Listening suggestions

►Chill-out music, episode 2

Even though summer is close to its ending, I thought it would be a good idea to make it last a little longer by writing a post about chill-out music, remembering all those long, warm nights, on a beach or some other nice place, just chilling out in good company.

Also, it might be interesting for those among you who’d like to start producing music in that genre.

About its origin and history, I’ve already written, you can find the article here on my site.

But I didn’t get into details of the music or present any listening examples, so that’s what I’m going to try this time.

First, one should mention that chill out music is meant to be listened to in an only half-active way, sort of what happens with ambient music, but maybe with a little more attention. That’s how it manages to have such a chilling and relaxing effect on the listener.

There are no fixed rules for what material can be used to write a chill out track, nor with what means.

It can as much consist of acoustic material, like some melody played on an exotic instrument on a strings background, that could almost be called world music, wouldn’t there be an electronic break-beat in the background, as it can be a fully electronic track, combining mysterious, slow melodies with synthesizer effects and drum samples.

You can find your inspiration in Latin American tunes, or music from Middle Orient or Asia, using some ethnic instrument, as well as you could prefer to create something totally free, played on some nice lead pad, for example.

Feel free to create whatever rhythms you like, also the structure of the track can be totally free, as well as the duration of the track might vary from 2 minutes to 30 minutes.

One thing to keep in mind, after you have your musical material done and are starting to mix and add plugins and effects, is that you’re looking for a warm, relaxing and “airy” sound, so allow instruments to have enough space between them (be it with delays and different reverbs, simple panning or equalizing), give the whole mix a slight cut between 1kHz and 2kHz aswell as make generous use of reverbs and “warming” plugins, like tape saturation, for example.

Even if you’re creating everything on your computer, think analogic, not digital.

If you want to use strings as your harmonic base, choose wisely which samples you’re going to use, they have to have little attack and sound warm, also be sure to compose in a way that chords have easy transitions (think common notes and always stay in legato). Stay within the natural register of each instrument and create physical space by panning the four of them (violin, viola, cello and contra-bass) in a logical way, forming a half circle: more treble to the left, more bass to the right.

If you’re looking for something exotic to use in your song or just for inspiration, here are some suggestions:

  • Indian music (from sitar to religious chant)
  • Gregorian chant and choral music (remember Enigma?)
  • Shakers and other acoustic percussion instruments from all around the world
  • Fusion with metal solos or classical music.
  • Effects and background sound recorded directly from our natural environment (like wind, rain, the sea, etc)
  • Vocal parts with poetic lyrics or at least enigmatic meaning (be sure to look for breathy and airy voice capture)
  • Be creative, think out of the box, don’t limit to your synthesizers or samples and effects or plugins, look for sounds all around you.
  • Combine electronic parts with live recordings of you or other musicians who you invite
  • Look for the essential, go after the idea of “less is more”, leave space for each instrument and don’t use too many at the same time, not more than five.

 

Now that we have talked about some basic ideas, here are some listening suggestions to further improve your inspiration or just chill out:

Vangelis – Conquest of Paradise (remember him from the film Blade Runner?):

 

Thomas Newman – Soundtrack American Beauty

 

Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygéne  (several parts, one album from 1977 the other from 1997)

 

Conjure One – Center of the Sun (Solar Stone’s Chilled Out Remix)

 

Morcheeba – The Sea

 

Chris Coco – Holiday

CHRIS COCO – HOLIDAY by chris coco

 

►Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker for Guitar 4tet

Don’t know if I mentioned it yet, I’m finishing university, and tomorrow is one of the last exams. It’s a test in ensemble music, I’m part of a guitar quartet, and one of the pieces we’re playing is the Waltz of the Flowers from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.

