#colin stetson

[brokehorrorfan]

The Menu’s original motion picture soundtrack is available on vinyl for $30 via Waxwork Records. The score is composed by Colin Stetson (Hereditary, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Color Out of Space).

Scheduled to ship in February, the album is pressed on 180-gram splatter colored vinyl. It's housed in a gatefold jacket with matte satin coating featuring artwork by Matt Needle and a 12x12 art pint.

[dustedmagazine]

Brìghde Chaimbeul — Carry Them With Us (tak:til)

First of all, for any interested non-Gaelic speakers, the young Scottish piper’s name is (per her own site) pronounced “Bree-chu CHaym-bul.” And secondly, while the music found on this, her third album, sounds like what most would identify as bagpipes, it’s… well it is and it isn’t. To the extent that bagpipes are known to the wider world it’s something like the great Highland bagpipe (musician blowing into a reed, pipes extending over shoulder). Chaimbeul can certainly play that too, but she specializes more in the Scottish smallpipes, a bellow-driven instrument of more recent vintage (the 80s!) albeit from a lineage going back hundreds of years. The details are worth noting up front, because the music on Carry Them With Us is so viscerally enchanting it might be hard to keep track of them once you’re mid-listen.

Both varieties of bagpipe share some seemingly contradictory qualities. Drone instruments that (due to the various chanters used and other aspects of their design) can handle complex, fast-moving melodies; intensely analogue devices that, due to their precision and lack of sonic decay, can feel almost electronic in nature. Capable of simultaneously evoking melancholy and spritely joy, one on its own, played well, can fill a whole room with sound almost to the point of oppression. Unsurprisingly for a musician who’s been winning awards since she was a teen, Chaimbeul is an exceptional player of the smallpipes and from the opening blast of “Pililiù: The Call of the Redshank” these 35 minutes practically put on a clinic on why any listener might want to get to know them.

Not that Chaimbeul is strictly solo; after Canadian saxophone dynamo Colin Stetson reached out to her about a documentary soundtrack, the two of them wound of working together on six of the nine tracks here. If you’ve never previously considered the way sax and bagpipe might sound like each other, or take on similar roles, or complement each other, their completely natural fit here might take you aback. Stetson fans are well aware of the head of steam he can build up, but Chaimbeul’s no slouch either; a track like “Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom: I Am Disposed of Mirth” already feels delirious before you notice Stetson’s whirling flutters unspooling in the background. Even when their roles diverge more, like the impossible to miss saxophone tessellations towards the end of “’S Mi Gabhail an Rathaid: I Take the Road,” they feel like kindred spirits.

The most notable element aside from Chaimbeul’s pipes and Stetson’s sax is her voice, singing in Gaelic. It only shows up a few times but it’s an arresting presence whenever it does. Maybe if you speak the language it turns out she’s singing about something more mundane, but based on the song titles here and the incantatory, almost vatic feeling those passages bring to the rest of the music it’s hard not to feel like there’s something of deep significance being passed on. Like the rest of Carry Them With Us, it's intensely striking.

Ian Mathers

[jgthirlwell]

03.24.24 Elliott Sharp's Void Patrol (with guests Cyro Batista and Colin Stetson) at Big Ears Festival

[hildegardladyofbones]

Girl help I am mentally unwell about experimental avant garde jazz again

[noneofusareverno]

He’s listening to this…

[nofatclips-home]

Dreaming Awake by My Brightest Diamond, live for Mason Jar Music

[bermudianabroad]

February Listening

Not saying I contributed to the Tracy Chapman resurgence, but it was mighty weird playing her on loop to then see/hear her everywhere. About time she had a resurgence. Sliding into her B-sides, I hadn’t realised just how explicitly political her music was. End of Jan/start of Feb was a dark time so she lit up my long bus rides to and from work.

Dance Fever was an album I slept on when it came out. I wasn’t aware, so finding it was another bright spot in the long winter. Daffodil was one I played on repeat for hours. Not hyperbole.

Fun story behind Colin Stetson: the Boy casually thanked me for introducing him to this album and I promptly went lol wut because I’d never heard of it before. Looked it up and fell in love— somehow Stetson has Inceptioned his way into our hearts. He is his own grandfather type scenario, idk. But haunted club music? Sad trance? Melancholic rave tunes? Hard to describe.

