Ana Roxanne‘s second Kranky release is far more personal and emotionally direct than her previous recordings. While her earlier records could easily be categorized as ambient or perhaps new age, and had a certain element of playfulness along with their meditative qualities, Poem 1 is stark and unobscured, doing nothing to disguise Roxanne’s heartbreak and vulnerability. Nevertheless, her music is still highly hypnotic, and the arrangements draw the listener in and make it easier to focus on her lyrics.
On brief opener “The Age of Innocence,” she expresses the desire to travel and find home over glacial synths and mournful strings. The piano-based “Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45” is so intimate that it sounds like…
Tag Archive: Kranky
Isabel Pine has been quietly releasing independent EPs for a while now, and it was high time that a label like Kranky would pick up her new album release, Fables. And it all seems to fall into place, with that quiet description, the album title and cover, telling a bit about what is going on here.
Pine, a classically trained viola and cello artist, has exactly that touch to make that fluid area between modern classical and ambient music work.
It is not just about creating moody soundscapes but make those soundscapes transform obvious instrumental capabilities into music that presents personal emotions in a way that listeners can not only pick up on them, but understand them in a way the artist, in this case Pine, wanted it in the first place.
Scott Morgan, the Vancouver electronic music artist who works under the name loscil, leads a quiet life; the kind of patient, dedicated figure who desires neither cultural omnipresence nor promotional shortcuts, but rather a respectable long game played on fields that tend toward the timeless: graceful ambience, chamber drone, dub-inflected electronics. And while there’s plenty of change across his catalogue, Morgan’s thumbprint has remained distinct.
You can usually tell a loscil production through several compositional and production tics: the thickness of the textures; deft layering and arrangement that affords each sound its own presence in the field; juxtaposition that never feels awkward or ungainly; careful balance of…