'The Sales Department' is a new ongoing project thought out by canadian MD Matheson, after a successful ten year career with his previous moniker 'Beef Terminal'. While Beef Terminal was probably a more physical adventure, with guitar based musical structures, The Sales Department is completely focused on an emotional and mental connection with the music, through classic IDM rhythmic structures and ambient soundscapes that ultimately work as time machines.
Some (if not all) of those tracks are heavily based on nostalgia components: lush pads, ambient drones, epic keyboards, droopy beats and old-school-like samples.
'[Sub]ways' is also the first effort in a series of releases that test tube will put out over the next year. They should tell a story when combined or listened to one after the other. The Sales Department will also prepare and release a video sometimes after or meanwhile.
[Sub]ways leaves us wanting more from The Sales Department. We hope that this wait won't take long» - Pedro Leitão
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October 25, 2008
AERIOLABEHAVIOUR AT QUEBRA
Tonight I'll be playing some test tube unreleased stuff among a wide selection of netaudio from around the world. Ambient, field recordings, some digital dub shit among from the worlds top netlabels. This will happen at the beautiful riverside city of Coimbra - halfway between Lisboa and Porto. The name of the club is Quebra and I'll be there until 4 AM.
If you're in the neighborhood, you're invited to have a drink and listen to some unexpected music.
«After a short interlude, Matt Cooke-Davis (a.k.a. Craque) assaults our senses with an eclectic amalgam of rich rhythmic patterns that derivate from dub, hip hop, techno and other urban languages, but instead of driving us straight to the physical emotion center, they drive us to the 'braindance' center. We should close our eyes, then, to fully appreciate what's being offered. 'Cirkulit' is all this and more, because it also speaks skewed experimental electronics idioms to our pleasure centers.
Half an hour of Craque's 'Gamma' is all we need to stimulate our craving for great electronic music. Craque isn't new around either, he has excellent works on Stadtgruen, Kahvi Collective and Kikapu. I just love how he uses the bass and lower pitch frequencies, the melodic loops, the ambient pads, the sometimes dirty beats and jazz-influenced improv. narratives. We can even experience some delayed acoustic guitar loops on 'Matterbuss'.
Excellent and extremely elegant electronic music.» - Pedro Leitão
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October 13, 2008
HOME AGAIN
• tube'|142 - Umbrellas in the Rain - Wieder Daheim
«Umbrellas in the Rain is the alias of an austrian musician from Vienna, and 'Wieder Daheim' - german for 'Home Again' - his first effort at creating something mature enough worth listening to (and worth releasing, for that matter...). Well, he did it, and with flying colours. 'Wieder Daheim' is a delicate collection of abstract songs that really grab one's heart. They are experimental enough to wander in, but also emotional enough - to the point of being nostalgic - to keep us down to earth.
We can also find enough drones to keep us occupied and plenty of found sounds of everyday objects to let us dream away. The songs are filled with a lot of different instruments too, among guitars, keyboards and xylophones. My favorite track has to be 'Moment of Life', because of the nostalgia that it sucks up from me, making me wander to my past memories like 20 years ago or more... home again yeah,
It really captures some moment of life there. Runners up are 'Birch Grove' and 'The small town we grew up in' just because I'm a sucker for big drones.
The final moment with this big lo-fi track 'Wilted Willows', has some real gems inside, but I'll leave them for you to discover.»
- Pedro Leitão
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October 10, 2008
VIRGA
There's a very pungent short movie called 'Virga', written and directed by Ben Spink who made into the Red Bull Reel Life competition. Now, the interesting part is that Virga's soundtrack was made by our very own Daniel Catarino a.k.a. Long Desert Cowboy, and it fits real nicely.
Since Red Bull's screening website is having some sort of flash problems (I couldn't play the video and tried 4 different browsers...), I've uploaded an FLV file (Flash based video, should be playable on Windows Media Player) of the movie to our server. Go ahead and stream or download it.
«What kind of feeling puts together the barren solitude of Sergio Leone's western spaghettis and the ultra heavy suspense of David Lynch's complex dramas? Living in Alentejo may have something to do with it, but Daniel Catarino's own life experiences and close contact with a deserted inland are most likely the paint in the canvas, or the roll in the camera, if you wish.
From 'Western Spaghetti' and 'Sandshoes' to this new work 'Finareia' something changed, and for the better. If Long Desert Cowboy's thick ambient collages borrowed something from Ry Cooder before, they've done the same with Angelo Badalamenti this time, Lynch's favorite soundtrack composer. If you swap the redwood pines for the desert cactus, most of the ambients created here are very reminiscent of Twin Peaks. And in a way, they carry the same dramatic narrative, only to be broken into pieces as soon as you hear Clint Eastwood's 'Blondie' talking to his villainous partner.
Highly suggestive track names like 'Spitting on a dead fascist', 'Hang my gun up in the wall' or 'Hanging a cow by the neck' complete the task of creating the perfect ambient for the listener to dive into, closing his eyes and picturing himself inside a David Lynch movie. Get this now!» - Pedro Leitão
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October 05, 2008
ANGELOU IN FRAMES
Check out this video from Project 5AM's song 'Angelou'. Jason Haye says it was inspired by Woody Allen's 'The Purple Rose of Cairo'. He also sent me the following text:
«In a rare public appearance at the National Film Theatre in 2001, Allen listed «The Purple Rose of Cairo« as one of only a few of his films that ended up being "fairly close to what I wanted to do" when he set out to write it. Allen provided more detail about the film's origins in a comment he made a year earlier, during a press junket for Small Time Crooks:
“Purple Rose was a film that I just locked myself in a room [to write].... I wrote it and halfway through it didn't go anywhere and I put it aside. I didn't know what to do. I toyed around with other ideas. Only when the idea hit me, a long time later, that the real actor comes to town and she has to choose between the [screen] actor and the real actor and she chooses the real actor and he dumps her, that was the time it became a real movie. Before that it wasn't. But the whole thing was manufactured»
