But musically the piece is more distinctive than substantial just asits model often is
But musically the piece is more distinctive than substantial, just asits model often is.Very much unlike Simon Holt’s Canciones, a hauntingly intense and exquisitely imagined setting of poems about love and death by or derived from Lorca. The instrumental word-painting is fully the equal of Lorca’s astonishing imagery, and even with the orchestra in full view one is frequently at a loss to work out exactly how Holt achieves these sounds. One is decidedly, here, in the dream world of Lorca’s bleeding mountain sides and perfumed knife blossom.There’s nothing dreamy, though, about Jean Rigby’s immaculate singing and the Birmingham playing, both of which were of needle-point refinement.. *
Chris “Coco” Mellor has been around the club scene for about a decade, as journalist, producer and, more recently, co-presenter of Radio 1’s late-night Friday show The Blue Room. As a performer, he’s still best known, perhaps, as one-third of Coco Steel and Lovebomb, whose “Feel It” was a turntable hit back in 1992.
These days, Coco has chilled out a bit – who hasn’t? – and constructs relaxed, downtempo grooves in similar vein to Chicane, albeit less orderly and anthemic; where Chicane leans toward Robert Miles, Coco leans more on The Orb – “My Sunset” could be the baby sister of “Little Fluffy Clouds”, with its innocent female narrator eulogising airily about a meteorological phenomenon. The Erik Satie piano figures in “Falling (61)” and “Gemini” give an indication of the moods Coco deals with on Next Wave: elegant and unhurried, sliding gently into understated dub spaces. Like many a house producer, he calls on guest vocalists to bring his pieces to life, though not the voices you might expect. The actor Patrick Bergin and the writer Iain Banks lay spoken recitations over “Only Love” and “Dreaming”, while Nick Cave brings cabaret to a warm, glowing version of the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning”. Busiest of all, though, is Belle & Sebastian’s Monica Queen, oozing sensual languor on “Hazy Lazy” and “All of My Best Friends”, but somewhat overwrought on “Before You Broke My Heart”.. *
Before he became radio’s pre-eminent champion of world music, Charlie Gillett wrote the definitive account of American pop’s regional development in The Sound of the City. Not that the absence of such familiar names detracts from the overall impact: given the chance to hear “LA Woman” and “Heartbreak Hotel” again, or to discover such lost gems as Travis Wammack’s “Scratchy” and Garnet Mimms’ “A Quiet Place”, I know which I’d go for.
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It’s the big superstar DJs that still command the attention of media and punters alike, but outside the utilitarian realm of the nightclub dancefloor, the house-music boom has quietly wrought a revolution in home-recording that may prove of more long-lasting influence. Ironically, given the DJs’ reliance on analogue vinyl, the DIY scene is primarily digital, with bedroom sonic alchemists across the country cutting and pasting music together inside samplers on their computers, and devising new techniques to replace such hands-on methods as scratching. Boom Bip, aka Bryan Hollon, is one such bedroom boffin; Seed to Sun, his debut album, follows a single, “Circle”, made with rapper Dose One, which raised eyebrows a few months back. Like a lot of new digitalia, it plays fast and loose with dancefloor imperatives, switching beats in mid-stride and mischievously seeking to confound expectations at every turn. Wheezing techno shapes ooze over electro breakbeats, looped fragments of violin and smatterings of piano notes circle around sampled string bass lines, and, occasionally, one of Bip’s rapper chums pops up to mutter darkly, like Buck 65’s surreptitious insomniac observations on “The Unthinkable”: “Everywhere I still see ghosts/The selected works of Karl Marx/The greatest hits of Bill Monroe.” Throughout, the elements are electronically slashed and shredded with a playful enthusiasm that pulls the producer ever further away from the club scene, towards more experimental territory: in the case of “Popsicle”, the digitally mangled phone conversation and minimal keyboard figure recalls the work of US avant-gardist Robert Ashley Remarkable..