|
Your favorite albums of 2010 (pg. 3)
|
View this Thread in Original format
| Lews |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
1. Antibreak - Eleven Shades Of Night |
This. |
|
|
| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by sljiva
Wanted to send you a pm, but I'll post here instead if anyone else is interested. Since new BoC might as well never happen, you could give a chance to Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?. This is fantastic stuff, I've listened to it today for the first time and it directly gets into my top 5 of the year. It lays somewhere between BoC and Fennesz, doesn't contain any beats and could throw you a little off if you aren't into soundscapes couloured with some analogue noise, but I think it's worth giving a chance.
Here's a taster |
Sounds good. Will definitely check it out.
I actually prefer non-beaty stuff, generally (as far as chillout music). Love Biosphere, for example. |
|
|
| InDeepSpace |
Some great albums:
Ripperton - Niwa
Horsepower Productions - Quest For The Sonic Bounty
Genotype - Ritual Dance
Phace & Misanthrop - From Deep Space
 |
|
|
| Sand Leaper |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woonyxoxo
#1 Darkstar - North
For some reason Darkstar decided to scrap their almost finished Dubstep album and they did atmospheric and detailed Synthpop instead.
|
And that's why the album really isn't that good. It does provide a thoroughly enjoyable synth pop offering with some poignant atmospheres, but for a group that went from Dead 2 Me/Break over Lilyliver to Need You/Squeeze My Lime and finally Aidy's Girl Is A Computer, North is big step backwards in terms of innovation and progression.
I also think that the album and the transition to being a "band" exposes the group members as studio heads who aren't necessarily very talented musicians, thanks to the at times annoyingly simplistic melodies and instrumentation. |
|
|
| Settimo |
01. Ital Tek - Midnight Colour
02. Robert Hood - Omega
03. Caribou - Swim
04. Scuba - Triangulation
05. Dettmann - Dettmann
06. ASC - Nothing Is Certain
07. Shed - The Traveler
08. Digital Mystikz - Return II Space
09. The Black Dog - Music For Real Airports
10. Bonobo - Black Sands
11. Shackleton - Fabric 55
Not in any order...but Ital Tek tops my list, that album BLEW my mind! |
|
|
| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by sljiva
Hate albums like this one. Sounds completely unique and different from everything else released this year, yet so barren and inferior to their golden era stuff, which is now already 15 years old. This Environments series could have been a triumphant comeback for FSOL to original material in the vein of Portishead, yet it has more of the feel of The Prodigy's infamous return. |
Having now listened to Environments 3, I disagree even more. I think it's a stunning album, perhaps their best yet. Some people have been calling it a dark record, but I think they're letting the inclusion of some remixed material from the Dead Cities era colour their judgement. There are so many wonderful moments in there that are never repeated, the whole album shimmers and shifts constantly while maintaining a beautiful sense of narrative. It's an evolution again from Environments 2 - this is a band who are genuinely developing their sound, twenty years after they started. Can't wait for the promised Environments 4, now.
I also heard that Emeralds album yesterday, and found it quite a draining listening experience. |
|
|
| DreamWalker |
Access to Arasaka - Void is a glorious album. My favorite of the year.
A dark glitchy mechanical ethereal masterpiece. |
|
|
| sljiva |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Having now listened to Environments 3, I disagree even more. I think it's a stunning album, perhaps their best yet. Some people have been calling it a dark record, but I think they're letting the inclusion of some remixed material from the Dead Cities era colour their judgement. There are so many wonderful moments in there that are never repeated, the whole album shimmers and shifts constantly while maintaining a beautiful sense of narrative. It's an evolution again from Environments 2 - this is a band who are genuinely developing their sound, twenty years after they started. Can't wait for the promised Environments 4, now. |
Then we simply like different aspects of their music.
