Evening of Light

Cloudscape #42: November 2013

Cloudscape #42: November 2013 by Evening Of Light on Mixcloud

Art: The Veil by Claudio Bravo.

Tracklist:

The Floating World and the Wood Beyond

The Floating World is the main artistic project of Amanda Votta, specialising in flute-based ambient music with dark and mysterious undertones. Starting as a solo flute project with its first releases eight years ago, it has since attracted numerous collaborators on various instruments and, occasionally, spoken word. Recent albums The Apparition and We Hunted have appeared on Cyclic Law and Reverb Worship, respectively, and this label attention will hopefully propel Votta’s music into a wider audience. Her latest album, The Wood Beyond the World, is just out on Eclipse, the subsidiary label of Cyclic Law. [...] The interview below is the result of an email conversation I had with Amanda. My intention was not just to give her the opportunity to tell us a bit about the history of The Floating World, but also to get her to delve a bit deeper into literary and art history, a topic I know she enjoys. As you’ll see, those promises were fulfilled, as Amanda has a lot to say on the subject. [...read more...]

Cloudscape #41: October 2013

Cloudscape #41: October 2013 by Evening Of Light on Mixcloud

Tracklist:

Cloudscape: Electric Crystal Bodies: A Numenéra Soundtrack

Electric Crystal Bodies is intended as a soundtrack for a campaign of the RPG Numenéra I’m playing with some friends. I was mainly inspired by the area we are currently exploring: The Cloudcrystal Skyfields, but also by the general feel of the game: mysterious, a blend of science fiction and fantasy. I looked for songs mostly by word association with the title, but since my collection quite often meshes together nicely, making a coherent mix out of it didn’t prove too difficult. So, a journey through strange landscapes, encounters with ancient advanced technologies, and a rocking bonus track at the end. Enjoy! [...read more...]

Cloudscape #40: September 2013

Cloudscape #40: September 2013 by Evening Of Light on Mixcloud

Photo: Chris Arnade – “Beach, Stars and Waves: Rhode Island” <http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnade/4…>

Tracklist:

Bushes and Briars: A Brief Raving Folk History

Songs are sometimes immortal travellers, and if you follow their tracks, you end up in all kinds of places. Regular readers will know I have a weak spot for folk ballads, and their history and various interpretations are fascinating to track. Bushes and Briars came onto my path from different directions, but I’ll get to that later. The oldest mentions of the ballad that I could find are from nineteenth century broadsides such as this one. It’s a classic love ballad, in the sense that it explores some of the troubles and uncertainties of love and relationships. The woman in the song doesn’t trust men, and the last line suggests she’s driven to suicide because of it. Within the context of British ballads as a whole, that is understandable, as many of them are about men preying on (and murdering) women. In 1904, the song was collected and rearranged by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and from there on it entered into the repertoire of many choir and solo singers. [...read more...]

Cloudscape: Isolation

I’ve been meaning to do a showcase of some videogame soundtracks for a while, and this month I have the perfect excuse. I wrote an article on the island games Dear Esther, Miasmata, and Proteus for the fourth issue of Five out of Ten magazine, and as it happens all three games have fine music. I used some outtakes from those soundtracks and mixed them up with some of the usual Evening of Light fare and I think the combination is rather fitting, with all artists included here operating somewhere along the boundaries of ambient, classical, folk, and drone.

[...read more...]

Review: Bruno Heinen Sextet & Karlheinz Stockhausen – Tierkreis (2013)

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s piece Tierkreis (composed in 1974/75) is a zodiacal work that leaves a lot of freedom to the performer. This series of twelve melodies, one for each sign, was originally written for music boxes, but can basically be played on any instrument, and there have been many different versions: for piano, voice, lute, orchestra, etc. A search on YouTube will yield several examples to satisfy your curiosity. Interpreted like this, the music often maintains much of its original airiness, but you could just as well jazzify the thing, which is what Bruno Heinen did with his sextet (Heinen: piano; Sigurta: trumpet; Allsopp: bass clarinet; Challenger: tenor sax; Di Biase: bass; Scott: drums). [...read more...]

Cloudscape #39: July 2013

Cloudscape #39: July 2013 by Evening Of Light on Mixcloud

Review: In Gowan Ring – The Glinting Spade (1999)

Rereleases long overdue is primarily a relevant category when you don’t own the original album. Apparently, I got the absolute last copy of the original The Glinting Spade CD when I bought it from Bluesanct some seven years back, or at least that’s what the label told me. It’s been sold out since then, and while the surrounding albums The Twin Trees and Hazel Steps Through a Weathered Home had been given new editions by Shayo at around the same time, The Glinting Spade had to wait to this year to be overhauled by German label Merlin’s Nose. The groundbreaking début album Love Charms has been wallowing in obscurity since 1994, but hey, what can you do. Maybe something to consider for its 20th anniversary next year? For those who for whatever reason didn’t snag a copy of the original release, here are some reasons why the new issue should get your attention. [...read more...]