Colleen - The Golden Morning Breaks

Colleen is a composer of electronic and ambient based folk music who is based in France. This is her 2005 album, 'The Golden Morning Breaks'.

If you don't really have many childhood memories, you can listen to this. It will make quite a few of them up for you.

the golden morning breaks

William Basinski - Melancholia

William Basinski is a classically trained composer and ambient musician who rose to prominence with his documentation of disintegrating tape loops. Here's my favourite record of his, Melancholia.

take a walk with me, let me take you someplace. i don't know where, away from here is all i know. reach into my flesh, take what makes my heart loop and mind deteriorate and wear it like a mantle. symbolise your eternal longing with a nascent kiss, amidst torrential downpour, swallowed under city lights. take it all. take it away from me, even though your blood just blended with mine. take it all away because i love you, and i want to remember this, even though my memory is unreliable and words always fall short. let me put on this tape as i drift off to sleep, cursing the clarity of my memory. these twinkles. they lull me. and it's already yesterday. mementos are journeys.

melancholia

Boris - Pink

One of the best rock bands out there at the moment. Japanese act Boris have been around since 1992 and have explored nearly every facet of the noise rock and sludge aspect of the genre. This is one of my favourite album entries into the noise canon, and in fact you'd be hard pressed to find much music in the 00's that rocks as hard as this.

Pink light, from the mouth of infinity. Let your senses be destroyed. Also, title track lasts 4 minutes and 20 seconds. You know what I'm getting at.

afterburner

Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase

Boards of Canada are an electronic duo from Scotland, who helped define the shape of IDM and electronic music since their inception in the 90's. Here's my favourite record of theirs, The Campfire Headphase. 

Barthes would tell you that myth is a powerful thing, that it perpetuates itself, that it doesn’t need to be created, just allowed room to develop, that it emerges everywhere within the scope of human culture. By avoiding face-to-face interviews, by revealing scant biographical information (and what they did reveal, it transpires, was sometimes false), by making music characterised by enormous semiotic and literal holes which practically beg the listener to inject their own interpretations and construct their own folklore in order to understand it, Boards Of Canada have inadvertently allowed an entire world of myths to build up around them over the last decade or so. And now, it seems, they’re trying to destroy it. 

The Campfire Headphase comes wrapped in a sleeve none-more-Boards-Of-Canada, turquoise-tinted mildewed Polaroids of dozens and dozens of people who may no longer exist scattered across the digipak. Song titles (if they are songs—a dictionary will tell you that a song is something to be sung) such as “Chromakey Dreamcoat,” “’84 Pontiac Dream,” and “Tears From The Compound Eye” fit comfortably alongside the titles from their previous albums and EPs. The opening seconds of “Into The Rainbow Vein” confirm that the sound of The Campfire Headphase sits just as flush with their history. But this was bound to be the case—Boards Of Canada nailed their aesthetic long ago, and have no desire to change it. 

Some myths debunked, and truths revealed. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin are actually brothers (Eoin is Marcus’ middle name); they concealed this fact because they didn’t want to be compared to Orbital. Yes, they’ve used numerological theories to structure their music, but no, they’re not practicing members of any cult or occult group, despite a few oblique references placed within their songs. Yes, they are keen on keeping themselves separate from any perceived scenes or trends, but no, they don’t believe their geographical location is key to the creation of their music. The duo have also detailed how they artificially age their music, talked about how they compose, record, and then spend months, if not years, perfecting everything in post-production. It seems, in telling us this, that the Sandison brothers are deliberately seeking to erode the intricate tapestry of theories, rumours and speculations that has surrounded them for years in order to allow their music a degree of contextual freedom. Depending how you feel about the band, this is either necessary or foolhardy. 

There are aesthetic changes—the interpolation of (heavily treated) guitars into the duo’s sonic soup has been discussed extensively. Yes, from a distance it makes The Campfire Headphase sound like My Bloody Valentine, but it’s a lazy comparison. Likewise there are less unsettling vocal sample interjections, no playground laughter, no oblique quotes about paganism or distant, childhood declarations of love. It’s a less unsettling album overall, lighter in tone, more directly tuneful and even, on a couple of occasions, positively uplifting without (much of) a sense of bittersweet melancholia underpinning it. But it’s still far from being Simon & Garfunkel; most people, faced with The Campfire Headphase, will find it an uneasy listening experience, even if, after Geogaddi, hardcore BoC fans may not. 

Make no mistake though; this record contains some of the most astounding music that Boards Of Canada have ever composed. Four minutes into “Peacock Tail” a tiny, tremulous melody emerges and is as good, as evocative, as heart-tuggingly uncanny as the nearly intangible movement in “Kid For Today” (from the In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country EP), perhaps as anything they’ve produced before at all. There are the bizarre, upwards-spiralling melodic fills of “Ataronchronon,” the infinite fadeout decay of album closer “Farewell Fire,” the huge (by their standards), almost jubilant tunefulness of “Satellite Anthem Icarus.” “Dayvan Cowboy” is an ambient wash of distant, corroded, almost unheard hum for two minutes before open, reverberating guitar chords fall into place and strings lift this typically Boards Of Canada sound and make it soar like they never have done before. A rattle of drums three minutes in is like Dylan going electric or something. It’s their most tangible, solid moment of music since “Roygbiv,” and it might just be my favourite song on the album. 

Oddly it strikes me with this album that Boards Of Canada and Sigur Ros are following similar career paths, which no doubt will be blasphemy to some readers, and that after acclaimed and beautiful breakthroughs (Music Has The Right To Children and Agaetis Byrjun) and moodier, aesthetic-deepening follow-ups (Geogaddi and ( ) - you can count Von and Twoism as counterparts too, if you like), their current records see them re-establishing lines of communication, focusing themselves and becoming unafraid of their music. The Campfire Headphase turns previously oblique approaches to building new worlds of sound in more concise directions, makes Boards Of Canada more accessible without making them any less special. They are still isolationist, peculiarly nostalgic, disconcerting and beautiful. They’re still unique. They always will be. (*)

Slow this Bird Down

Gang of Four - Return the Gift

Simply one of the finest bands to grace the alternative scene, Gang of Four are a post punk quartet who play a stripped down, intelligent brand of punk with influences from funk, dub and modern minimalism, topped off with biting socio-political commentary. Insanely infuential (really, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are a poor man's Gang of Four - something even Flea admitted) and with songwriting chops that rival the greats from any era, I'd call their first two albums ("Entertainment!", "Solid Gold") essential to any music catalog. And having seen them live just a week ago, I'd say, somehow they still manage to rock your balls off 32 years. Here's a good compilation of their best material - Raw, urgent and mandatory listening for anyone reading this. 

Rerecorded material of the best Go4 tunes. Enjoy! 

To hell with poverty