As with my last TOTW artist Earthen Sea, Gaussian Curve focuses his sound on wide ambient textures but shows the listener just how different the genre can be. Creating a Yin to Earthen Seas Yang. The dark cold shadows of Earthen Seas’ sound pallet are replaced with bright crystalline structures shimmering in broad daylight. On Dancing Rain a rhythmic Synth pad sound and bass provide minimal but enticing melodies that keep you hooked through its playtime:
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As the end of the year approaches and so does my end of year list I’ve been spending time listening to albums I’ve missed throughout the year and came across Earthen Sea.
The artist mixes ambient, house and techno to create a massively atmospheric sound. On the track About That Time he uses minimal percussion to drive wide synth pads and guitar to create a club track with a wide cold sound pallet. It’s a sound I have always been a huge fan of and Earthen Sea does it particularly well making it my track of the week and well worth your time:
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I recently visited Morocco on holiday and during my travels was introduced to a collection of music from the region that I found captivating. Tinariwen were one of the first to grab my attention with a sound that manages to blend traditional folk and modern styles.
On Islegh Tagharm Tifhamam the guitars and percussion create a fluid almost hypnotic sound that provides the perfect background for the vocal harmonies to whisk you away:
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Four Tet does things differently. His take on dance music has always used sounds and structures outside of other artists in the mainstream. It’s a style that he has cultivated over the years and in different directions but always to great results and his latest album New Energy is no exception.
The focus of the album is a more minimal approach with lots off atmosphere which unifies all the tracks to create a complete piece of work. LA Trance with its lead synth Line with plenty of Swing was the first track to really get in my head and I’ve chosen it as my Track Of The Week.]
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On his latest album PHANTOM BRICKWORKS Bibio creates large ambient soundscapes reminiscent of other luminaries in the genre. It’s a sound I’ve been developing myself over the past few weeks for a my live performances at Leigh’s ART Market on the 9th & 10th of December and in doing so you realise just how hard it is go keep things simple in structure. You constantly battle with the desire to add more but it’s the lack of this that creates the track.
By removing something easy to latch onto the listener has to find their own from the sounds that are available or even imagine sounds to give the track a feeling of competition. It creates a track with a unique feel that can be frustrating for some listeners but addictive to others. I fall into the second camp as these kind of tracks never get old for me, leaving space in the mix to constantly create my own ideas.
On PHANTOM BRICKWORKS III Bibio uses tried and tested techniques that are highly effective for the genre as loops of piano notes are played at very slightly different durations to create a melody that drifts gradually over time.
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Hi all, It’s been a while since I have done anything live but the wait is over. I will providing ambient background music with some special guests for Leigh’s ART Market at the Turnpike Gallery on the 9th and 10th of December between 12 and 5pm. Address below:
The Turnpike
Civic Square,
Leigh,
WN7 1EB
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Link:
https://goo.gl/maps/8Y1noTmuEop
This will be a collection of improvised and generative music with wild track recordings of spaces unlike other stuff I have done before. Designed more to provide an accompaniment to the Leigh’s ART Market rather than the centerpiece of it. Feel free to come in at any point and have a listen and a look at some of the art work throughout the two days and 10 hours of music. Over this time I will be accompanied by other musicians throughout who will all add their own unique styles to the music. I will let you know more about them closer to the time.
It’s been a long time since I posted any of my own music to the site and for that I’m sorry. I have been working on stuff for quite some time and have a backlog of material that is in limbo. I will have more news on future releases in the coming months and thank you for your patience.
All the best,
CT
BadBadNotGood are a Jazz Quartet for the modern generation. Their influences span multiple genre especially Hip hop and because of this they have become a regular collaborators with some of the biggest current Hip hop acts in the world.
Their own albums also show this willingness to adapt and morph between styles and genre for the sake of the track. It leads to a versatility and unpredictability in their work that is always refreshing to the listener.
On Time Moves Slow, laid back soul music is clearly the main influence. Future Islands Samuel T. Herring providing the vocals to a bed of lush organs, gutar and drums with a natural swagger that really give the track an organic sense of place. It’s the atmosphere that’s created that really elevates this track. Talking you to a world of dark smokey clubs and late night recording studios. It’s a sound that’s missing from a lot of modern production as technologies and cost have removed the more natural sounds of people playing in a room together and It’s great to hear it still existing on tracks like this:
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Sun Kil Moon has been developing his own style in the genre of the singer songwriter over his past four albums and his last three could almost be seen as a trilogy. Benji was a nostalgic masterpiece that looked back on lead singer/guitarist Mark Kozelek’s life in a mix of joy and sorrow with a forward facing honesty that hit home on many counts. Then the album Universal Themes brought the same style of honest story telling the current day with diary like detail. Now on his latest entitled Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood Kozelek has blended both the past and the present together in more detail. We spend a lot of this album inside his head as it goes to some uplifting and unsettling places.
The Highway Song is a great example of this. Boiled down the song is about his thoughts whilst driving around with the A B structure almost working as two separate songs. The opening A structure deals with immediate thoughts that he experiences as he sees things from his car before it reminds him of his fascination with Murder and Serial Killers which then become the B section. These sections are explained with a detail of the crime with a police report accuracy. This Structure creates a dark and occasionally uncomfortable piece of music but an intriguing one that’s worth listening to.
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Boards Of Canada have always being and enegmatic presence in the music industry. Staying secretive and creating music that is unique and has become iconic for fans of the fringe elements of electronic music. It’s a sound that is so distinguishable that any listener of their work will recognise it within seconds when its frequently used in films and television, even if its is a track they haven’t heard before. No mean feat for any artist.
Peacock Tail blends the mix of field recordings, sampling and instrumentation well. With large synth pads and heavy use of delay and reverb to create a cavernous sound that is then cut through with precise and dry drums. The song slowly shifts through different instrumentation and iterations of the melody, effortlessly creating a sound that sits somewhere between the the foreground and background. It’s this style that captivates fans of their work. Crating a pallet of tonality that is constantly shifting yet rarely intruding, instead reflecting the thoughts of the listener onto it.
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Mogwai have had a long and productive career developing their instrumental atmospheric sound which can vary from light ambiances to heavy rock.
Reno Pano has been out for a few years now but it’s a track I continue to come back to. Its abrasive build of guitars and synths are Layered on top of each other with different styles of distortion to create a wall of sound that becomes somewhere between overpowering and hypnotizing on the senses.
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