Brashness and personality are the qualities in modern pop
Ambient music gets a bad rap. We believe music ought to be anything but ambient: brashness, boldness, and personality are the primary qualities valued in modern pop. Album titles such as Rhythms of the Rainforest or The Song of the Sea Cucumber do little to add credibility to one's record collection. It pleases me to say that there is an alternative to the CDs you find by the checkout in health-food shops, and the creator is Britain's own Warp Records. Warp's (cult) superstars are those doyens of Nineties dance music, Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, and you could do worse than download their respective anthems "Windowlicker" and "My Red Hot Car" off www.bleep.com by way of introduction.
Warp's most interesting group of the past few years, however, is the Scottish duo Boards of Canada. They make lush, computer-generated electronica, but with an earthy undercurrent. Rumour has it that the band baulked at the clean, crisp sound of their 2002 album Geogaddi when it was first recorded - "It's a lot more appealing to us to make dirty music," they said recently - and so they put it through a kind of reverse purification process, transferring the tracks from CD to vinyl, then recording them back again, and so on. The result is the gorgeous organic crackles and needle whispers that keep vinyl fetishists so excited about the format, and thus cold metal machine music is rendered as natural and alive as anything with the Soil Association's seal of approval.
Boards of Canada's back catalogue is all on the Bleep site - the highlights of Geogaddi are myriad, but the vocal track "1969" and the eastern-style epic "Alpha and Omega" are worth listening to first (which you can do for free). The band's new album The Campfire Headphase is a real progression - a sort of Radiohead's Kid A crossed with the Avalanches, only twice as good as that. The brilliant soundscaped drums of "Chromakey Dreamcoat" and the dreamlike "Dayvan Cowboy" are your starting points here. Organic produce really is best.
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