utorak, 4. prosinca 2012.

A Journey Down The Well - How Little Can Be The Orchestra (2011) +Sorry Monsters, I Have To Grow (2009)





Miminimalističke klasične zračne životinje sreću ambijenatlni medijski znoj, eksplozije, javljanja uživo.
Šveđani Martin Bjelfvenstam i Anna Erneman, i jedan Turčin, Taner Torun, čelom, violinom i klavirom intervjuiraju suvremeni svijet.
Suludo dobro.

Streaming ovdje

ajourneydownthewell.blogspot.com







A Journey Down The Well, the band known for creating extraordinary classical music pieces, releases a new EP, “How Little Can Be The Orchestra” on Fluttery Records.
A Journey Down The Well releases a new four song EP revealing their impulsive, unusual, minimalist approach to classical music. This is their first entirely instrumental release, as well as the first release of A Journey Down The Well as a duo.
A Journey Down The Well was founded in 2006 by musicians from Turkey (Taner) and Sweden (Anna and Martin). In 2010, after releasing two albums (The Funeral Album - 2007 and Sorry Monsters, I Have To Grow – 2009) the Swedish wing left the band citing the difficulty in traveling between the two countries. Taner Torun (the only founding member remaining in the band as well as the owner of Fluttery Records) has moved the project to his hometown and partnered with Ipek Zeynep Kadioglu (cellist, Mimar Sinan Conservatory & Manchester University School of Music and Drama graduate).
The new compositions contains rich string pieces (“How”), beautiful piano-violin-cello arrangements (“Little”), ambient structures created through delay manipulations (“Can Be”) and processed cellos made to sound like a ship's foghorn ( “The Orchestra”).
Taner Torun says “The EP is called How Little Can Be The Orchestra and there are several reasons for this. First of all, we recorded it as just two people and it reflects the minimalist nature of our music. Also, there is still sadness but also a gleam of hope. All four songs are about how little things have importance and make people happy with their existence like birds, kittens, children and toy instruments.”
How Little Can Be Orchestra also contains various field recordings alongside the music. Cars pass by on the street and a little girl yells at them from the window (02), fans celebrate their victory (03), newborn kittens sing along with other animals and it becomes a choir (04). Taner Torun says “They are not spices to make the compositions colorful. They are the core elements of the compositions just like piano, violin and cello.”

The EP has received good reviews from other modern classical, post-rock and ambient musicians:

Gonçalo Pereira / Diamond Gloss, How Constellations Shine
"Just a few words about this recording. How Little Can Be The Orchestra is just a wonderful piece of music. Simple pleasures are the best pleasures, and this music is a simple pleasure. It´s hard to write about good music. It´s hard to write about such a good music like this. How beautiful can be a orchestra? So, just put your ears over this four songs and here is your answer. Excellent work, simply made. "

Aviv Cohn / The Widest Smiling Faces
"How Little Can Be The Orchestra, the new EP from A Journey Down the Well combines provocative melodies and textures with a natural and minimal sound palette. The first track, "How" brimming with lovely tones and compelling harmonies, is a particular standout. Later pieces contrast captured field recordings with melodic compositions, a wonderful example being "Little" which begins by relaying sounds of a port or perhaps a commercial dock (or something similar). As the track progresses, string swells create the imagery of deep ocean waves, presenting a fascinating juxtaposition of captured sounds with composed imagery. "How Little Can Be the Orchestra" is full of imaginative little ideas like this, and is a fantastic EP for anyone who enjoys creativity and imagery in their music."

Ludovico Lamarra / En Plein Air
“A Journey Down The Well produce a small and precious EP, abandoning electronic experiments of the first work, with the will to embrace the essence of the music, in four stylish and minimal tracks.”

Jun Minowa / Yawning, Gargle
“As if every single note carries a meaning, as if trying to read between the silence, I swim deep in the sea of their music. "How Little Can Be The Orchestra" is a great EP with fantastic composition and emotional sound. Ever since I knew Fluttery Records, I could have found some real music that touch my heart and they are surely one of them. Now it's time for you to discover A Journey Down The Well.”

Jan Hammer / Draff Krimmy
“I hear the first sounds of the new A Journey Down The Well. A feeling of joy is flowing through me. That joy carries with it a feeling of sadness, no destructive sorrow but a self-sufficient melancholy. This feeling is good, freedom and fear, pleasure and pain. The music makes me enjoy the moment, authentic and pure. I re-discover the feeling I had when listening to the first A Silver Mt Zion albums. It is only the moment and my experience of it. I am right here now. The orchestra is little, but the mood it leaves behind is enormous. And it grows every time I listen to it.”

A Journey Down the Well has come out with their new EP “How Little Can be the Orchestra” recently in which modern music meets electronics in a modern expression that they have cultivated. This 20 minutes EP is a following work after the band’s “The Funeral Album” and “Sorry Monsters, I have to Grow” . A Journey Down the Well has been formated by Taner Torun in 2006 with his swedish friends Anna and Martin which continued as a band until the release of their first album. Unfortunatelly they have broke up as a reason of physically being in different countries. Now the new band member is the cellist İpek Zeynep Kadioglu. Although there is a pessimistic possession on the songs, still there is a great pastel tones one can hear that imitates all the goodness of life itself. Apart from the sounds of classical music instruments there are musical scenery that created by automobile voices, fans slogans and kitten voices mixed with sonic touch. This EP is a gathering of classical music’s deepness and punk music’s destructiveness. This logbook of music has been created by short expressive sentences in a mysterious, minimal and instrumental style.
Taner and İpek; they are the sympathetic version of grotesque fiction characters Gargantua and Pantagruel. They are contrast and also compatible as like poping out of a Goya’s painting or Poe’s writings. Peculiar and surprising in their musical forms, combination of contrasts in dialectics. Their music is emotional and bleak formed by neo-classic and dark ambient which hooks up Rachmaninov and Brian Eno.
Silent screams and elegant denials. This EP can only be identified by winter season and a warm red wine... - Murat Beşer

