Electronic Music NewsMatmos ‘” Supreme Balloon
The News Review:
- Matmos ‘” Supreme Balloon
- ‘Night Music’ poorer for lack of live musicians
- Moby goes club-hopping
- Ambassador of Cool
- Ghostland bservatory at the Showbox: Lasers no substitute for live…
Matmos ‘” Supreme Balloon
SFStation.com – Apr 6, 2008
“Supreme Balloon” (the song) is 24-minutes long and begins with minutes of Meddle-era Floyd-ian tones. About three minutes in the track begins to sound ritualistic almost like the hippy spirit of the 70s is trapped in an Excel spreadsheet. This is an interesting look for electronic music where the sounds try and sound organic like guitars or chanting voices or hand drums. In such capable hands it’s hypnotic. All these mixtures and textures and variations make Matmos — and Supreme Balloon — incredible. All the metaphors I can think of for this music revolve around childlike concepts of fun: it’s a playground of sound a theme park of noises a summer vacation for songs. It’s music that refuses to grow up.
‘Night Music’ poorer for lack of live musicians
San Diego Union Tribune – Apr 6, 2008
”But absent live instrumentalists you really aren't doing the show. The difference between having actors sing to prerecorded instrumental tracks and actors sing with live musicians is the difference between karaoke and performance. “Without musicians you have a cheapening of the actual art that the audience is going to listen to” said Joe Waters a composer who teaches electronic music and recording at SDSU. “You don't have the symbiotic connection between the singers and the musicians. In a performance they react to each other. If the singer is singing along with a presequenced track it's a one-sided arrangement. ”The technology that allows a production such as Cygnet's is undeniably seductive.
Moby goes club-hopping
Akron Beacon Journal – Apr 6, 2008
n the other side many applaud him for the same talent. In Europe where dance music has long been popular Moby was already a star several years before his stateside (and global) breakthrough with 1999′s Play which not only sold googobs of CDs but saw nearly every track licensed for ads a former artistic no-no that is now simply a way to survive. His last album Hotel featured all live instrumentation and vocals but in the end the process was more interesting than the final product. Last Night finds the 42-year-old Moby in a nostalgic mood and as he outlines in the short liner notes (often his albums contain lengthy essays on his political and social views) he wanted the album to sound like a long night of metropolitan club-hopping condensed to 14 tracks and just over an hour of music.
Ambassador of Cool
Washington Post – Apr 6, 2008
The manuscript is still on the electronic keyboard in the neat but nondescript living room that looks out on the. n the coffee table sits a book of Adams’s photographs of the… He and his quartet traveled the country in a station wagon with the bass strapped on top. “We were so broke God almighty. “But Brubeck kept playing his music and little by little the whole world took notice. 13 1961 a West Berlin radio station broadcast Dave Brubeck’s music all day long.
Ghostland bservatory at the Showbox: Lasers no substitute for live…
Seattle Times – Apr 6, 2008
A couple clues had a touch of humanness — Beherns’ shoulder-length braids and Turner’s high-collared cape — and without those visual signifiers there was little confirmation that there were indeed people playing music in real time. And even with them it was hard to tell where Ghostland’s frantic dance-rock came from. Turner remained stooped over a large indiscernible bank of gear assumably sending out chords from a synthesizer and setting off the explosive electronic beats that propelled the music. Behrens pranced and vamped under the laser light his schmaltzy prog-rock wail stepchild to a long line of schmaltzy wailing prog-rock forefathers (Queen’s Freddie Mercury Styx’s James Young the Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala). It was the kind of voice that demands response and for the majority of the sold-out crowd that meant a mix of headbanging and disco dancing a blissfully unholy union if there ever was one. The first half of the show comprised mostly the Austin Texas-based band’s older material songs from 2005′s “delete.