Ane Brun: breathy and cool. Just chill and nice. Velvet is an apt visual on the album cover. Song that turned me onto the album is still my favourite— Do You Remember. A heartbreaking and triumphant banger.

Likewise, been aware of Michael Kiwanuka for a while; loved the album’s eponymous song and that’s still my favourite too. Still need to delve into his back catalogue, but another one that got me over the humour of winter. He has the promise of bright summer days (daze) in his voice. Hot, warm yellows.

@tangledupinblue8 tagging you in this since you tagged me in that, not quite the same but what I listened to lately <3

9/52

[fedoracore]

When we were that what wept for the sea - Colin Stetson (2023)

[mossymandibles]

Me every time I pick up on an ominous saxophone in a movie soundtrack

[maxximonstre]

[davidisnotmyname]

holy shit I mean this is the most serious way possible you need to listen to among the sef by Colin Stetson. He’s the same guy who did the music for hereditary and this specific song is the opening for the new Uzumaki anime coming out soon. It’s all just one guy, and the vocals aren’t overlaid, he’s literally singing as he’s playing the saxophone. It’s amazing, and I’m not even a big fan of saxophone music which is saying something

[mywifeleftme]

345: Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld // Never Were the Way She Was

Never Were the Way She Was Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld 2015, Constellation (Bandcamp)

My prevailing memory of seeing Sarah Neufeld and Colin Stetson’s duo performance in a small room at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa was the way they spent much of the performance with their eyes locked on one another. When violinist Neufeld became lost in her own playing and arched backward, in the same motion Stetson would lean forward over his hulking, steampunk bass saxophone, his legs braced wide. It was as though the two of them were bound at the neck by a long, invisible leather strap. In the most intense passages, they would square off barely a foot apart, like two rams, the veins in Stetson’s sweaty neck and forehead standing out, Neufeld’s angled forearm a blur of precision cuts. Despite also seeing Stetson’s SORROW, an arrangement of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony for a 12-piece band, during the same festival, it was the intimate physicality of the duo show with Neufeld that had the bigger impact on me.

While Stetson has frequently performed in larger combos (as has Neufeld with Arcade Fire, for that matter), in solo and duo performances his uniqueness as a player is more legible. On Never Were the Way She Was, he uses his uncanny circular breathing technique to create ogrish drones (“With the Dark Hug of Time”), loop-like melodic phrases (“The Sun Roars Into View”), and even to emulate broken techno beats (“The Rest of Us”). Stetson is a pretty physically jacked guy, and when you see him do this stuff in person it’s a bit like watching a blacksmith going at his forge—on record it can be easy for an inattentive listener to miss the exertions required to produce these sounds. But when you start tuning in to the fact all of this groaning cacophony is produced by one man’s laboured lungs, its rawness and minor imprecisions become captivating.

Neufeld takes centre stage on the more somber, post-rocky tunes like the title track, her violin weeping rust as she overlooks a grey bay, Stetson contributing various fog horns and stomach upset. Now and again she wordlessly sings, but it’s always recorded distantly, like a memory of some ever-present sorrow you refuse to allow to surface. On “In the Vespers,” she sketches out a tricky rhythm that Stetson eventually echoes on a tenor sax, the pair running through an odd-time workout that would sound like prog were in not for the chilly clarity of her phrasing, the way the energy decays once again into remorse.

The pair’s previous collaboration was a 2013 film score (Blue Caprice), and the record is of a piece with the influential work Stetson has subsequently done as a soundtrack composer (notably Ari Aster’s Hereditary). As with fellow Aster collaborator the Haxan Cloak, Stetson’s work has helped to define the sound of contemporary unease. If you’ve watched a recent horror movie or psychological thriller, the palette of Never Were the Way She Was will already be familiar—but here the pieces aren’t tied to any preconceived scenario, and the interplay between the two musicians gives it a dynamism and complete-in-itself mood all its own.

