Oyez, oyez
Mar. 21st, 2005 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaWork's been a bit mad this last week. But here's a music post while I have a breather. :D
Lansing-Dreiden - The Advancing Flags
Lansing-Dreiden - Laid In Stone
Lansing-Dreiden - Desert Lights
Selected tracks off Lansing-Dreiden's The Incomplete Triangle, which I ordered off Kemado Records the other week. It's... basically I can't shake off the impression that they set out deliberately to make a fake!New Order album just so they could design a fake!Peter Saville sleeve for it. And why not? It's easier said than done. Let alone done in the Formalist manner Lansing-Dreiden adopted: if you fold the cardboard CD sleeve back on itself the white lines join up into a triangle shape. Each "side" is four songs. Each four-song group is in a different style, loosely corresponding to errrm Closer, Movement and Low-Life. XD;; ...Not exactly, of course, there's other stuff in there. I hear My Bloody Valentine, a touch of the Beach Boys. The songs are, by the way, amazing.
Lansing-Dreiden insists it's a corporate multimedia design collective that decorates the interior of art galleries and such, and only a pop band some of the time. Their media communiqués are lit-theory balderdash. All quite intentionally over the top, but - it would appear - way too subtle. 90% of online reviews run along the lines of "they're pretentious art-school wankers but we forgive them because the music is good," except Pitchfork which was like "never mind the music, they commit the unforgiveable sin of being even more pretentious wankers than we are." The other 10% grokked the joke. XD
Depeche Mode - Halo
Depeche Mode - Halo (Goldfrapp Remix)
(With the original, for comparison's sake.) Never got around to posting this remix to lj, though I peddled it over MSN to all and sundry, and in any case it was hanging around in my download folder for so long flisters with proper initiative should have it already. XD But if not, this is a must-listen.
Here's the thing. Depeche Mode remixes fall into one of three broad categories: A) the 8-minute house/trance mix that sounds like Underworld, B) the clanky industrial mix that sounds like NIN, and C) the mix that sounds exactly like the remixer's own work (vis. Air, Ulrich Schnauss, Mike Shinoda out of Linkin Park). Whereas Alison Goldfrapp... The effect is difficult to describe. It starts with a harp. Then Dave Gahan's voice comes in - "you wear guilt / like shackles on your feet / like a halo in reverse" - the production lush and curiously flattened, as if it's all taking place on the same perspectiveless plane. One imagines the saint in a pre-Giotto wood icon, sporting a halo of applied beaten gold. Rising chords, ballet-music tremolo strings (Debussy? Saint-Saen?), child-angel voices in an echo chamber, an opera sample... I barely experience it as music; it's like listening to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine.
Chemistry - Pieces Of A Dream (DJ Watarai Remix): Soulful j-boybander ballad, quasi m-flo production. Someone said this was an Inui & Renji song, no? It is for me, anyway, I wax utterly sentimental listening to this (and used it to close one of my personal favorite mixes). Will translate the lyrics when I have time.
Iron Maiden - Dream of Mirrors: the GetBackers Voodoo Child arc as told through nine minutes of prog-metal. No, really, t3h Maiden's as good as saved me a chapter or two's worth of translation. XD "Lost! In a dream of mirrors! Lost! In a paradox!"
The Raitei track that follows the above in my (cheesy, dramatic, decidedly proggy) Mugenjou FST: UNKLE feat. Ian Brown and Mani - Reign. Like one of those dance tracks featuring Robert Smith, only with the Stone Roses and... not really dance. Epic-battle strings, like Massive Attack going to war. One mostly can't tell whether it's "reign" or "rain" in the lyrics, which is intentional.
Lastly, in honour of sakura season, a video: Tsuji Ayano - Sakura no ki no shita de. It's one of my favorites. Something about the imagery grabs and shakes me, almost to the point of tears. The theme song to an imaginary film based on a famous pre-war Japanese novel that was never written. (Here's the mp3.)
Lansing-Dreiden - The Advancing Flags
Lansing-Dreiden - Laid In Stone
Lansing-Dreiden - Desert Lights
Selected tracks off Lansing-Dreiden's The Incomplete Triangle, which I ordered off Kemado Records the other week. It's... basically I can't shake off the impression that they set out deliberately to make a fake!New Order album just so they could design a fake!Peter Saville sleeve for it. And why not? It's easier said than done. Let alone done in the Formalist manner Lansing-Dreiden adopted: if you fold the cardboard CD sleeve back on itself the white lines join up into a triangle shape. Each "side" is four songs. Each four-song group is in a different style, loosely corresponding to errrm Closer, Movement and Low-Life. XD;; ...Not exactly, of course, there's other stuff in there. I hear My Bloody Valentine, a touch of the Beach Boys. The songs are, by the way, amazing.
Lansing-Dreiden insists it's a corporate multimedia design collective that decorates the interior of art galleries and such, and only a pop band some of the time. Their media communiqués are lit-theory balderdash. All quite intentionally over the top, but - it would appear - way too subtle. 90% of online reviews run along the lines of "they're pretentious art-school wankers but we forgive them because the music is good," except Pitchfork which was like "never mind the music, they commit the unforgiveable sin of being even more pretentious wankers than we are." The other 10% grokked the joke. XD
Depeche Mode - Halo
Depeche Mode - Halo (Goldfrapp Remix)
(With the original, for comparison's sake.) Never got around to posting this remix to lj, though I peddled it over MSN to all and sundry, and in any case it was hanging around in my download folder for so long flisters with proper initiative should have it already. XD But if not, this is a must-listen.
Here's the thing. Depeche Mode remixes fall into one of three broad categories: A) the 8-minute house/trance mix that sounds like Underworld, B) the clanky industrial mix that sounds like NIN, and C) the mix that sounds exactly like the remixer's own work (vis. Air, Ulrich Schnauss, Mike Shinoda out of Linkin Park). Whereas Alison Goldfrapp... The effect is difficult to describe. It starts with a harp. Then Dave Gahan's voice comes in - "you wear guilt / like shackles on your feet / like a halo in reverse" - the production lush and curiously flattened, as if it's all taking place on the same perspectiveless plane. One imagines the saint in a pre-Giotto wood icon, sporting a halo of applied beaten gold. Rising chords, ballet-music tremolo strings (Debussy? Saint-Saen?), child-angel voices in an echo chamber, an opera sample... I barely experience it as music; it's like listening to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine.
Chemistry - Pieces Of A Dream (DJ Watarai Remix): Soulful j-boybander ballad, quasi m-flo production. Someone said this was an Inui & Renji song, no? It is for me, anyway, I wax utterly sentimental listening to this (and used it to close one of my personal favorite mixes). Will translate the lyrics when I have time.
Iron Maiden - Dream of Mirrors: the GetBackers Voodoo Child arc as told through nine minutes of prog-metal. No, really, t3h Maiden's as good as saved me a chapter or two's worth of translation. XD "Lost! In a dream of mirrors! Lost! In a paradox!"
The Raitei track that follows the above in my (cheesy, dramatic, decidedly proggy) Mugenjou FST: UNKLE feat. Ian Brown and Mani - Reign. Like one of those dance tracks featuring Robert Smith, only with the Stone Roses and... not really dance. Epic-battle strings, like Massive Attack going to war. One mostly can't tell whether it's "reign" or "rain" in the lyrics, which is intentional.
Lastly, in honour of sakura season, a video: Tsuji Ayano - Sakura no ki no shita de. It's one of my favorites. Something about the imagery grabs and shakes me, almost to the point of tears. The theme song to an imaginary film based on a famous pre-war Japanese novel that was never written. (Here's the mp3.)
