Qwertyuiopia

It’s old stuff time: Five albums that, well, you should have. This time’s selection features albums with lots of electronic elements.

Brian Eno - Nerve Net (1992)

Although it’s not one of Brian Eno’s most recognized works, and not very characteristic of the historical perspective that established artists such as him are generally seen in, Nerve Net is a textbook example of a masterwork.

Synths and samplers are becoming easier to program and experiment with and Eno, along with all the other big names (such as Robert Fripp and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones) participating on this album are the obvious people for taking up the challenge of building something intelligent off the potential that synthesized sound has to offer.

Nerve Net is a dense, uniform album, using lots of compression and synthesized percussion, jazzy and funky bass lines and incoherent but mathematically precise-sounding lyrics to create a pretty consistent atmosphere of detached complexity, with a bit of quirkiness and cynicism on the side.

Shpongle - Are You Shpongled? (1999)

Shpongle is a project of Simon Posford (also known in the psychedelic scene as Hallucinogen) and Raja Ram, who used to play with Quintessence. Their sound is mostly psychedelic downtempo synthesizers along with sampled eastern traditional instruments, Posford’s synthies mixing with Ram’s arrangements of flutes.

While it’s probably not the first time that psychedelic slows it’s tempo down a little bit, nor the first time that traditional instruments are introduced to electronic music, Are You Shpongled? has definitely left a mark in defining a new genre, known as Psybient, or Ambient Psy, as it was one of the first albums in it’s time to be comprised totally of chill-out tracks.

Well, after this album’s success the Psybient scene fully bloomed, producing lots and lots of names that sounded lots like one another, and reached a state that bears an uncanny resemblance to decadence within the next five years or so.

Anyway, Are You Shpongled? is a very inspired album, conveying its intended atmosphere with an obvious deep understanding of the potential of electronic synthesis and production.

Primal Scream - XTRMNTR (2000)

Primal Scream is one of the bands that once (during the 80’s and 90’s) defined the British indie scene, and it may seem a bit weird that they’re not represented by Screamadelica, their most successful 1991 album.

Exterminator is a rather loud and dark specimen of Primal Scream’s work. Aggressive but with its sense of irony intact, it showcases the band’s ability to express an atmosphere of anger, revolt and desperation, without missing out on style and trippyness. In my opinion, this is Primal Scream at their peak.

Overall, Exterminator is a very good dance record, experimental and noisy in a very balanced way, managing at the same time to be both ominous in sound and infectiously pop.

Björk - Medúlla (2004)

Björk is, without doubt, one of the weirdest things to happen to international pop music in the last decades. Having a solid musical background since childhood and pretty diverse field experience with bands such as The Sugarcubes and Exodus, she came up with a personal style of her own, and tasted success on the way.

Medúlla is the album that certifies this last statement. Almost every one of her solo albums until Vespertine at 2001 was a step towards perfecting the same act, every album being more refined and specific than the previous one. The obvious development to that would be yet another album, one even more popular and inoffensive, that would sound like something-like-Björk and would probably afford her a villa someplace nice.

But then Medúlla came out. Now, I’m sure that Björk wasn’t facing particular economical difficulties that would force her to do something pop if she didn’t want to, but then on the other hand there’s not a lot of people that really kept working their music in the face of success.

This album is about vocal work. The sound is mostly shaped out of sampled voices, and though admittedly inaccessible and maybe downright tiresome for a large portion of the audience (the ones in for the video cuteness), it is a very intricately woven and profound piece of art.

Tosca - J.A.C. (2005)

Tosca is a project of Richard Dorfmeister (well known from Kruder & Dorfmeister) and classical composer/producer Rupert Huber, started in 1994 in Vienna.

J.A.C. (initials stand for Joshua, Arthur and Conrad, the sons of Dorfmeister and Huber) is a particularly tasteful and carefully laid out trip-hop album. Lots of different singers in combination with the subtle but rich downtempo music end up shaping a result that’s non-intrusive without getting boring.

And isn’t that what chill-out’s all about?


So, that’s all for now: Hopefully these should keep you busy until the next batch of arbitrarily grouped reviews is out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 13:22 and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.