345/365

[shitass-broadsword]

my sanity is dwindling

[jgthirlwell]

playlist 01.28.24

Monika Roscher Big Band Witchy Activities and the Maple Death (Zenna) REZZETT Meant Like This (Trilogy Tapes) Nihiloxica Source of Denial (Crammed) Forest Swords Bolted (Ninja Tune) Vonn Zandus Unimmortal (Bandcamp) Armand Hammer We Buy Diabetic Test Strips (Fat Possum) David Chesworth Ensemble Badlands (W.Mine) JAAW Supercluster (Svart) Laurel Halo Atlas (Awe) Sprain The Lamb As Effigy (The Flenser) Shining Grindstone (Rune Grammafon) Rev Kristen Hayter Saved (Perpetual Flame Industries) Water From Your Eyes Everyones Crushed (Matador) Hashashin Nihsahsah (Art as Catharsis) Colin Stetson When we were that what wept for the seas (52hz) Gazelle Twin Black Dog (Invada) JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown Scaring the hoes (AWAL) Wednesday Rat Saw God (Dead Oceans) Qow ElMosameh Sherine (irsh) The Guru Guru Pchew / Make Less Babies (Suburban) Future Old People Are Wizards M (Zeal) Marnie Stern The Comeback Kid (Joyful Noise) Cruel Diagonals Fractured Whole (Beacon Sound)

[zef-zef]

Colin Stetson - Live @ Aglomerat, Moscow 11/04/2019

[my-chemical-wheaties]

Albums That I Listened to in January 2024

Last month, I made the first of what I plan to be a series of twelve posts where I share what albums I listened to in the month before then and what I thought about them.

Here are the twelve albums that I listened to this month:

Titanic Rising - Weyes Blood (2019)

When We Were That What Wept for the Sea - Colin Stetson (2023)

3D Country - Geese (2023)

Middle Cyclone - Neko Case (2009)

In Colour - Jamie xx (2015)

Atlanta Millionaires Club - Faye Webster (2019)

Color Me Country - Linda Martell (1970)

Madison - Sloppy Jane (2021)

Marquee Moon - Television (1977)

Heaven or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins (1990)

Fantasies - Metric (2009)

In My Own Time - Karen Dalton (1971)

Here's how I'd rank these albums:

Madison - I decided to give this album a listen purely out of curiosity because of how fascinated I was by the story behind how it got made. For those of you who are unaware, songwriter Haley Dahl and her band Sloppy Jane recorded this album in the Lost World Caverns in West Virginia over the course of two weeks, and for an album that was recorded in a literal cave, it's excellent. The orchestral, art pop compositions are absolutely beautiful, and Haley is a great lyricist whose ability to convey certain emotions and experiences with such visceral imagery and usage of symbolism throughout multiple tracks is something I admire and respect. Going into this album knowing that it was recorded in a cave adds to the atmosphere of the album, too. While listening, I couldn't help but imagine Haley and company playing these songs in a dark cavern in the middle of the night. I could go on about this album and how much I love it for pages, but I these posts are already kind of long as it stands, and I don't want it to be any longer. Definitely give it a listen, especially if you're as big of a Kate Bush fan as I am, because this has her influence all over it. 10/10

2. Middle Cyclone - Ever since I discovered her music last year before I started this personal challenge, Neko Case has quickly become one of my favorite artists and this album only further demonstrates to me why I've come to love her work so much. The way she blends together indie rock and country scratches an itch for me; and much like in her album preceding this one, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Middle Cyclone demonstrates Neko's incredible lyricism, particularly her ability to convey emotional rawness and human vulnerability in such a straightforward, yet eloquently profound way. Given that this is also what I would consider Neko Case's most accessible album, I would highly recommend anyone who hasn't already listened to her work to check this album out - especially if you're a fan of artists like Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, or Adrienne Lenker who I think all owe a part of their sound and success to her. 8/10

3. In My Own Time - Karen Dalton is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated artists of the 60s and 70s and deserves more recognition than what she gets. Only the second album she ever released in her lifetime, there's something especially pleasant about her different covers of these songs (Yes, this is a covers album - Karen didn't really write or record original material). It makes me feel like I am sitting in a living room in a house on the countryside watching the snow fall in the winter or the leave rustling in the breeze in the summer. Not to mention that Karen has a beautiful alto voice. I actually like some of these covers better than their original versions. If you're looking for late sixties/early seventies folk music to listen to, I would recommend checking this album out. 9/10

4. Fantasies - Metric is a band that has been on my radar for a while now, but for some reason, I haven't gone out of my way to listen to any of their albums in full until now. All of the tracks go pretty hard, and I really like Emily Haines' voice. My favorite band Paramore cited Metric as an influence for their most recent album This Is Why, and I can definitely see where they were inspired. If any of you like Paramore or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I would definitely give this album a listen. 7/10

