From: owner-velvet-station-digest@smoe.org (velvet-station-digest) To: velvet-station-digest@smoe.org Subject: velvet-station-digest V4 #5 Reply-To: velvet-station@smoe.org Sender: owner-velvet-station-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-velvet-station-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk velvet-station-digest Friday, March 2 2001 Volume 04 : Number 005 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [VS] 'Balloon Mood' ["Adam Walter" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 14:10:16 -0800 From: "Adam Walter" Subject: [VS] 'Balloon Mood' What, with the lack of Velvet Belly news, I thought I'd pass this along. While awaiting release of Anja Garbarek's new album, I decided to sling together some of my thoughts about her first CD. These reviews are sort of an ametuer hobby of mine, so any constructive feedback is welcome. Also, I post these things at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, so there are some similar reviews I've done there of "The Landing" and "Lucia" (I can't remember if I ever passed those on to this list). ~Adam http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-glance/-/A15G57AIKJ5PRQ/ ***** Anja Garbarek's "Balloon Mood" is the sort of album that shifts one's perceptions to the metaphoric and to the subjective. I sometimes find myself picturing the album as the sort of candy dish--filled with multicolored sticky sweets--that one might find in the home of a lonely old widow. The album's cover displays several identical snapshots of a mirthless young blond girl. This image is probably the reason for my further fantasy, imagining Anja's precious voice issuing from the lost soul of a porcelain doll condemned to the hell of an abandoned nightmare factory. The album's excellent blend of industrial and techno music lies in fragments about the doll like dilapidated but magical machinery, with no one to serve but her. In this remote and confined soul-space, Anja's songs often have the eerie quality of an Emily Dickinson poem. Other comparisons come to mind as well. The psychedelic, wandering narrative of "Strange Noises" is solidly within the tradition of Ken Nordine's riff-based storytelling and the albums of "word jazz" that he has released over the past four decades. In "Picking up the Pieces," Anja combines her tragic surrealism with a dense, White-Zombie-style, cyber-metal drone and a chorus in baby-doll voice: "You took away my red lips / And cut them up in pieces / So now I can't kiss the moon / So now I can't kiss the moon goodnight / No longer fly, through the clouds / No longer touch, the stars." All the best idiosyncratic elements of the album are pulled together in "The Cabinet." Anja sings about a cabinet hanging above her bed, "filled with all my secret things," at which she stares during the night. In the background, crowding her voice, all sorts of tiny sounds are at work, hinting at a parade of ceaseless activity. The song (like the whole album) is slightly worrisome, eliciting the thought that perhaps a tribe of small, careful animals or shadowy mechanisms are forever creeping about at the back of one's unconscious mind. ------------------------------ End of velvet-station-digest V4 #5 **********************************