2 posts tagged “norway”
Last week I remembered I like Steve Tibbetts, so I added a Steve Tibbetts station to my Pandora account. I was listening to it yesterday when I heard an unfamiliar Jon Hassell song. Or so I thought--it turned out to be by Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, a former Tibbetts labelmate at ECM. I bought Molvaer's ECM album Khmer a few years ago, but I never took to it. The backing tracks sound like rudimentary techno and hip-hop loops, dooming the album to the fate of so many hybrids, i.e. not being as good as any of the individual genres that it combines. On the other hand, I did like his playing on one of Bill Laswell's Sacred System albums. But the song I heard on Pandora is from Er, Molvaer's 2005 album, and it's his best work yet. On several tracks he's obviously going for a Jon Hassell group sound, but his own tone and modalities are different than Hassell's. Then there's the song I can't stop playing, "Only These Things Count"--
That's Sidsel Edresen singing, with a voice like a cross between... Nico and Dewey Bunnell (of America)? And it's beautiful! (Now I'm tracking down her own albums.) The song feels like a thick down comforter with a golden brown velvet cover, draped over a sofa and just inviting you to plunge in, wrap it around yourself and luxuriate in the softness and texture. That's what I get from it, anyway. It also feels like a David Sylvian song, one of the ones with Mark Isham playing trumpet. The song it reminds me of the most is "Thalheim" from Dead Bees on a Cake:
Okay, that's not Mark Isham playing the trumpet, it's Kenny Wheeler playing the fluegelhorn. Not only that, Kenny Wheeler has been recording with David Sylvian just as long as Mark Isham has: both played on his first solo album, 1984's Brilliant Trees. That album initially disappointed me: I was so enamored with the electronic sounds of Japan that I had trouble accepting the mostly-acoustic instrumentation of Trees, and I didn't buy a copy for over ten years. I always liked "The Ink in the Well," though, and it features... Kenny Wheeler on fluegelhorn!
Coming up: equal time for Mark Isham.
The Spiderman theme is fine as a jingle, but I've never thought of it as an actual cop-show theme. Until today, that is, when I found Norwegian electro duo Ugress's groovy remake:
That's definitive; I doubt you'll ever hear a better version of that song. Who are Ugress and what are they all about? Rather than trying to paraphrase I'll just paste in the statement from their MySpace page:
Ugress is mad sound professor Gisle Martens Meyer and his groovetight percussive assistant, The Igor.
With a sexy crew of guest vocalists and instrumentalists, Ugress bloom with references to the last decades of pop, film and cult culture.
Symptoms of exposure include subtle drift towards the dancefloor, uncontrollable rhythmical movements, hightened auditive pleasure and a out-of-reality experience reported as "being part of an epic film".
On stage an überhybrid mash-feist of mad professorizing, cloned musicians, steampunk instruments and multiple synchronized video projections keep your eyes, ears and consciousness glued to an escapist reality of multiple dimensions.
