Skip to main content

Gllia

Browsing the music at amazon.co.jp in 2007, I happened upon a thumbnail of a CD cover depicting some brightly-coloured giraffes. Impulsively, I ordered it, despite knowing nothing about Kazumasa Hashimoto, the composer and multi-instrumentalist behind it. Happily, it's a wonderful record, though not an easy one to describe. The genre labels attached to it at Discogs are "Modern Classical, IDM, Ambient" which barely seems helpful at all. Hashimoto was linked at one point to the putative genre of "childish music", which perhaps gives a slightly better sense of its flavour. "Warmtronica" is another label that has been affixed to his work.

The instrumentation includes violin, cello, piano, clarinet & glockenspiel, but it doesn't strike me as having all that much overlap with classical. Though there are also significant servings of acoustic guitar and mellotron, and a smattering of bass & drums - it definitely isn't rock'n'roll. The vocals are fascinating: so stilted and affectless, that to begin with, I wasn't sure if their origin was natural or artificial. I'm still not certain about that now - but as the voices are credited to Uma Torrini, Ms. V and Mr. B, I'll assume that they are real people for the time being.

My favourite pieces on this disc are the title track, and 'Milmils'. On the strength of my affection for Gllia (2006), I afterwards acquired three more albums by the same artist. Yupi (2003) is almost entirely instrumental, and with slightly more of an electronic emphasis; while on Epitaph (2004) the strange, listless voices also appear. I enjoyed both of these, though neither one quite as much as Gllia. I was less fond of Euphoriam (2007) which features more conventional vocals on a number of its tracks.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

In Heat

Having acquired the soubriquet "the walrus of love", Barry White thereafter became something of a figure of fun, something that misled me (and presumably others) into disregarding his music. Only within the last few years have I begun to pay it more attention. After picking up a copy of his '74 album Can't Get Enough last summer, which I loved, I sought out some of the music by his protegés Love Unlimited. From a Discogs seller I ordered well-used copies of Under the Influence of... ('73) and In Heat ('74) for only £6.25. The only unappealing thing about In Heat is its awful title. The songs and the singing are strong; the arrangements rich & warmly enveloping. As one would expect from White, the thematic focus is firmly fixed on amatory matters. The opening number 'Move Me No Mountain' (the only one on the record not written by White) offers a refreshing rebuttal to the kind of lyrical hyperbole in songs like 'Ain't No Mountain High E...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...