Archive For The “ambient” Category
The band that put the gorgeous in Goth. Astoundingly beautiful in places, this album awakened a hitherto uncaring world to the pleasures housed by the 4AD label. Featuring members of the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Colourbox and Modern English performing songs by some truly great songwriters including the then unfashionable Alex Chilton, Roy Harper 
A genuine oddity, cello, vocals and well, echo, this is as singular as it gets. Arthur Russell was the visionary genius behind Sleeping Bag records, a label that found favour with the genre hopping iconoclasts of the eighties club scene by fusing disco with the avant garde. This is a very different proposition, having more 
Not many albums are recorded in a single day, and on the evidence of this one, perhaps the practice should be embraced more enthusiastically. Based on a piece of music commissioned in 2008 by the Royal Ballet, inspired by T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland, the album presents variations on two themes, rendered with the aid of 
A sprawling behemoth of an album, taking chillout into wild and uncharted territories decorated by surf guitars, live drums, pulsing techno and cinematically immense production. Influence spotting, as ever is the game to play and the likes of Sergio Leone, Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch, Bill Laswell, and Cheb i Sabbah jostle for attention in Track 
Angular and edgy, this music is inescapably urban. Dubstep is the unromanticised sound of the inner cities. Apparently drawing on the complete history of electronic music, Scuba produces a harder, cleaner sound than say, Burial. Fractured, kaleidoscopic and twitchy, this is the sound of the internet after everyone has gone to sleep
….And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness represents an extraordinary leap forward from the potential of earlier works by Olafur Arnalds, which threatened at times to collapse under the weight of the melancholia dominating the emotional range, particularly in last years ‘Found Songs’. A broader musical palette, even introducing drums to the mix, enables 
