Artist: Keyboard Choir
Title: Mizen Head To Gascanane Sound
Label: Brainlove
Genre: Avantgarde
Bitrate: 177kbit av.
Time: 00:56:56
Size: 74.43 mb
Rip Date: 2009-03-19
Str Date: 2009-03-09
1. The Drone Of The Hearse 1:04
2. Legal Boards 6:29
3. Depths In Meters #1 1:06
4. In This Situation, Thinking Won't Help! 3:37
5. Macondo 7:42
6. Depths In Meters #2 0:58
7. Put Me Down 5:37
8. The Shiver 5:49
9. Skylab 4:37
10. Bugs 4:40
11. La Fin De Tout 0:56
12. Electrical Unity 14:21
Release Notes:
Hailing all the way from the sunny valleys of Oxford, and
signed to the marvellous Brainlove Records (also home of
Napoleon IIIrd and Pagan Wanderer Lu, amongst others),
Keyboard Choir are a six-piece making electronic music in a
full-band set-up. Trying to describe precisely what they
actually sound like would be pretty much pointless- you'll
have to listen for yourself, but suffice to say that despite
several clearly discernable influences (Boards of Canada, Daft
Punk, DJ Shadow, etc) they don't really sound too much like
they're coming from the same place as very many of their
contemporaries, in the UK or otherwise.
'Mizen Head To Gascanane Sound', apparently named after a
scrawl on one of the walls of the studio in Ireland where they
recorded it, is, on one level, a concept album about some sort
of apocalypse or other such nuclear-related event, a story
told through snippets of old Cold War propaganda recordings
and the likes. But, on another, it is, in the same way that
'Music Has The Right To Children' was (apparently) what it
sounds like to be a child in the late 70s/early 80s, ╡Mizen
Head To Gascanane Sound' is what it sounds like to be a geeky
teenager in the late 90s/early 00s. To listen to it is to be
beset by memories of science-fiction films and computer games-
Blade Runner, Anachronox, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII.
Thematically this is not necessarily what the album is about
(more on that later), but certainly, sound-wise, it is- the
organ sound on introduction 'Drone Of The Hearse' is pure
Squaresoft; the predominant settings on the synths throughout
recalls nothing so much as the soundtrack to a certain
Vangelis-scored science fiction film already mentioned above.
And then over on album highlight 'Macondo' the tinkle bells
kick in and you're playing your way through the bit of Chrono
Trigger with all those floating islands in the sky, circa
12000 BC. It's quite the geeky trip.
And then there's the albums actual themes, of course, which,
frankly, just provide a still further layer of joy. For a band
whose live show features people dancing around at the front in
homemade cardboard and tinfoil robot outfits, there is
something surprisingly and for that matter definitively
significant going on underneath their compositions. Perfectly
placed bits of vocal samples meld with haunting
counter-melodies and DJ Shadow-style beats to create something
at times traumatic, at times melancholy, at times- yes-
apocalyptic, or at least dangerous. In short, it does not just
remind me of old computer game soundtracks- it reminds me of
the best goddamn computer game soundtrack I could ever imagine
I'd hear.