The arrangement for 4 guitars is made by The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, one of the best guitar quartets in the world, and I’d like to show you their brilliant recording. We can only dream of getting close to that…

 

And to complete this post, here’s the original for orchestra. I don’t post one of the videos with ballet, because I looked hard but couldn’t find any decent recording regarding the audio (be it quality of interpretation). But you can easily look that up yourself, it’s beautiful to see, obviously. I post two recordings, I like both, but interpretation is quite different. You can comment which you like best 🙂

 

►The Alternative Music Lounge: Rabih Abou Khalil

Today’s chapter of this series is about a very eclectic and quite unique musician, his name is Rabih Abou Khalil.

Born in Lebanon, but having moved to Germany in 1978 because of the civil war, he early started his music studies, becoming a virtuoso on his main instrument, the oud (string instrument having common origins with the lute – read more here).

 

An oud
An oud (Author of photo: Viken Najarian)

Probably the best term to describe the style of Khalil’s music could be “World Jazz”, as he combines traditional arabic music with jazz, rock and classical music.

Having released several albums with different projects and colaborations, his original compositions feature a wide spectrum of styles, instrumentations and genres.

Along his career he ranged from an album with mostly arabic music, over two projects more oriented to jazz (one with Sonny Fortune and the other with Charlie Mariano and Kenny Wheeler), a lineup of string quartet, oud, tuba and frame drums producing the album called Arabian Waltz, an exotic project called Morton’s Foot (combining european and easter traditions, including tibetan throat singing) to his most recent project, consisting of a trio (oud, piano and drums), with the original name Journey to the Centre of an Egg.

For a more complete biography, read this.

Let’s listen to some of his music:

Ma Muse m’amuse (from CD The Cactus of Knowledge)

 

Live at Jazz Club 1990

 

Sahara!

 

About this series:

One of the ideas I have for this blog is to start periodic post series about a few interesting topics. Like one post a week or a month, about the same topic but always bringing you new (or classic but little known) musical discoveries.
This series that I gave the name “The Alternative Music Lounge” is about presenting you bands and projects that I like a lot or respect much because of the quality of their music although they haven’t made it into the so called “main stream” and therefore probably will remain unknown for many people.
Whatever might be the reasons for this (sometimes their creations are just too good, too unique, lacking any “commercial characteristics”, othertimes it’s just another case of being disregarded by the music industry, we all know what’s usual to happen…), I think the’re more people out there who might like their music but just didn’t have a chance to discover it yet, so I hope these publications of mine might be helpful.
By the way, if you’re a musician and think I might like your music and would like to propose your creations for being featured in a post of this series, you’re welcome to comment this post or any other future post of this series, stating your project’s name, a link to where I can listen to some tracks and a way to contact you.
I promise to try and listen to everyone’s tracks and respond, even if I happen to not accept the proposal.

►The Alternative Music Lounge: Taraf de Haïdouks

This time, I’d like to present you a collective (maybe that’s the right name? “band” is somewhat wrong here) of great musicians from Romania who call themselves Taraf de Haïdouks.

They are mainly a result of gipsy traditions but have joined together into this project and already released quite a few albums.

Having also given quite a lot of live concerts they started to become known a little all over europe and the other day it was my turn to discover them, when they played a song of them on Antena3 radio station.

It was a track which is part of their newest album, where they decided to combine their original compositions with “covers” of famous works of classical composers of the 20th century, especially when they had been inspired by romanian folk music (like Bartok, Khachaturian, Falla, Albeniz).

In this case it’s the famous piece Asturias – Leyenda by Isaac Albeniz, which is best known on guitar, I’ve played it myself.

Have a listen:
Taraf de Haidouks – Asturias

And here are some videos of other tracks of them:

Waltz from Masquerade (A. Khatchaturian)

 

Lezghinka (A. Khatchaturian)

 

Ostinato (B. Bartok)

To finish up this post, I leave you links to their biography on wikipedia and a page where it is possible to order their CDs.

