Dr. Rob's blog Ban Ban Ton Ton has been the standard setter for all things electronic and Balearic. The Ban Ban Ton Ton and Bagging Area tie in continues today with a post that follows on from Dr. Rob's bumper Andrew Weatherall funk, soul and jazz post I hosted last week.
Dr. Rob writes...
Late one night,
early one morning, in 1993, Andrew Weatherall played The Chi-Lites`
The
Coldest Days Of My Life on London’s Kiss FM. A sad, strung-out soul
symphony, from 1972, smothered not only in strings, but otherworldly reverb and
field recorded tides and seabirds. Due to the hour, and the station being a
pirate, I’m assuming that he was a little drunk, and / or a tad stoned. I know
I was. Weatherall said that The Chi-Lites` orchestral oddity reminded him of Reload`s
Le Soleil Et La Mer, which was what he span next. A piece of
brand new IDM - “Intelligent Dance Music” - “ambient techno”, produced by Mark
Pritchard and Tom Middleton - a duo perhaps better known as Global
Communications - and released on Creation Records` short-lived electronic
off-shoot, Infonet. A label run by the Abbott brothers, Tim
and Chris, who went on to work super closely with Oasis.
I suspect it was the synths, mimicking wave after wave of crashing surf, and the soaring minor key melody, that brought about Andrew`s comparison. Probably not the broken breakbeats. The track is a classic of its genre, coolly managing to convey the rush, life’s urgency made plain, intensified, of a high head speeding while standing, or laying, perfectly still.
Taken from Tom and Mark’s long-player, A Collection Of Short Stories, the tune later picked up a remix by The Black Dog. The triumvirate of Andy Turner, Ed Handley, and Ken Downie, turn the track into a bustle of busy bleeps and circuitry, clipped electric current. They shoot the strings into outer space, but keep the introspective, melancholic undertow. If anything it`s now even more of a mirror of a mind blown on Ecstasy, so that listening, flat on my back, I`m staring at the stars. It`s a thing of beauty created from seemingly random collisions. Sublime sonic serendipity.
Le Soleil Et Le Mer (Black Dog Remix)
1 comment:
Superb post, this really is a match made in (Balearic) heaven. This has made my evening.
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