Harold Budd - By the Dawn's Early Light (1991)

This is a splendid album, perhaps the most personal album of Harold Budd. Mixing together the reading of some of his beautiful poems and ambient musical soundscapes, Budd creates unique atmospheres, between day and night, between light and darkness, between sleep and awakening. Playing piano, Hammond B3 and synthesizer, Harold Budd is surrounded by B.J. Cole (pedal steel guitar), Bill Nelson (acoustic and electric guitars), Mabel Wong (viola) and Susan Allen (harp).

The result is magical and moving, deep and ambient, and a subtle and aerial chamber music surrounds Harold Budd's texts: his voice, the rythm and pauses of his reading are parts of the music.

Imagination meets memory, silence found its voice, words and sounds are just colours painting a beautiful, quiet, serene and ambient atmosphere...

link: mp3 / 320

HB.BtDEL.zip

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Ketil Bjornstad and David Darling - The River (1997)

This is a splendid ECM album recorded as a side project, during the sessions of The Sea, the quartet album of Ketil Bjornstad (with Terje Rypdal, Jon Christensen and David Darling).

In the 12 tracks of this album, we can listen to a very inspired dialogue of Bjornstad's piano and Darling's unique cello sound. One of the starting point of these sessions was William Byrd's and Orlando's Gibbon's melodic invention, translated into a modern idiom. Improvisation and unexpected creative moments offered the materials for the other tracks.

Chamber music, experiments in harmonic ambient music, exploration of all the creative possibilities between two gifted musicians, research in the blending of sounds and climates...

The River is an emblematic recording (among hundred of others) of what ECM is about... Intimate, deep, conceptual and emotional at the same time, crossing all the borders, creating its own place, its own identity at the crossroads of so many roads...

Ambient music at its best, music to swim through, if you love to dive into deep sound...

Link / mp3 320

KBDD.zip

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Penguin Cafe Orchestra - When in Rome, Recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall (1988)

How could I describe the music of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra ? Lets imagine a wedding party, where musicians invite everyone to dance and to have fun... Let's imagine a nomad band, travelling from city to city, and creating incredible parties, each time it stops in a particular place... Let's imagine yodel's art blending with American country music, let's imagine blues, jazz, classical music, rock blended in order to create a unique instrumental music, challenging any attempt to classify it... Let's imagine a pub, where an inspired music invite you to dance all the night...

Penguin Cafe Orchestra followed a very unique musical path, crossing many musical genres and creating unexpected dialogues between instruments and genres... I love the simplicity and the sophistication of the arrangements, the subtle blending of acoustic instruments, the inventive play on harmonies and rythms...

Guitars, percussions, piano and harmonium, cello, mandolin and ukelele.. Well, there so many instruments that it is impossible to list them...

If I was to locate the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on a map, I would pinpoint its place at the crossroad of minimal and chamber music, but I would like to add a third coordinate: pleasure and fun..

"When in Rome'" is a live recording...  You will feel the incredible feeling, the unique instrumental skill, the fun, the inspiration of this so creative band.

Simon Jeffes died in 1997. He was the main composer of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, he was its soul and he contributed to create its unique sound and mood...

I love this live recording... So much energy, feeling and creaticity.. Such a creative dialogue between musicians and instruments...

This is a great album !

link : mp3

PCOWiR1.zip

PCOWiR2.zip

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Harmonia Ensemble & Roger Eno - In a Room (1993)

"The rich subtle music of Roger Eno has forever remained dreamily suspended between an electronic appeal and high brow tendency. This record proposes him as a composer of pure chamber music, featuring acoustic melodies for piano, cello and clarinet. The CD also includes tracks for piano solo".  

The liner notes of this CD, released on the Italian label "Materiali Sonori", are a good introduction to Roger Eno's music. Roger is Brian's brother, and he shares with him the same interest in ambient musics (he was involved into the Apollo album, with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois). Pianist and singer,  Roger Eno is also a composer of chamber music, subtle and elegant, with a unique style. Orio Odori (clarinet, bass clarinet), Damiano Puliti (cello), Alessandra Garosi (piano) create an intimate and beautiful mood, while playing these 16 compositions. Listening to this record will take you from track one "Classical Music for those with no memory ( 4th Movement)" to track 16: "A Dance with no people (Aromatic Tango)".

This is a beautiful musical journey....

link: mp3 / 320

HERE.zip

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John Adams conducts - American Elegies: Charles Ives, Ingram Marshall, Morton Feldman, John Adams, David Diamond (1991)

All the compositions of this album share a common feature: a quiet and reflective mood, an elegiac feeling, blending together lament and memory. As the title of the opening track by Charles Ives suggests, this CD could be considered as a meditation about "The Unanswered Question", as an elegy for the inharmonious folly of the world itself. 

The Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by John Adams, plays compositions by Charles Ives (among them, Five Songs, for the splendid soprano voice of Dawn Upshaw), Ingram Marshall (Fog Tropes), Morton Feldman (Madame Press Dies Last Week at Ninety), John Adams himself (Eros piano, played by Paul Crossley) and David Diamond (Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel).

This is a beautiful journey through the territory of American new musics, beyond all the usual borders of genres and sub-genres. One could say that a particular form of minimalism is displayed into these delicate orchestral atmospheres, as intimate as chamber music, as evocative as memories fading away...

link / mp3 320

JAAmEl.zip

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Jean-Philippe Goude - Ainsi de nous (1994)

Jean-Philippe Goude (b. 1952) is a French composer who wrote many soundtracks for movies,  TV shows, adverts and dance companies. Some of his compositions were also commissioned by music festivals and symphonic orchestras.

Ainsi de nous is a good introduction to Goude's musical universe (his discography includes 5 other CDs): chamber music, with an intimate and a very subtle atmosphere, the twelve tracks of this album put the emphasis on melodies and refrains, blending neoclassical influences, a light jazzy swing, and a frivolous elegance that could remind the style of the Penguin Orchestra...

Clarinet and saxophone, basson, cello and violin, piano and harmonium, acoustic bass and accordion provide these compositions with their specific colours, and one can notice, among the musicians involved, jazz artists such as Bruno Fontaine or Renaud Garcia-Fons.

This beautiful album is a gem quite representative of the new musics trend  "à la française"..

link / mp3 320

JPhG.zip

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