Dark secrets look for light...

Evo necega sto bi moglo da bude nastavak nase emisije na radiju...
Milos & Vangelis preporuke..epizoda 1

Soley
Theater Island EP (Morr, 2010)

This is the debut EP by Sóley Stefánsdóttir, a 23 year old girl from Reykjavik, student of composition and a member of the Icelandic indie-collective Seabear – it’s the debut of a singer and a dreamer: Six songs held together by Sóleys piano play and her voice – because every of her compositions come into being while she is singing to the piano.


Sóley loves this: by her own account she’s actually singing all day long. On ‘Theater Island’ she uses a lot of instruments though: Strings, guitars or just some electronic crackles and noises. The record opens with ‘Duttla’, a dotty and strange song, that is followed by the engrossed and nearly impressionistic ‘Kill the Clown’. From now on the songs become more and more catchy. The title track remains on Seabear’s open-hearted Indiefolk while ‘Blue Leaves’ and ‘Read Your Book’ are touching pop ballads – and the record’s final ‘We Will Put Her In Two Graves’ is absolutely disarming in it’s simplicity. But there’s something vague and unreal, that sticks to all of these songs as well. This applies to the lyrics, too: Like Alice, Sóley walks through her very own wonderland, where things happen, that can only occur in the surreal logic of a dream.








Silje Nes
Opticks (FatCat, 2010)

Sure, once you hear that Silje Nes hails from the tiny coastal town of Liekanger, Norway, her music seems to echo out of some vast snowy terrain, a lonely expression of arctic life amidst all those fjords and floes. With her hushed vocals and spindly strings, she sounds like some miniature snow sprite or white gypsy fox dancing on the tundra, bright northern lights sparkling like jewels overhead. …
Nes is a multi-instrumentalist who composes through recording, by layering and looping both traditional sounds and snippets of digital noise. Her new album Opticks has been characterized as a “folk-electronic” hybrid, but perhaps a better phrase would be “romantic digitalism,” if only for its wider implications. Throughout, human sounds morph into artificial ones, to the point at which you can no longer tell the difference between expression and its programming. Nes does this best with her own already ethereal voice, which she subtly manipulates into eerie, abstract forms. But she similarly works over her entire gamut of classical instruments (guitars, drums, xylophones, concertinas, flutes, and trumpets) and her quirky set of found sounds (pots, jewelry, waves, etc.). In the end, each song sounds both warm and mechanical, human and strange, but always in motion, always drawing you in with its subtle dramas of digital loss and gain.
In other words, Opticks seems to be an album about lost connections and communications, and its constant layering of sound — now aching and sharp, now murky and distant — beautifully conveys its deeper sentiments. At times, the digital process seems to bury the possibilities of expression, but it also generates completely new emotions and sensations. In fact, the album takes its name from Isaac Newton’s 1704 scientific treatise on the refraction of light into component colors.


Silje Nes - Crystals from One Little Indian Records on Vimeo.


Brave Timbes
For Every Day You Lost (Second Language, 2010)

brave timbers is the performing and recording alias of Newcastle upon Tyne-based multi-instrumentalist Sarah Kemp, an in-demand violinist and esteemed contributor to a number of notable musical ensembles and their recordings, including much-admired works by The Declining Winter, Fieldhead, Lanterns On The Lake, Anna Kashfi and Last Harbour.
For Every Day You Lost proffers a delightfully drowsy procession of mellifluous, melancholy-tinged instrumental vignettes for violin, tenor guitar and piano, all of it played by Sarah. It’s an album whose sustained reflective mood and keening chamber arrangements conjure a bewitching, immersive sound world that will immediately appeal to fans of Rachel’s, Balmorhea and Dakota Suite. Sarah’s influences are broad and innumerable, but she acknowledges the importance to the brave timbers sound of Seefeel, Brian Eno’s ambient works, Stars Of The Lid, Low, Peter Broderick, Ólafur Arnalds and Wim Mertens, as well as that of “growing up in the North East, living on the coast, and friends I’ve played violin with in different northern cities...”


brave timbers - For Every Day You Lost from k craig on Vimeo.