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Toronto ( ON ) - Canada
Admin of artists : Aural Pleasure
Website : http://sites.google.com/site/brendaclews
Joined : July 06, 2008
Instruments I play
Latest starred albums
Last starred artists
* The simplicity of this electronic music with its white spaces is conducive to my inner poetic thoughts. It's not shifting my brainwaves so much as moving with them. How this is I cannot explain. Is this ambient background music or muse to create by? A bicycle pump & air? Too wild for words. And yet it's gentle, opening pathways rather than probing; allowing a strange rhythm rather than imposing one. I like! I like!
As I listened, I wrote images.
1)The Time of Recompense.
Like a massive, slow procession of cumulo-nimbus storm clouds moving slowly and ominously over the mountains, unstoppable, a dirge, funereal.
2)Lullaby for Shadows.
Slashes of sunlight tearing the clouds which gracefully part like curtains to reveal the stage, a grand stage of all life. The artist is playing the music of the grand story of the tableau of life with the tenderness of a lullaby.
3)Escape.
Strings, action. The inner workings of the organ in the silent night. An audience of souls. Ghosts dancing as the heart remembers love, joy, fullness.
Glory. Steady, majestic dance building tonal waterfalls, crests of waves of notes, golden shining through.
Increasing radiance.
Pure love in the final magnificent dance. Rich, timbre echoing to the steady heartbeat of chords until the last ray of sun sets.
The artist gives the gift of his music to celebrate the drama, the gift of life, a recompense. This love partakes.
Mary & Juan present a beautiful couple of songs, there's some power here, they are in control of the music and can let it sweep through their fingers, but the album as a whole is perhaps too short or lacks some moments of lightness, of feather-breeze. While beautifully played, without that feather-breeze, a little ponderous, old wood too polished. There's lustre but not enough sap. I think a longer album modulated (so that there are peaks and crests to the waves, or the wind rushing through the leaves while the tree is deeply rooted) might better display the obvious talent and experience of these two musicians.
This is a very beautiful album, and I could be ecstatic about your music... except the synthesized drumbeat really spoils the harmony and excellence of the album. That incessant unreal beat takes over, dominates. It wouldn't be so bad if it was real drumming, with actual hands, with the echo of real skin taut over wood chamber. I am so sorry to say this, but either do disco lounge or angelic beauty. For me, mixing angelic sounds and this tinny be-bop beat doesn't work. At the very least, decrease the sounds of the synthesized drumbeat to almost non-existent. Every song begins beautifully, with such promise. Then you put on that way too loud disco beat. Can't you hear how it over-rides the ethereal beauty of starwaves of music with its unrelenting mechanical sound? Oh, oh, oh. I'm happy to have found this album; sad it's ultimately unlistenable.
'Wander without following the day' almost works... it's the best on the album, but, again, that beat, tacked on, starting somewhere into the song and suddenly ending before the song does, not integrated in very well, tacked on, and too loud.
At the very least, I'd recommend decreasing the 'drum/cymbals' volume, like drastically, and therefore making it *serve* the starwaves.
This music takes me deeply into my body and my spirit in ways that make me grateful. With this music, I am able to dream. To it, I dance. Beautiful, of depth and longing, fun and cadence, laughter and love, sensuality and asceticism, abundance and emptiness. The production values are excellent. What a discovery you are! Many thanks.
I've just listened to 'Beyond This' and wow! A brilliant album! I can't believe how Buz Hendricks stretches musical boundaries and yet remains within a jazz rubric and find the creativity here exciting. I look forward to listening again and again as I come to understand what he is doing in this gentle, sensual and yet risky, edge-stretching, boundary-leaping jazz interweaving.
This album has lifted my spirit this dark and cool and wet Toronto evening...
Thank you...
A large vision. I listened to 30 sec of the first track last night and downloaded without reading your notes. This morning, out with the dog in the morning air, I listened.
And I thought how far some of our musicians have moved from 'traditional' music, though I was not thinking of the Orient but of the European concert. Melody and rhythm don't exist in this album in the traditional sense.