 

About this series:

One of the ideas I have for this blog is to start periodic post series about a few interesting topics. Like one post a week or a month, about the same topic but always bringing you new (or classic but little known) musical discoveries.
This series that I gave the name “The Alternative Music Lounge” is about presenting you bands and projects that I like a lot or respect much because of the quality of their music although they haven’t made it into the so called “main stream” and therefore probably will remain unknown for many people.
Whatever might be the reasons for this (sometimes their creations are just too good, too unique, lacking any “commercial characteristics”, othertimes it’s just another case of being disregarded by the music industry, we all know what’s usual to happen…), I think the’re more people out there who might like their music but just didn’t have a chance to discover it yet, so I hope these publications of mine might be helpful.
By the way, if you’re a musician and think I might like your music and would like to propose your creations for being featured in a post of this series, you’re welcome to comment this post or any other future post of this series, stating your project’s name, a link to where I can listen to some tracks and a way to contact you.
I promise to try and listen to everyone’s tracks and respond, even if I happen to not accept the proposal.

►And I thought I knew his music…

I always thought I knew the music of Sting reasonably well, not as well as in the case of a dedicated fan, but fair enough.

You know, all those classics of his? Every Breath You Take, Roxanne, Message in a Bottle, Don’t Stand so Close to Me, Englishman in New York, etc? Have heard them many times and like them quite a lot.

But today I found out I didn’t know it well enough. When I finished a home assignment for ear training or whatever you’d like to call it. I had to write down the notes of a song of his that I never heard before but that’s absolutely fantastic:

Moon over Bourbon Street

It’s about a werewolf, more precisely inspired in the book of Anne Rice “The vampire Lestat”. It’s very mysterious, sad, dark and the composition and musical arrangement is absolutely brilliant, hear by yourself:

Lyrics here.

 

►The Alternative Music Lounge: Revolution Void

In the first post of this series I’d like to introduce to you a project that describes it’s music style as “nu-jazz, electro-jazz or electronic breakbeat jazz” and their name is:

Revolution Void

Having been founded by producer and jazz pianist Jonah Dempcy, their recordings also feature a number of guest musicians including among others Seamus Blake, Matthew Garrison and Lucas Pickford .

Combining electronic music with live improvisation, Jonah considers his main jazz influences to be John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, as well as contemporary artists such as Kurt Rosenwinkel and Brad Mehldau.

Six years ago, Jonah began releasing music online through the Creative Commons, beginning with the album Increase the Dosage. Since then, Revolution Void has been an active member of the online music-sharing renaissance, regularly releasing albums and singles in their entirety for free online.

That’s how I got to know them, actually, found their album available for download on a torrent site that only includes LEGAL downloads.

I immediately liked their music, right from the first listen, every single track of the album.

What I especially admire is the quality of sound, improvisation, production and the diversity and creativity of each track.

I also love the different rhythms and beats they used, while still managing to mantain some connection throughout the whole album.

So, as I suppose you’re almost at the point saying “stop talking, I want to LISTEN!”, here goes a widget with some of their tracks:

 

And to finish up this post, here’s the link to their website .

 

About this series:

One of the ideas I have for this blog is to start periodic post series about a few interesting topics. Like one post a week or a month, about the same topic but always bringing you new (or classic but little known) musical discoveries.
This series that I gave the name “The Alternative Music Lounge” is about presenting you bands and projects that I like a lot or respect much because of the quality of their music although they haven’t made it into the so called “main stream” and therefore probably will remain unknown for many people.
Whatever might be the reasons for this (sometimes their creations are just too good, too unique, lacking any “commercial characteristics”, othertimes it’s just another case of being disregarded by the music industry, we all know what’s usual to happen…), I think the’re more people out there who might like their music but just didn’t have a chance to discover it yet, so I hope these publications of mine might be helpful.
By the way, if you’re a musician and think I might like your music and would like to propose your creations for being featured in a post of this series, you’re welcome to comment this post or any other future post of this series, stating your project’s name, a link to where I can listen to some tracks and a way to contact you.
I promise to try and listen to everyone’s tracks and respond, even if I happen to not accept the proposal.