Smooth Groovin’s with Anton
Anton Graham introduces and reviews some of the best new age, ambient and lounge music out there to accompany you and uplift you, in the spa or anywhere else.
Patrick O’Hearn
Beautiful World
This album is gentle and expansive and lush. It is prozaic music done with style, although the title track unexpectedly leaps into a lounge/dance territory half way through. It’s a great tune, although somewhat out of place amongst the other chilled-out, pad-smothered floating brain restoratives. This is superior New Age music, created with something more than just computer programming. There are some good instrumentalists featured, but Mr O’Hearn’s soundscape construction skills are what it is really all about.
Minus
Tho-So-Aa
This is the most minimalist music I have heard in a long time. It is dark and brooding, yes, but also hypnotic, like floating in fluids filled with foreboding while listening to industrial gregorian chants minus the monks. There is no way I can top that sentence, so I won’t even try. If you find it intriguing, find the album.
Brian Wilson
Smile
Brian Wilson is the man behind the harmony masterpieces of the Beach Boys. The rest of the Boys are dead, but Brian made it through with his brain pretty much intact. And in 2004 he finished his album Smile, begun in the mid-1960s. It features a reconstruction of one of his best songs, Good Vibrations, with one annoying change, but I forgive him. The rest of album is patchy, but it feels as happy as the title, and there are some gems, including the opening track, Our Prayer.
Two Lone Swordsmen
The Double Gone Chapel
This is a two-man outfit in England which produces material that I will describe as ambient punk. They produce atmospheres, but use quite of lot of traditional rock instruments to do it, particularly sounds with a 1980s feel. But the result is not rock at all. It is sort of dancefloor electro alternative pop. This is one of two albums produced by the TLS duo in 2004, so they are both prolific and – for their rather narrow, genre – successful. Worth checking out.
January 2004