What are you listening to?

[Ross]

Yes, big fan of the modern classical end of ambient/electro-acoustic stuff. But there are a fair few pieces on the EBS series!

I do really think there's a reasonable album somewhere in Rockoon trying to get out. Big City Dwarves and Touchwood I enjoy, and some of the others would be good if they were more focused and less about letting Zlatko noodle on his guitar for most of the track. It could also do without Edgar's three shitty sub-Melrose cheese-fests clogging it up. If Jerome did one thing, he brought TD back around to doing the kind of dark, moody synth stuff which was much needed after ten years of poppier sounds, but Edgar kept on with the romantic film score sounding stuff for a while which is really painful.

Right, Tyranny of Beauty now. This, at least, has a couple of good tunes, including the first hints of the more contemporary / dance sound they adopted for a while. Which will be refreshing after the last hour of horribleness.

[seedy]

lol i can be pretty dopey sometimes

i'm thinking to myself "self, this is surely a tune that max was a part of.....thinkkkkk......."

hmmmm.....perhaps it's that tune called MAX?


myeah that's what i was thinking of =P

within the first 20 seconds or so is the snippet that kinda sounds like that budd/eno tune





back to TG - i mean....i've yet to hear an album that doesn't have at least ONE tune i can enjoy. just the era you are in right now has a lot of cheese spread all over it all

[Ross]

I only use the words cheese and cheesy in extreme circumstances: it very often refers to digital '80s production and / or particularly sentimental melodies, both of which I love, so it's rare I will bother with the term. But when it comes to tracks like Spanish Love, I can't think of a better term.

From 1992 - 1996, there's a pretty solid TD album that would probably compete with some of their other mid-quality albums like White Eagle for me - it's just unfortunate that the material is spread thin over four albums mostly filled with bland noodling and a depressing lack of any real musical content.


Going to go back to that Plateaux of Mirror track and compare it to Max once Tyranny of Beauty is over...

[Ross]

Having done a bit research further on, my conclusion is that after Lily On the Beach, the only studio album worth owning is Jeanne D'Arc (although Mars Polaris is worth a listen). What an album though! It starts on an unpromising couple of tracks, but after that it's really beautiful and I'd say genuinely up there with some of the band's Virgin albums. If only Thorsten and Jerome had got on, we might have had more stuff of this calibre.

[dell1972]

Er, Ross, that statement implies that Lily On The Beach is worth owning. Have a word with yerself! Agree on Jean D'Arc and Mars Polaris (the live version of it Rocking Mars is pretty good too) though. I'd add Summer in Nagasaki though, and controversially perhaps Purgatorio. There's a really good album trying to get out of those two discs. Thousands would disagree mind, the Dante trilogy was responsible for alienating a large portion of the fanbase and was partly responsible for Jerome and his mullet jumping ship. For years you could buy "Dante's Dead" T-shirts in Jerome's webshop!

[Ross]

Ha, well I enjoy Lily On the Beach a lot more than anything that came after - i.e. more than about two tracks. Perhaps I should rephrase it to Optical Race then, ha.
Dante stuff - nooooooo. I'm with Jerome on that!

[sigESANg7]

Allot of COIL recently , Winter Solstice must be near ... ' ENVIRONMENTS II' & 'Environments4' have interrupted this .

[Ross]

Brian Eno - Nerve Net, My Squelchy Life & The Shutov Assembly... recent reissues on All Saints.
Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow. As it's getting near Christmas and sounds so apt.

[Ross]

[RazorJack]

Talvin Singh - Butterfly
OK (1998)

Just when I thought I had heard just about any combination in music.. This is drum 'n bass, with a bunch of classical Indian instruments (bansuri, sitar, tabla as far as I can tell). Very cool track.

[seedy]

heard of but never actually listened to that dude

i liked that track as well

[epitome]

Mogwai - Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1.

[darktrain]

currently devouring some Autumn of Communion - autumn of communion 3 and 4
jon hassell - last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the streets
the orb - peel session - a huge evergrowing pulsating brain - especially good and rather epic
Ost for the film White bird in a blizzard by harold budd and robin guthrie

Really enjoying the war on drugs new album - lost in the dream

and finally warmth - dopamine E.P on bandcamp.

Oh and playing 'i turn to face the sun' at every opportunity lol

[seedy]

classic f'n trentemoller tune

[epitome]

I've now listened to about 180 tracks from Touched Two. I'm doing quite well, I think - especially considering I only finished listening to Touched One a few weeks ago