Some have suggested that North Sea Radio Orchestra look at the world through sepia-tinted glasses; that their chamber combinations of woodwind, keyboards, strings and Sharron Fortnam’s pure-toned voice reek of old English parlours; that they are excessively nostalgic.The fundamentally forward-looking music of I A Moon refutes that facile argument. Fortnam might sing, “We are sitting in a row/Looking over England/Watch the evening go,” on “The Earth Beneath Our Feet”, but play the song next to something by Vaughan Williams or Benjamin Britten, and you can immediately hear where they part from their admitted influences.
At times guitarist Craig Fortnam’s compositions do tap into folk memory, most obviously on “Heavy Weather”, with its sea shanty refrain of “Heave-ho/Down below”. But over a tolling four-to-the-bar piano figure he weaves in bassoon, bass clarinet, tuned percussion, strings and twinkly synths over its eight minute course. Its inspired arrangement has some overlap with Clogs, Art Bears, Pentangle and Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
The album’s real surprise is “Berliner Luft”. With its acoustic guitar strum and drum machine, it sounds like something off Harmonia’s Musik Von Harmonia, until it gains more substance through a series of agitated, almost Zappa-esque wind and tuned percussion themes. North Sea Radio Orchestra might share with Britten and Vaughan Williams a kind of haunted melancholy that has come to be seen as characteristically English, but their music couldn’t have come from any other century than the 21st.
Avaliações
Ainda não existem avaliações.