5. Titanic Rising - This album sounds like walking through an antique store that is faintly playing old obscure 80s music on its loudspeakers as you gaze over the various items decorating each "room" in the store, the scent of vintage goods and old wood wafting through the air. Weyes Blood's voice reminds me of a cross between Eurhythmics' Annie Lennox and Enya, and the instrumentation and production on this album are stunningly beautiful. I was worried going into this album that I wouldn't be able to get into it because the tracks are all on the slower side in terms of tempo, but I actually found myself liking this one a lot. 9/10

6. Color Me Country - Linda Martell is an important figure in country music history who, despite her significance and the barriers she helped break down for black artists in the genre, has been oft forgotten. The first black artist in history to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, she only ever released one studio album - Color Me Country, in 1970. The album consists of pretty standard country music that was common at the time, with lyrical subject matter typical of the genre - but just because an album isn't sonically pushing the envelope, doesn't mean that it can't be good. I don't know what it was, but something lit up in me listening to this album and I really enjoyed what I heard. It makes me wonder what else she would have done had she continued her music career and released more material. Either way, this is a wonderful album from an incredible woman who deserves a lot more attention to her work. 7/10

7. 3D Country - This album sounds like a fusion between The Rolling Stones and Queen and I'm kind of living for it. It's genuinely good, fun, classic-styled rock music that doesn't take itself too seriously and has some really unique qualities to it. St. Elmo has been stuck in my head ever since I first heard it, and little embellishments like the harp on the title track really give this album its own personality. If you're somebody who primarily listens to older music who wants to try something newer or are just looking for more rock bands to get into, I recommend giving this album a try. 8/10

8. Atlanta Millionaires Club - Did you know that Faye Webster and I are the same age? I'm so used to artists either being older or younger than me that seeing someone around my age making music is both surprising and refreshing to me at the same time. This might be part of the reason why I clicked with this album a bit better than some of the other ones that I listened to this last month - Faye and I are in kind of the same place in life and due to us being the same age, and we probably share a similar perspective and experiences. It also helps that Faye is an adroit lyricist, and the chill indie rock instrumentation suits her voice well. The only issue that I have with this album is that the track Flowers near the end sounds jarring given how different it is from the rest of the album. 8/10

9. When We Were That What Wept for the Sea - This album gaslit me into thinking I have synesthesia. No really, I'm serious - I listened to this album while driving at night and I remember during the beginning of either Infliction or Passage I started smelling freshly brewed coffee. I didn't have any coffee in the car with me and I was not in an area where there would be any coffee brewing nearby. It was wild. And then after that it started smelling like the produce section of a grocery store in the beginning of the second half of the album. Anyways, this experimental ambient album by saxophonist Colin Stetson was really interesting to listen to and there are a lot of cool details scattered throughout each song. It wasn't what I was expecting at all, but it was a pleasant surprise. It would probably pair well with the flute album Andre 3000 put out last year. 8/10

10. Marquee Moon - This is a classic album that I see getting a ton of praise, so I figured I would give it a listen. It's a pretty good album, although the tracks sound a little bit samey at times. The two songs that stand out to me are Venus and the title track. 7/10

11. In Colour - The only solo album (As of right now) from The xx member Jamie xx makes for a fairly pleasant listening experience. Jamie seems to be veering slightly away from the indie rock elements of The xx's work and more into electronic and pop, incorporating some hip-hop influences along the way. The featured appearances all fit in nicely, and the album overall sounds like the chill cousin of Daft Punk's Homework. 8/10

12. Heaven or Las Vegas - Please don't take me ranking this album last as some indication that I don't like it. I actually enjoyed it - albeit think that it's overrated. The number of people that I have seen praising this album and talking about how great it is made me think that it was going to be some amazing, mind-altering experience to listen to, but it was really a series of (Super short) shoegaze-y pop tracks that are just good. I don't really get why people hype up Cocteau Twins so much. You would think that they invented sliced bread with the way some people talk about them. 7/10

So far, I've really been enjoying most of the albums that I listen to. I have a few albums in mind that I plan to listen to in full in February, but again, if anyone wants to recommend me anything, you are always welcome to leave a comment. :)