Space Music 40

 

Daniel Herskedal - A Single Sunbeam, album review

Beats of Beauty

This is an album I keep coming back to for its instrumental serenity and mesmerizing vocal from Marja Mortensson, a South Saami Norwegian singer. With its percussive pulses and her wordless incantations, the tuba and bass trumpet playing of Herskedal meld to a haunting of melodic threads across all tracks. There is ambient programming as constant backdrop, and the percussion continually drives. Horns take on loops of their sweet melody, and Mortensson punctuates this with startling vocal idiosyncrasies. Gorgeous. With title track A Single Sunbeam, gentle drumming and other rhythmic beats support a solo horn emerging from the quiet to an increasing rise with programmed strings. 

 

Space Music 39

 

A Lily - Saru l-Qamar, album review

Haunting Beauty

The tracks on this affecting album are mysterious and often haunting, their past origins as reel/cassette tape recordings infused with the distortions of their distant times as well as the effects used in re-presenting them within new musical soundscapes.

 

Here is a slice of the background details presented on A Lily’s Bandcamp page:

 

From the 60’s until the modern era, it was common for Maltese families to receive reel tapes from relatives abroad. Maltese emigrés resettled in Australia, the UK, Canada etc. would record their news onto cassette - often in the form of għana, traditional Maltese song - and mail the tapes back home.

 

The musical backdrops are ambient and repetitive, loops of sound wrapped around long ago and relayed into the present. It is the voices that carry a sonic past with most impact, seemingly lyrical intonations now molded in preserving electronica. Most are carried on pulses of sound like heartbeats resurrected from beyond. Obtained from

 

Archival recordings provided by Magna Żmien Foundation

Dan il-proġett huwa megħjun mill-Kunsill Malti għall-Arti

they are now their own archives of memorial music.