The other weekend I had the pleasure of going to dinner at smunderground, done by Sachin and Meagan, two culinary experts and entrepreneurs in the Chicago underground dinner scene.
Beef cheek brisket with pureed kale, sassafras sauce, fried sweetbreads and cream, vacuumed potatoes turned tots, fennel/cilantro salad
Not only was the food incredible, a lot of the songs that were playing caught my ear. In particular, I heard this cover of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' in the style of bossanova. Wow.
I was passively listening to NPR one day and heard a familiar french voice speaking along with some familiar french names. I held my hand back from turning off the ignition and sat in front of my house. Good thing I did. I was pleasantly surprised that Air was scoring an old film called Le Voyage dans la Lune. I had never heard of it prior to but some digging around led me to understand that it was basically the first science fiction film made and a nod to Jules Verne.
The story during their interview was that Godin and Dunckel were asked to do it a month before it was to debut at Cannes, 16 May 2011. At the end of endless nights, they hadn't even seen film with the score together prior to the showing. Now, the soundtrack is a available, and the DVD is set to arrive at ye olde Logan Square at the end of the month. I'll have a showing, but my pal Christopher downloaded it earlier this week (no, I'm not going to cheat). For some clips (a different kind of cheating), you should go here.
Note that this isn't the first time that Air scored a film. You would remember that they did Virgin Suicides and former (then-current) drummer, Brian Reitzell, pulled off Lost in Translation... both Sofia Coppola films, both great soundtracks.
Sidenote Soulwax is taking the space-themed soundtrack route as well... though not as elegantly as Air is. Here the Dewaele brothers do what they do best: jam.
When I saw that day9 (yes, I play starcraft on occasion) posted an Isolee video on the f'book, he instantly got another 5 points. When I went to conspicks to see if I had put up an Isolée post anytime previously, I was severely disappointed. I'm confessing and the following is my repentance to Rajko Müller, Mr. Isolée himself.
If you're looking for lyrics, you won't find them here. We Are Monster is a collection of distilled, up-beat microhouse (think minimalist dance w/ 4x4 beats). I remember making up a dance with my friend Dan's then-girl Abby sticking my wrists out my sides and treating my phalanges as fins while bobbing like a buoy to 'Jelly Baby/Fish'. Probably one of my favorite samples ever is 4-3/4 min into 'Schrapnell' where he takes the sound made through a speaker when a cell phone about to ring near an amp/mixer/recording device. Brilliant.
Last year he put out Well Spent Youth. He keeps to his truncated groovy roots and at the same time smoothes it out more to take a deep house turn. I can't say that I'm a big fan of the genre in general since I feel that there's a persistent discontinuity. 'Palorma Triste' and 'Trop Près De Toi' are closest to what I'm used to from him and consequentially the one I find most appealing... and not coincidentally they are the tracks that have the most number of samples creating that weave.
Müller understands balance, and that's what gives his cuts longevity. Repetitive dissemblance with a memory is the key to good production and too often you hear artists with the loop button pressed a little too long. This is not a new concept. Probably the most famous example is Beethoven's 5th symphony; it's the same damn duh-duh-duh-duuuh thing over and over again... but not. The modern day version of this departs to the 4/8/16 bar loop, but Müller must, else it wouldn't have the house slant.
The other positive aspect in all of his work is the amount of detail that extends throughout. You can be minimalist but that doesn't mean you lack effort in the form of content. It takes a lot of leaves to make a tree and someone's got to put them there. It's great that the focus can be on the details of singular items, but I would prefer that that appreciation happen in a sub-layer of the overall design, otherwise there's less to recognize.
Although the goal here is to make more people aware of music that's out there (that I like), if you are would rather not see the music posted on the site because you own the copyright, send an email to duconrad at gmail dot com and I'll remedy that.
