Reviews by kuvien

I got out my D&D miniatures and played with them while listening to this album. Yes, I made the battle sound effects with my mouth.

I've not got much taste for it, but this one's not bad. I like the non-English version because I don't care what the lyrics are. I'm just listening for the manly anthemic vocals singing about their manly Swedish king.

Saami's been making music (I assume on his rooftop) all his adult life, but it's only been in the last couple years that he's had a recording career. This, like his previous album, is a religious microtonal meditation that bears the weight of its meditation on its shoulders. It moves slowly because it's moving in relation to its divine subject, not its listeners. I have a feeling this music would bore a lot of listeners, both in the East and the West.

The constant (not annoying) droning on this album creates a sense of mystery and space, and that space is filled with male choral singing and chanting. The protracted vocalization evokes a sense of timelessness, like when the sun is at is zenith in an unclouded sky. Though it’s rather easy to track the movement of our fiery orb when it lies on the horizon, when it travels above us, its movement is pretty much undetectable. It hangs there, burning and unmoving, like this music.

Beautiful, meditative, longform spiritual music focusing on the droning qualities of the instruments and the expressive vocals of the singer.

An excellent collaboration here. This is the kind of music you'd hear in a jazz bar in the [Film168] world, the retro-futuristic sound of the distant crying guitars fitting the scene perfectly.

This is basically ambient jazz guitar music with some jazz-rock moments mixed in. “Fare Well” feels like a farewell to Earth and to all solid ground. The weightless odyssey begins. Pretty cool to have come across something that's basically ambient guitar-solo jazz. This album is perfectly named, because it feels like going on a space odyssey to Planet Jazz.

Much freer and more experimental than his other albums I've heard, but still a great album. Sometimes it's good to just let go and see where the wanky new age stuff takes you. This is cloud and bird jazz, the notes flying as high above you as the puffy white clouds and crying down at you like hawks or chirping like sparrows.

George Russell is a mad scientist running an orphanage for foundling technology. He takes the devices in and, against the advice of his bemused neighbors, begins the long (and fascinating) process of teaching the machines about Man. "We made you. You are our dangerous creations, so we must instruct you in the ways of humanity to facilitate coexistence. Hear this? This is a musical instrument. This is jazz. Feel its warmth. Understand its unpredictability. Hear that? Those are human voices! Learn the tongues of Man. Listen, and when you are ready, speak. No. Sing!"

When you're scrounging for supplies in a post-apocalyptic hellscape and come across curious musical artefacts from a bygone era. A couple women back at camp can read music, though, and they spend their nights by the fire staving off fear by singing these lonely tunes.

This album is an exploration of the restlessness we feel in modern society, a disquiet born of frustrated dreams and curtailed desires. Youth struggles to discover itself, but there is a sense of being locked into things—into a system—and everything is boiled down to science, for either our salvation or our damnation.

An incredible, legendary album, and the only one I know of that picks up with the continuation of the song that ended the previous album. This one opens with the conclusion of the Cygnus saga, the god of balance being born out of the near-cosmos-ending struggle between appetite and intellect, personified as Dionysus and Apollo. Just a perfect, epic song. What follows is a brief criticism of modern politics, and then the album ends with the monumental "La Villa Strangiato", arguably the best thing Rush ever composed and played, an immortal testament to what the band was capable of.

A highly philosophical album whose message is locked like a spell within the music, A Farewell to Kings is a treatise on the possibility of the intersection of the real and the ideal. It expresses profound discontent regarding the state of things as they now stand and desires a return to the way things used to be, not in the good old days sense but in that archetypal quest for a return to Eden, Atlantis, or Xanadu. Rush, like Plato, is sketching out the blueprint for a perfect society, where the philosopher and plowman not only each knows his part but is content within that role. Also, though I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to music, I can't think of another album that has a to-be-continued song like "Cygnus", which is picked up on their next album.

What I love about this album is its unconventionality for the early 1980s, especially because it was a time of tight corporate control over music. This isn't the album that led me to the Vanguarda paulista movement (an experimental, avant-garde approach to making music by artists without major record deals), but its eventual inclusion in my collection was a foregone conclusion due to its quirky songwriting and structures, its eclectic playfulness, and its unconventional vocal performances. This music is basically Rock in Opposition on the other side of the Pond, a culture of artistic rebellion by likeminded, forward-thinking artists who wanted to prove that they could do it without label support and without limiting themselves to what's popular (what sells).

Dizzying vocals—or rather vocals performed by a dizzy man hopping on one leg trying to keep his balance while wiping the drool from his lips, and the percussion and bass guitar pound out an SOS. Brilliant when the vocalist gets his feet and leads the percussion along, returning the favor. And then they throw in chase scene music just for the hell of it. This album is playful and fun, though I’d be surprised if many people can listen to it in one sitting.

This is beautiful insanity splashing through shallow synth puddles.

This album opens with a gut-punch of freaky, punctuated vocals, supported by great bass guitar work. The psychedelic vocal interludes are a welcome respite to the ongoing brutality of this thundering, drum-heavy musical exploration. The end of the album is a real treat, too, the last three tracks being “Classical Music Medley”, “Hard Rock Medley”, and “Progressive Rock Medley”, all with three- to five-second instrumental snippets of famous songs all strung together.

This is an American-Malian collaboration, and it sounds like it, too, what with the rendition of a Thelonious Monk composition as well as something out of Welsh tradition (of all places!). Things never get too complicated here, which is fine by me, making for a pleasant, relaxing listen in which I can enjoy the rich tones of an expressive trombone as well as the evocative sounds of traditional Mande instruments such as the kora (a 21-string harp), the balafon (a wooden xylophone), and the n'goni (a small lute). They seemingly disparate atmospheres of the instruments blend well together because they never demand too much of one another.

This one popped up on my radar because of my interest in Andreas Røysum, leader of his Andreas Røysum Ensemble. On this recording, he gets together with a fellow Norwegian as well as a Dane and does exactly what the title of the album reads: improvise music in an unedited free jazz session in one night. Clarinet, double bass, drums. This short album of four selected improvisations offers much more than the prosaic title suggests, so give this one a spin if you want to hear unique voices employed in the context of fearless spontaneity.

A couple of duds, but overall this is an amazing synthpop album of lush, full sounds. Quite infectious!