s w e e t b e a t s
november.28.2000 - #355
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artist : The Cinematic Orchestra
album : Remixes 1998-2000
year : 2000
label : Ninja Tune
genre : Lo-Fi
catalogue : zencd50
url : www.ninjatune.net | www.cinematicorchestra.com
quality : CD 192k HQ True Stereo
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01 Moving Cities (Faze Action) 7:50
02 Channel One Suite (Tom Tyler) 5:15
03 The Fear Theme (Kenji) 5:48
04 Guauanco (Les Gammas) 7:35
05 Panoramica (Piero Umiliani) 6:27
06 Vilderness (Nils Petter Molvaer) 6:21
07 Re-Arrange (DJ Krust) 9:48
7 tracks | 00h 49m 04s | 67MB
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Cinematic Orchestra's 1999 debut, Motion, was a landmark in
technique. Frontman Jason Swinscoe's music starts from a hip
hop/DJ-culture vantage and is steeped in his passion for jazz and
evocative European film scores. Working with live musicians, he
records largely improvised compositions, and then reprocesses the
moods and rhythms with a sampler. With its deeply affecting
emotional resonance, his music shows up the ironic contrivances of
many breaks-and-beats producers, whose supply of clever and amusing
references drawn from a bottomless DJ crate seem like cheap musical
tourism, all surfaces and superficiality. Swinscoe raises the
stakes just that little bit higher.
Unsurprisingly, he has become an in-demand remix engineer, but he
steers clear of commercial projects (in a recent interview he
admitted turning down a lucrative Moby commission - a thorny
proposition in itself - because it would be released as a flipside
to a Paul Oakenfold mix). Instead, his fascinating selections on
Remixes act as threads leading back to whole other universes of
music you could spend weeks exploring. Six of the remixes here are
drawn from original pieces whose authors would be largely unknown
to all but aficionados of specific strains of popular culture.
Swinscoe's choices turn you into a noirish detective in a Howard
Hawks film for which he is providing the score: you already know
whodunnit, it's the details, revealed in an astonishingly vast
frame of reference, that provide cause to gasp and swoon. It's
frighteningly rare that a musician in a contemporary field brings
so much generous knowledge and that magical transforming power to
their work, inviting you inside their world and introducing you to
a new way of listening.
Italian soundtrack composer Piero Umiliani has been rediscovered
and reissued in the recent dinner-party craze for lounge and
exotica. His work is marked by a passion for Duke Ellington and
Moog-oriented electronica, and Panoramica is an apt title for this
contemplative, snake-charmer's seance. Vilderness first appeared on
Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvµr's album Solid Ether; his
work encompasses ambient, acoustic folk and jazz funk. Molvµr's
trumpet curls and unfolds like a cigarette trail over a
mesmerisingly pregnant double bass rhythm, the satellite sounds of
vibraphone and electronic motifs sparkling like fragmented beams
from a disco ball.
The only remotely dancefloor-related tracks come from
Reprazent/Breakbeat Era's DJ Krust with Re-Arrange, which becomes a
sensual, intoxicating freefall into string-soaked suspense and
horn-driven resolution. Moving Cities, by hip Nuphonic act Faze
Action, tips a hat to scat jazz and Latin afro-house. Here, though,
Rita Hayworth is double-crossing her gangster husband on the
dancefloor. Guauanco, by Les Gammas, a piano-based German duo from
Munich's underground cafe-jazz label Compost, grows from stuttering
percussion over a subdued piano melody to an African
call-and-response rhapsody.
The most peculiar choice is The Fear Theme, originally written by
Japanese Sega Dreamcast software guru Kenji Eno, who created D,
Enemy Zero and Real Sound and curiously moonlights as an
accomplished modern classical musician. Flute loops punctuate the
loping bongo and bass drum groove, with a sample like the heavy
breathing of a jewel thief adding texture over this midnight tiptoe
across the roof tiles.
Taken even with complete ignorance of their genesis, and regardless
of your enthusiasm for obsessive record-bin trawling, Swinscoe's
remixes are spellbinding on their own. But it would be a missed
opportunity not to take this as a starting point to pursue a
tangent into a strange new planet of sound.
--guardianunlimited.co.uk
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s w e e t b e a t s
we're all about remixes.
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greetings to klangwerk, mgc, sour, & impg
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