This is a good Modern Classical EP consisting of 4 songs that will embrace us with its tender sound.
Ambient electronic sound appears throughout the EP but it is as a whole composed of classical strings of melodies. The natural and soft sound brings us a sense of excitement and also offers us comfort. However, at the same time its sharpness mixed with the warmth makes this EP more attractive. The splendid atmosphere created by repeating strings of melodies is natural and strong. The shimmering sound reminds us of beautiful sceneries.
We can fully experience their good Modern Classical music on the first track “How” and the second track “Little”. The third track “Can Be” is an impressive ambient drone song with the stateliness of classical music in it. The fourth track “The Orchestra” is an ambient song which is creating a scenery of which as if we get lost in deep woods with repeating serene and turbulent melodies. The sampled animal calls create the atmosphere of the song in a good way, and the violin coming from the middle gives us an impression that talks diverse feelings. The particles of the shimmering sound which is like a scenery of quietly flowing water and falling drizzle really move us. The four-song EP is drawing a calm and stately story
This fantastic piece draws not only the gentleness and the softness but also the stateliness and the turbulence by adding ambient arrangement based on the lush colors of strings which represent diverse sceneries. This is a 4-song EP, but I’m totally enraptured by the classical and flowing wave of sound.
If you are interested, take a touch to this fantastic sound.- Akasaka Takahiro




Sorry Monsters, I Have To Grow (2009)

Streaming ovdje

A Journey Down The Well are known for their unique style, using classical instruments to create a special sound which flirts with rock, ambient and experimentalism. “Sorry Monsters, I Have To Grow” is their second station on their journey; the strings create a smoky and haunting downtempo ambience with the piano; lyrical songs wink poetry.
The band was also backed by the members of Strandvägen Choir in the recording process. “Working with a choir has made a powerful impact, I can’t imagine ‘Sugarman’ and ‘Sorry Monster, I Have To Grow’ without their parts” remarks cellist Martin Bjelfvenstam. According to the band members the album is about brutal wars, oppression of personality and trying to grow as a human being while leaving all the unnecessary fears behind; “Despite the bombs, despite the guns, despite people building prisons for themselves and others.” Taner Torun adds.
According to Anna Erneman, their contemporary classical influences move one step ahead in this album. “We are inspired by many elements. The chilly sound of post-punk, eye openers like A Silver Mt. Zion and Godspeed You Black Emperor; Brian Eno and many others... But in this album our sound, with hints of contemporary classical composers like Arvo Pärt, Richard Einhorn and Henryk Gorecki, is dominant.”
The general tone and mood of a year can often be reflected in its music. If the first new record I’ve heard in 2009 is the soundtrack to the coming months, then I think I’ll just hide under my duvet until 2010 rolls along.
A Journey Down the Well are a trio of two Swedes and a Turk (Martin Bjelfvenstam, Anna Erneman and Taner Torun) who make music that fits the bag marked post-rock / neo-classical crossover, but who sound very little like most of the acts who share that increasingly overfull niche. There are no grandstanding displays of virtuosity, and no warm, lush and comforting pieces. This is music that is fairly sparse, and exceedingly bleak.
Sorry Monsters, I Have to Grow is an explicitly political album. As is often the case when writers use a language that is not their first, the lyrics often have a strange turn of phrase and an unintentional ambiguity that somehow works. The words on “Happy Bird Day”, for example, don’t read well, but fit the music. It’s a plea against intolerance and bigotry that is coupled with a desolate backing that seems to be resigned to that plea falling on deaf ears.
On the first two tracks, the trio are aided by the Strandvägen Choir whose mournful, phonetic phrasings make them sound more like a ragged band of refugees than a classical chorus. “Sugarman” is a jarring track. Its eerie cello figure and voice sound like the embodiment of human suffering. “They create a history out of lies and they call it future” is the age old, but still depressingly true, complaint that history is written by the winners and the powerful.
There are moments when the generally oppressive atmosphere is lifted. “I Will Never Become What I’m Afraid Of” is a charmingly ragged ballad, and “Two Beautiful Swans in a Dirty Lake” is a richly beautiful violin / cello duet. It opens with a robotic evangelist (is there any other kind?) seeing Heaven in a vision of two swans on a dirty lake. Christians do have that cheesy tendency to proclaim as miracles anything that is out of the ordinary or unexpected, but the juxtaposition of beauty amongst filth is more a general metaphor of hope amongst despair.
The moments of hope, though, are fleeting. “New Abandoned Places on Earth” is a percussion-heavy epic instrumental that has echoes of post-punk acts like 23 Skidoo and Savage Republic. As the US-backed Israeli forces wreak havoc and death upon the civilians of Gaza, it’s a chillingly apt and timely piece of music.
Sorry Monsters, I Have to Grow has some parallels with recent albums by A Silver Mt Zion. But where the Canadians never let go of the hope for a better world, A Journey Down the Well seem to despair that nothing can change, and that the weak and defenceless will always be the victims of the powerful. Like Towering Inferno’s Kaddish, it’s not always an easy album to listen to, but nevertheless a brave and ambitious work that deserves to be heard. - dezji.wordpress.com/

 

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