Musical Shuffle

Put your music player on shuffle and write the first 3 songs that play and what your initial thought is:

Mark Lyken & Emma Dove Douglas from “Mirror Lands”

This is a beautiful piece of sonic art from Lyken and Dove, recently released on Colin Herrick’s wonderful Time Released Sound label. Herrick spends a lot of time obsessively packaging his releases to make them special, and this one is no exception (check out the link above). Ultimately, it’s about the music though, and fortunately, that’s beautiful too, with haunting strings and nautical-sounding embellishments over a seabed of mournful synths. A subtle, wordless vocal melody drifts in and out. This is part of a soundtrack to a film which I haven’t seen yet (although the package comes with a link to a page where it can be viewed), and incorporates appropriate field recordings into its musical tapestry to the extent that the sounds here straddle the fence between soundtrack and sound design.

Volcano the Bear The Following Him, from “Commencing”

This is from the box set that I mentioned getting in the mail a couple of posts back (many purchases made online come with a free download). Volcano the Bear are sonic adventurers of the purist sort, taking a surrealist, kitchen sink aesthetic and applying it to everything they do. This song is no exception, layering sped-up voices and strange squeaks over a slow, grinding rhythm abetted by a cheesy synth melody. The amount of music on this release is overwhelming. I haven’t had a chance to process it all yet.

Thy Catafalque Oldódó formák a halál titokzatos birodalmában from “Sgurr”

This is a 15-minute, Hungarian folk metal song from an album that came out last month, so Like the other songs here, it is relatively new. There is a narration in the middle that, like the rest of the lyrics here, I can’t understand because I don’t know Hungarian, but I listen to enough music in foreign languages that it doesn’t matter at all. The vocals are just another instrument, and the emotion and intent shines through despite the language barrier (strangely enough, possibly due to the fact that I listen to so many songs in languages I don’t understand, I often find myself not paying attention to lyrics when they’re in English). This is like a sonic travelogue for part of the world that I may never visit. The music evokes vast natural vistas and epic questing.