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Winterizing
The 2008 installment of our Christmas compilation series. Strangely enough there seem to be somewhere around zero covers of traditional Christmas tunes this time out. download
zip file | Archive.org
page
: Press Release |
Track Listing:
Varde - Breath Hotel Hotel - midwinter blues Clang Quartet - Christmas Amid Catastrophe Charles De Mar - This Christmas Electric Bird Noise - proti village-meteora-odeon of herodes atticus.christmas08 Glissade - She Washes Over Me Sailor Winters - Firefly Miss Massive Snowflake - Bring on the Snowflakes Goddakk - Overnight Travel Gorgons - Silver Bells Small Life Form - feeding santa Lauri des Marais - 2008: Christmas in Crisis Ligo - snow on the oaks Moodring - Tjmstollefson Xmas slicnaton - RestYe Remora - i need new effect pedals for christmas Moral Crayfish - Flight into Egypt The Carnage Visors - Underneath the Trees South West Airline - Hang Out the Fire Northern Valentine - Present Past Spotlight Kid - Singing Out My Feeling (Christmas Lights) The Left Channel - Side Tracked Recorded Home - Sonnez les cloches The Child of A Creek - Loneliness Subscape Annex - Sleighride |
As usual every other year,
Silber Records has just released its christmas compilation, the fourth
one so far. Now, christmas has come and gone and most of you will already
be focussing on 2009. Covers of typical christmas carols are lacking however,
hence the more general title, and in the meantime the whole of northern
Europe is slowly freezing over. So who are we to not review this wintry
compilation from 2008?
With 26 songs of just as
many artists and nearly two hours of music its no use discussing them all,
so I'll limit myself to some of my personal highs and lows on this compilation.
First thing I noticed was that apart from several artists that have been
reviewed here before (Remora, Hotel Hotel, Electric Bird Noise or Slicnaton)
there is a long list of unfamiliar names that often have not released anything
yet.
Highlights for me include
songs like the ones from Sailor Winter who combine claustrophobic noise
with electronics. Miss Massive Snowflake gives us a slightly chaotic and
jarring christmas tune that has a very sixties flavour to it due to it
being acoustic. The disturbing bit is that someone in the background is
trying to recreate the sound of wind blowing. At least, that's what I think,
although it comes off as the muffled screams of someone insane. Gorgons
too go for a rather disturbing christmas tune with some very subdued synths
and vocals. More abstract work is being delivered by Moral Crayfish, who
use sounds of scraping metal to make a rather messy and noisy tune, and
the album closer by Subscape Annex who use a combination of drones and
sounds extracted from guitar strings.
Some of songs I could have
done without though. Charles De Mar plays such a sweet acoustic song it
hurts my teeth. The Carnage Visors' contribution actually starts out promising
with a moody organ and some sobre percussion but is then ruined by a singer
who constantly misses his notes. Painful.
I wouldn't call this compilation
a treasure trove and I wonder if it would be an idea to be a bit stricter
in the selection of tracks and limit this to one disc only. Nevertheless,
the compilation has turned into a nice collection of calm ambient, drones
and acoustic folk and I can recommend it to people who want to experience
or meet the Silber Records sound. This compilation can again be found on
the pages of archive.org.
~ songsoverruins, IkEcht