New Track: A Quiet Sunday
Jan 27, 2008 tracks
I decided to insert this track as track 1 on Fountains, which meant renumbering all the other tracks and extending the projected number of tracks in the project. All the other mp3s have been updated, but the music is the same, so it’s not really critical to grab the updated files.
That said, here’s the new track! I hope you enjoy it.
A Quiet Sunday (download)
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The Nature of the Beast
Jan 24, 2008 Gear
So I sat down this evening to work on some music. It turns out that if you only do this once in a blue moon, all of your apps update on you! There’s an update for every last music application in my core bundle. Tonight’s musical composition evening has consisted entirely of glancing at a progress bar. 
I suppose this is one argument for natural instruments, eh?
Behind the Light
Jan 6, 2008 Uncategorized
There’s supposed to be a formative point in most people’s lives, usually in their adolescence, where they really identify with the music and from whence the music will always feel *right* and genuine in a way that music from other times doesn’t, not because it really was, but because it fell at that point in their lives.
For me, this period begin around the summer after 8th grade and lasted until about the end of the 10th grade. That’s not to say that I don’t live plenty of other music from other times, but there’s just something about the music at that time that really hits a place in my soul that other music doesn’t, and I think it’s simply because it was *that time* for me.
A few albums from then have continued to mean as much to me and feel as beautiful to me now as they did then. One of the best examples of this is “Nailing Colours to the Wheel,” by Breathless — a four-song EP. I discovered Breathless because the singer was one of the few mysterious collaborators in the This Mortal Coil projects that wasn’t in any of the bands on 4AD records, and he contributed the vocals on some of their most recognized songs, such as The Jeweller from “Filigree and Shadow”. Breathless was signed to a small label called Tenor Vossa who had kind of terrible distribution where I lived, so their stuff was very hard to come by. That one EP was all I ever found available in any store. However, every of the four songs on it plunges straight to the core of my soul and is in that upper echelon of favourite music for me, and none of them have ever faded or become less wonderful a listening experience when I’ve returned to revisit them.
Every so often I’d try to find Nailing Colours to the Wheel on CD, but it was either never released on that medium or only breifly, and I haven’t had any success with it. At the same time, while I always wanted to find more Breathless material, somehow I never quite got around to ordering any, as it was all mail-order with expensive shipping and there were so many other handier things that I wanted.
Fast forward to recent times when I sat down to listen to some old vinyl and listened to Nailing Colours to the Wheel again. I determined to get more of their material if possible, but I shortly thereafter read an interview wherein they said that they felt that on that EP they had let the producer mold their sound too much and that it didn’t feel like it represented them well. Since I love that album, that made me wary of listening to their other material, lest I become disillusioned and disappointed with a band that had become legendary for me. I steered clear of it, but I made one small concession — I put one of the albums on my wish list.
Well, for Christmas my nephew got it for me (special ordered from some obscure company in Vancouver). I finally put it on today, and I have to say that it’s a beautiful album. It is indeed very different from Nailing Colours to the Wheel and I think that NCttW will remail their signature work to me for a long time yet, but Behind the Light is a wonderful release with a lot of songs that have grown on me immensely already. Different though it may be, Dominic Appleton’s vocals fit into the mix in a very similar way, with their eerie smoothness that feels sometimes more instrumental than textual, and his tremendous emotional expression. The music itself is smoother than NCttW and less percussive, but not quite as fuzzed out as to be dreampop / shoegazer material. It hangs somewhere just to one side of that in a way that appeals to me a lot.
I might have more to say about it in the future, but in the meantime I’m just rambling, half-asleep, about finally facing up to a listening experience that could have betrayed one of my great musical loves and finding that they lived up to the test. If anything, now I’m eager to hear more!