Apparently, I buy too many records

My wife Helen, like every other woman i've ever lived with, believes that I buy too many records.

Which, as every record-buying man knows, is a ridiculous belief.

I will concede, however, that I do indeed buy a lot of records and that I don't afford them the same amount of listens and attention that I did 20 or 30 years ago.

To this end, I have decided to blog about the records that I buy, in order to help my appreciation of them - and perhaps to show Helen that I don't buy that many records after all.

Because i'm crap with deadlines the blog posts will be sporadic and probably be about a month or 2 behind but that's just the way i am! The posts will not necessarily be actual reviews (most likely comments, at best) and will generally be pretty damn short due to the reasons outlined above. As a writer in a previous existence i have decided not to worry about writing as art in the pieces but, instead, to attempt to convey feeling over semantic (and often grammatic) perfection.

And 'OCRB'? It stands for 'Obsessive Compulsive Record Buying' - a little known mental health affliction that is potentially damaging to the bank account but ultimately life-affirming. It is sad.......but a nice form of sad.

Friday, 21 October 2011

Imaginary Softwoods: The path of Spectrolite (Amethyst Sunset)

Imaginary Softwoods is John Elliott from the massively prolific Emeralds and these ambient  synthscapes are beautifully lush and luminescent. They float around between the speakers in an expansive room-filling manner that hijacks your thoughts, commands you to take notice and attempt to follow the ever-evolving twists and turns. Which is exceedingly hard to do.

I bought a copy of this for Matt the Hat at the same time as i bought it for myself (he trusts my judgement, as should you!) and gave it to him by saying "it's a perfect tangerine dream tribute". Whilst the album certainly references TD, and Klaus Schulze's more ambient solo releases in particular, i did it a huge disservice by describing  it thus - as it is much more than that, Elliott has blended his own sensibilities into each track that means they stand out as very individual pieces of music. There's a lot of this stuff around at the moment - but this stands out as special as each track is a musical feast, with a great structure sadly lacking from a lot of ambient analog electronic music. It is all too easy to set a few tones going and leave the room for half an hour, and call it an ambient drone, some of us demand much more.



Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)