Luke Temple- Snowbeast

http://www.mediafire.com/?k0ls0vv8izwrhkc

You know you have a good friend when they email you to write, "Hey, this cd makes me think of you. I think you'd like it."

Luckily for me, when someone does that, they're often right. Luke Temple was recommended to me by a good friend and I ended up really being drawn by it. I really got hooked on it when i was riding my bike downtown on the way to see Camera Obscura play live. This is an amazing "Hot-summer-night-on-a-bike" cd-- lots of swirls, loops, ambiance, textures, and great vocals. The songs are simple and catchy, and they fade and wash into each other, so that the whole of the album is greater than the parts of it.

Snowbeast (nickname for yeti) made me think about songwriting and recording differently. Luke Temple sings in this great haunting register, and layers his vocals at parts. There is a strange absence of low end stuff-- hardly any bass, etc. But it's really the high, lonesome vocals that do it for me. Plus the gurgling synth textures and "less is more" approach. The tracks are eerie, pretty, and haunting, which is like icing on the cake.

Give it a chance, listen to it a couple of times, and I bet it'll grow on you.

By the way, this image was taken from the Daytrotter Sessions site (which you should look into, if you haven't). Luke Temple with an armful of Yeti.  Wacky.

The Well-Tempered Synthesizer

http://www.mediafire.com/?x3i5x897d3kgpyg

It must have been exciting to be a music fan in the 1960s, as there was an "anything-goes" mentality with record pressing. I have found records with yodeling, honky-tonk, children's choirs, puppets, and cricket recordings and they all seem to have been released willy-nilly into the atmosphere with no idea of sales, target audience, or financial concern.

One of these funny experiments was made by Wendy Carlos, an accomplished pianist who had an unusual curiosity for the emerging Moog keyboard. Unlike the average wanker, she approached it as a legitimate instrument and made layered recordings of classical compositions, in which she played all of the parts on a differently-styled Moog patch. Surprisingly, they were such a success that she was able to make four different albums.

The Well-Tempered Synthesizer may be one of my favorites since she had honed the process at this point. There is a bit wider range, so that she was branching out from Bach to include Scarlatti, etc. They somehow sound timeless ("classical") and futuristic at once. I can't think of anything happening today that still sounds this fresh.

Lift to Experience - The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads

http://www.mediafire.com/?wqggbh5a1stgiz0

This is the stuff legends are made of.

A hugely-bearded cowboy who shovels horse shit for a living in north Texas has a thing for shoegazer music. He plays giant spacerock through two amplifiers. One of those amps has a cow's skull drilled onto the top. He enlists another bearded cowboy and a large jazz drummer with big cymbals to create the largest live sound you have ever FELT, let alone heard. Think My Bloody Valentine, only they are all Texan cowboys. And the singer sounds like Jeff Buckley. And their lyrics are a semi-fictional fantasy about Apocalypse where Texas is Mecca.

They famously signed to Bella Union (run by ex-Cocteau Twins members) and release a double album. Absolutely incredible quality, predictably poor sales. They tour like crazy until a huge tragedy rips them apart (involving a sudden brutal death of one of their wives). They don't reunite, and have dropped off the face of the planet.

The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads is their double album that deserves a few listens. It is so well laid out that even the titles of the songs spell out two beautiful sentences:

"Just as was told/ down came the angels/ falling from cloud 9/ with crippled wings/ waiting to hit/ the ground so soft"  and "these are the days/ when we shall touch/ down with the prophets/ to guard and to guide you/ into the storm."