Almo's Music Blog

This article will be a two-parter. The first part is the story of how I came to buy and love Biosphere's Substrata , the first beatless ambient album I heard. The second part will be a review of that album. The break is clearly marked below, so readers can get at whichever parts interest them. This music is now just over twenty years old, but I find it as fresh now as when I first heard it sometime around 2005. There are two albums I use to introduce people to Ambient music with. This is one of them, and the other is Loscil's most excellent Coast / Range / Arc . Both are great starting points for the genre. Note: the link to Substrata above includes the extra music released for the reprint; the original album is just the first 11 tracks, ending with "Silene". The Story Over the years, I have gotten into what I consider weirder and weirder music. First, back in about 1991, I had bought mostly stuff like Best of Blondie, a bunch (but not all yet) of the Moody Blu...

This week's article is a review of an Alt-Country album. It's not a genre I listen to very often, but this one warrants attention. The self-titled Broken Muse (available at bandcamp ) is the debut release from this septet of friends. Led by singer/songwriter/guitarist Mark Goodwin, it combines a more traditional Country sound with rock elements and modern recording clarity. While it does contain some rock elements, the result doesn't sound like Contemporary Country which often sounds like rock/pop with a slide guitar and/or southern accent thrown in. Just within the first three tracks we get a wide variety of sounds: All You Want sounds very traditional, Have It Your Way rocks out, and Holiday has a more loungy feel. Despite being so different, there is a cohesive sound to them and none of them feels out of place on the album. I'm not an expert in this kind of music due to limited exposure to it. But I'll go out on a limb and say that the chord structures are va...

I am going to try a new kind of article today... an in-depth single-track analysis. Some of the music I like appeals to me for very specific reasons. While I was watching the movie Amadeus, it occurred to me that I could probably appreciate opera music much more if I could think of it in the terms Salieri describes it with. So I will be doing some of these in the hope that it opens up some new musical doors for a few people. For my first attempt, I will be doing Orbital's "Planet of the Shapes" from their 1992 self-titled album (the brown one... they have three self-titled albums of different colors). One of my all-time favorite pieces of music from any artist, this is a 10-minute Ambient Techno epic with some very interesting sonic texture choices. The mixture of hard techno drum sounds with floating flute and sitar is very interesting. However, I'll be focusing more on the track's rhythmic content. Here's a link to Orbital's SoundCloud page with the ...

Plaster – Platforms (2011) How I found this album is actually pretty funny. I was looking for the latest release on iTunes from Plaster, a Montreal electro-jazz band. Here's a sample of what they sound like; I love this track: https://myspace.com/plasterfirstaidkit/music/song/square-wave-21881461-21682646 iTunes doesn't differentiate well between different bands with the same name, so Platforms came up in the search. It was released more recently, so I took a listen. This is what I found: https://plastersound.bandcamp.com/track/component It's a completely different artist (obvious if you listen to the two tracks). This one sounds like some sort of hybrid between Nine Inch Nails and Monolake's Momentum. It was a great discovery; I since have gotten all of their released albums, and they're all good. But I have to say this one is still my favorite, which is why it's getting a review. The sound engineering on this disc is amazing. Everything is crisp an...

Loscil – Coast/Range/Arc (2011) This album exemplifies a minimal music genre, so I will spend some time explaining to readers how I came to appreciate music of this type. I do this in the hope that they might be interested in diving in after me if they haven't already. The first real "favorite band" I ever had was The Moody Blues, starting in the late 80s. For about 10 years, I would describe them to people as being my favorite. During that time, my taste in music started to branch out as I gained exposure to more kinds of music. At one point in the late 90s when Internet Radio was just starting up, I found a channel called "Cryosleep - Zero Beats Guaranteed". I couldn't imagine why someone would want to listen to music without beats at the time. I thought of Classical music as a different animal, as it still had clear rhythmic structures, and is a showcase for the skills of orchestras in playing it and in conductors interpreting it. But if I was going t...

Ohrwert has long produced both Dub Techno and beatless Ambient recordings (the latter under his real name, Arjen Schat). He's a master of both forms, with his Dub Techno varying between deep mysteriousness and upbeat jams, and his Ambient recording covering sequential compositions, Drone Ambient, and even the occasional step into Dark Ambient. With his album Ambex Project ( http://music.ohrwert.com/album/the-ambex-project ), he blends the two styles into a seamless experience, by making a set of tracks that sit at varying locations on a continuum from being heavily rhythmic to a carefully constructed drone. As usual for his work, the quality of the sound staging is impeccable. I recommend listening to this in a quiet room with either good headphones or a stereo with really good imaging. Formally, most of the tracks are quite sparse in terms of composition. But what they lack in density of elements they surely make up for with beautiful sonic texturing. The opener starts us wi...

A little while ago, I asked Bola (Darrel Fitton) if he would kindly answer a text interview. He said he would, and another little while later, the following text file arrived. My questions are in italics, his answers follow. At the time of posting, he has a new album on the way, D.E.G! See his artist page at Skam Records here: Skam Records On a personal note, I am so thrilled to have the honor of posting this. Bola is one of my favorite artists, and I am terribly grateful that he took the time to give us this interesting insight into his work. How did you get started in music? I've played piano from about the age of 7 and that's probably why I still have classical leanings, but I would say my first introduction to something resembling contemporary music would have been through my skateboarding buddies at about 14 years old. Those guys were all a bit more clued up in most things than me back then.. and I guess being part of that crew led me to being introduced...