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winterizing 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
Reviews:
You can tell it's Christmas when the nights start drawing in, the days get colder (ok maybe not if you're reading this in the southern hemisphere), the neighbours deck their abodes in enough lights to guide the Shuttle and Silber release their annual Christmas compilation.
This years compilation is full of the usual intriguing collection of Norwegian folk, shoegaze, nu-gaze, ambient and experiments in sound but with a twist. There's a lack of covers of Christmas classics! But don't let that get you down, if you want to hear the Christmas classics you can take a trip to the local department store. This year is also unusual as half the artists have never appeared on a Silber compilation before.
And, as every track can be downloaded for free from Silber's website, the album won't set you back a penny. At a time of year when the credit card goes into meltdown free is fantastic.
So sit back with a mug of eggnog in front of a roaring fire (or the southern hemisphere's equivalent) for two eclectic hours of festive tunes.
~ Paul Kerr, The Devil Has the Best Tuna

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