looking […]
The fact that this long gestation has neither disrupted the flow nor knocked them off course says a lot about the trio’s interaction, their ability to lock together and ride a groove to its inevitable conclusion; because for all the talk of consciously unfashionable, this music still rocks and maintains a momentum that surfs right through the album.
There is a dreamy quality to his sax playing on Balans and the opening track feels like an introduction to an inner world. Synth tones drift in a similar romantic Angelo Badalamenti vein. There is distance to the piano; but all is welcoming, even the soft flutter of the percussion. There is intimacy here, close-up sounds evolving just for you, a soft air of someone with something special to show.
It’s hard to believe both these albums — which first appeared as unearthed archive material as part of Faust‘s epic 1971-1974 boxed set in 2021 — stem from the early seventies; they feel so startlingly modern, totally out of touch (in the best way possible) with the music of the time.