I was always amazed how FSOL, beside having completely specific philosophy and approach to their music - which reflects in utter uniqueness of their material, could create such atmospheric, full, textured and detail-rich sound. What amazed me even more is their ability to create fully functional and exquisite records without using too many pretty/attractive elements, relying just on their compositional skills and huge amount of samples - case in point: ISDN. ISDN and (in smaller degree) Lifeforms are all about atmosphere - they always gave me a feeling of wandering through woods at night on some god-forgotten island where all you could hear are million little sounds of forest, different animal species and local tribes. And you would concentrate on those little sounds (samples) and their interaction with other elements not because beats, main hooks and other attention-grabbing elements were missing, but because they were so interesting and well laid out.
The problem with Environments 3 is that most of the time all that above mentioned stuff that made early FSOL great is missing. There's no subtlety, very little attention to details and no real experimentation. Flow is completely broken down with numerous pointless string and piano interludes. I have no problem with sourcing from Dead Cities, but not in this lazy way. For example, The Empty Land could have become fantastic updated version of My Kingdom and probably one of their signature tunes, yet they decided to just loop that one segment for almost six minutes without any variations. Result - 14 years older track sounds like Pink Floyd compared to ing Elvis Presley. And that particular track demonstrates the main weakness of this album - not enough hard work has been put into making it. Yeah, FSOL are geniuses and they have come up with fancy new sounds, yet they neglected their compositional and arrangement skills this time. Tracks with great potential like Heart Sick Chord don't venture outside of early established constraints and that's a real shame.
Now I'm not saying E3 is a complete disaster. There are of course some moments of brilliance like Summer's Dream and Absolution that recall golden era FSOL. And no matter how sloppily executed it still screams out uniqueness (compared to other music released this year). Yet I can't shake the feeling that its potential is not realized in the way it should have been. If this is their developed sound I'd rather listen to undeveloped FSOL. |
|
|
| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by sljiva
The problem with Environments 3 is that most of the time all that above mentioned stuff that made early FSOL great is missing. There's no subtlety, very little attention to details and no real experimentation. |
This is the crux of what you're saying. I think there is plenty of experimentation, insofar as I can't think of any previous FSOL album that sounds like Environments 3. It seems to me that the earlier FSOL material was not hugely "musical" - if you stripped away the trippy sampling and unusual atmospheres you had a lot of dull musical noodlings, which is where their work sometimes falls down for me. If you get over the novelty of the sound, the music itself was occasionally lacking. I mean, on Lifeforms they use a ing new age ambient cover of Pachelbell's Canon at one point, which is ludicrous and unnecessary.
I wasn't a fan of their psychedelic prog folk (or whatever) period, but they did seem to come out of the other side able to play a lot more instruments and write a lot more music without relying on samples. The electronic work they've made since then has definitely benefited from it. Environments 2 and 3 have relied a lot less on sampling and more on original musical ideas. So this is a new FSOL sound, which combines their classic soundscaping and arrangement with a new melodic approach.
Environments 2 was quite stern, glacial and vast. Environments 3 is more lush, more transient, ever-shifting. They emphasise the Eno quote "Repetition is a form of change", but this feels like one of their least repetitive works yet, full of beautiful little moments like the intro to End Of The World. I think there are loads of details in this album to be found. The difference is that this time they're musical details, rather than sonic or sampled details. It's also possibly their least prescriptive album in terms of mood. You knew Lifeforms was all about this cybernetic rainforest vibe and Dead Cities was post-apocalyptic. You went into the records with those images so they came easily. This time round there isn't any easy theme to latch onto, so the images the record conjures are more personal. I find it has a weird utopic sci-fi vibe, remniscent of those crazy French adventure games that developers like Cryo used to make a decade ago - they were all set on beautiful and weird desert planets and their plots didn't make a damn bit of sense. My point is that this is a more idiosyncratic and evocative FSOL record. |
|
|
| Specimen303 |
Didn't really listen to new stuff too much.
Slacker - Start a new life
Bonobo - Black Sands
Caribou - Swim |
|
|
|
|