There is a beat, but it is organic. As if we are moving through a deep underground cave. Echoes. Stalagtites. Distant water where diving is so deep as to be depthless. Strange sea creatures in those black waters of the lakes in the underground caves. Ecstatic diving, bubbles, cool pure water.
As we move through the dark cool chambers of the cave, its damp limestone walls, light cascades in occasionally. Ebullient. Nourishment for our earthbound bodies.
The woman singing is both ethereal, like a Greek siren calling, or an angel healing, for she is both, and also a sense of being synthesized, produced.
We move through Nyx as if in a movie. I felt an archetypal narrative unfolding in my depths. The "Primordial goddess of the night"... wow! Yes! I felt her, strongly, in my first listening, before referring to the notes.
The drums throughout hold everything together for me. They are my link to traditional music, tribal music, and the power of the Orient beats here too.
Fukataku's drumming anchors the subterranean journey of this soundscape. This soundscape in 6 sections - organic sonic world of strange sounds and energies and things sweeping, by, close, far, ebulliently, darkly, it's almost a ghost world, and yet more primal than that. The human and the animal and the synthesized all co-alesque in this deeply mythological, archetypal music that is ambient and trance and has flavours of traditional Japanese influence which takes the listener through a deep inner journey in the dark and mysterious places of the soul.
Each song a dance, our movement through the world. Hush, galloping, dancing quietly in the joy of our inner soul. Harmonies of existence come rushing in. Moments of hesitation, hovering on the edges of; moments of confidence, expansive, open. We find our footsteps lightening. We are airborne Chagall figures who dance elegantly on the ballroom floor. The depth of Tarkovsky's vision. Interlaced light trickling, cascading.
Yet also speed, tempo, drama. Humor. Vast panoramas in these deftly played keys, but viewed close. Slow building of soundscapes that fill the heart to overflowing. In the depths of the self, on the empty stage. Where it begins.
We are art; we are life. Each piece contains hommage to an artist, Modigliani, Rameau, Lermontov, Debussy, among others. And Lena Selyanina, composer, concert pianist, captures the mystery of living in its most intimate and expansive realities.
I love this album. I rented a space and danced to it for an hour, and made some videopoems. "Spring" is the profound, beautiful music in 'A Poetic of Light/Une poétique de la lumière,' which may be found in a post here: http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2009/07/poetic-of-lightune-poetique-de-la.html and also at my website: http://sites.google.com/site/brendaclews/videopoetry
Thank you for this beautiful vision, this beautiful music.
Dear Lena Selyanina, how can I express how much I love this album and Piano Paintings? Your fingers and the keys dance so that the strings within the body of the piano come to life and offer their deepest poetry to us. You take me on great vistas through the world and beyond when I listen, as I have over and over, to these pieces. They bring comfort, inspiration, excitement, joy, the large harmonies of an inconsistent life. I can see how you also love Tarkofsky! You create a music of luminescences, of liquid and crystal light forms, like a magician, a music that echoes creation, that is grand and vast and yet simple and intimate, to express and uplift us. I am grateful for your sharing your work here on Jamendo.
And now I have to relate to you that I have posted a performance piece with a clip from 'Sarah's Dance.' I played your music during a solitary 2 hour dance session that I videotaped. Later I chose a poem I'd written to go with it. I hope you approve - I have given you full credit, both in the credits in the video and as an active link back here in the "info." It's at my blog, Rubies in Crystal: http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2009/07/venus-enroute.html
I hope through my little humorous dance that others discover the beauty of your music and find their spirits soaring too.
Thank you!!!
This piece of what I would call experimental music, using your text to sound program, Japanese flutes and Jazz drums and other assortments of instrumental sounds fit perfectly with a prose poem I recently wrote and so I read to the rhythms of 'Lambkins Black' and put the two tracks together in Garage Band and uploaded to SoundClick. An embedded player as well as credit to you and links back to SoundClick are at my blog: http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2009/07/meridians-of-culture.html
Your on-line site wasn't up so I wasn't able to play with my own writing and see what might be generated. Somehow I don't think it would have been as perfect as this piece is.
Anyway, I hope you like what I did, and I wanted to thank you for offering some of your music on Jamendo.
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