From: owner-trailer-park-digest@smoe.org (trailer-park-digest) To: trailer-park-digest@smoe.org Subject: trailer-park-digest V3 #56 Reply-To: trailer-park Sender: owner-trailer-park-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-trailer-park-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk trailer-park-digest Tuesday, July 16 2002 Volume 03 : Number 056 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 11:50:15 EDT From: Seis98@aol.com Subject: Beth in NYT magazine this is the story that appeared in the NYT magazine this weekend sorry I had to post the whole story but youd have to sign up to view it....attached is one of the pictures that was featured.....[Unable to display image] Phat Folk By GERALD MARZORATI eth Orton is a one-woman revival. What she is bringing back is not a moment or even a sound but an approach -- a musical adventurousness that folk-styled British pop embraced for a few years beginning in the late 1960's, before rock-blues drowned it all out. Nick Drake and his chamber accompaniments, the Pentangle and their jazzy arrangements of traditional English ballads, Van Morrison and his ethereally acoustic ''Astral Weeks'' LP: this is Orton's roots music. Like them, she is yanking folk from the clutches of the folkloric. Orton is lanky, sad-eyed, pensive -- pure coffeehouse, except that's not where she got her start. Her first singing gig, in 1992, was a collaboration with William Orbit, the London studio wiz. On a recording never released here or in England, Orton's electronically treated voice can be heard straining above Orbit's dance-beat pulsings. But to quote the granddaddy of folk shape-shifters, there's no success like failure. When, four years later, Orton, at 26, released a first album of her own, ''Trailer Park,'' the opening song (which she wrote with Orbit) announced her arrival with an inventive mix of guitar picking, double-bass thumping, cello bowing, gypsy fiddling, synth gurgling and restrained funk drumming. Throughout ''Trailer Park'' and her follow-up album two years later, ''Central Reservation,'' back-country acoustic instruments -- harmonium, dulcimer and mandolin, along with guitar and upright bass -- mingle with electronic programming and all manner of dance-club and rave-scene grooves. She was like no one else, setting her old-timey songs in a late-night, futuristic soundscape. ''It can be easy for a singer-songwriter to get lazy with the music,'' she said recently. ''You have to be able to find that emotive thing beyond the words, without words. Like a soundtrack, you know.'' Not that her lyrics don't matter to her. She is a singer-songwriter. To melodies folky and spare, with a voice at once frail and husky, she essays what she's sifted from experience, much of it unhappy. The songs' infectious rhythms and transporting electro-atmospherics offer a tonic, though -- shake it off, make it new. In Orton's best tracks, sound and song gather to the truth every troubadour wishes to impart: to love is to learn, which loneliness clarifies. Move on. Orton has a new album coming out at the end of the month (and an American tour kicking off in Central Park in two weeks). It's called ''Daybreaker,'' and it's more ambitious and lush than anything she has previously done. Her melodies are more intricate and surprising, her singing more confident. Behind her, strings and abstract electronic sounds swell and ebb, or horns sashay, or Ryan Adams (or Emmylou Harris) closely, gently harmonizes. The title track, which she ventured with the techno-pioneering Chemical Brothers, sounds a lot like folk rock for the new century. Her touchstone for the album, she says, was Vangelis's soundtrack for the movie ''Blade Runner.'' Yet emerging from the sophisticated instrumental interplay and shadowy laptop timbres of ''Daybreaker'' there is always that voice, its guileless yearning, and the simply strummed chords: her presence. Lean in and listen. She is here to tell you how far a woman and her guitar can take you. [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type image/jpeg] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 20:40:27 +0100 From: James Nelson Subject: Show at Electric Ballroom Went to the show last Tuesday, it was amazing (first time I've seen Beth live). Set list for those who are interested (not complete or in order, as this is from memory): Feel to Believe (opener, my favourite track and a little disappointing really - got a lot better, though) Daybreaker Galaxy of Emptiness (amazing!) Someone's Daughter She Cries Your Name Stolen Car Concrete Sky Carmella (I think...) Sweetest Decline Central Reservation Thinking About Tomorrow (sure there were more, but really can't remember) Encore: (the guy behind me really really wanted Sugar Boy, but I'm glad he didn't get it, as I don't likt it particularly) Blood Red River This One's Gonna Bruise (I think...) Best Bit I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine James j.m.nelson.98@cantab.net ------------------------------ End of trailer-park-digest V3 #56 *********************************