Brombron's 3rd chapter (see Bjorgulfsson/Ohlsson review for more info on the series or check out extrapool.nl) brings together Tore Honore Boe (known for choosing unusual formats such as records, floppies, micro-cassettes and somehow involved with the Origami Republika collective) and long time experimenter Roel Meelkop (also one third of Kapotte Muziek and Goem and one fifth of THU20). Their involvement in field recordings and experience with sound manipulation translates into a feast of subtle sound occurrences and mellow ambience. If you listen to this at a moderate volume you won't hear much because the dynamics keep a low profile and rarely peak, but if you turn it up you'll discover a world of small glitches, low rumbles, and mid-range floors that were probably getting lost among the noise of your room's steam heat unit or the outside traffic noise dampened by your closed window...

Filled with piercing whale screams, their invisible proximity, the album «Grooved Whales» by Canadian violinist and composer Lisa Walker is an esthetically complete picture of primordial being, realized via animal world. There are no misty images or thickened colours in Lisa’s creative work. Instead it’s filled with universal and expressive perception of the world. The key to understanding Lisa’s philosophy lies in the correlation of herself with the natural world, because she’s not placing herself above nature. In the album «Grooved Whales» nature doesn’t appear as something individual and subjectively perceivable, it’s the element inspiring pieces of art created by the violinist’s talent. Lisa Walker is a sympathetic observer and an active participant in the ecological processes, hence the true love and respect towards the environment and it’s inhabitants. Lisa doesn’t exploit natural sonic environment during composing to give her music an exotic flair and freshness. After working for many years in the research centre in Alaska she is very drawn to the objects of her love - the Humpback Whales, the theme of this relationship is running through all compositions of the album. Nobleness and natural sensitiveness are the main qualities of «Grooved Whales». The violin parts by Lisa performed underwater combine the refinement and aristocracy of the classical instrument with the softness and virginity of oceanic environment. The relationship «nature - civilization» is viewed from a different angle in the music of Lisa, where man is not the king of nature, but one of its numerable atoms. «Grooved Whales» provides you with valuable psychological experience, akin to the experience of Gulliver’s transformation of conscience after he left the land of Lilliputians and found himself on the Island of Giants.

Two charming songs and a new label coming from England and all these into a little 7": this is quite amazing, isn't it? Primitive Painter presents us "Self Reference Hour" which is an hypnotic/electronic tune that reminds me a little of Kraftwerk and Suicide. All the track is based on various rhythms generated by analogue devices and along with those there's a melodic structure made of distorted monophic synthesizers, analogue bells and various samples. The result is quite appealing and catchy. Pulby instead reminds me more of Moby because of the nostalgic mood of "Water From Different Falls" which mix electronic moments and a clean guitar with manipulated voices. Both tracks seems to be based on a cyclic structure and more you listen them, more they convince you about how cool they are. Get this single and check the bands' streamings at the label's website.

Maybe you remember the review I did of Mourning After's MCD (they were a cool synthpop bands coming from Sweden). This release is a posthumous limited to four hundred 7" which contains two remixes of "Never The Same", a track coming from that MCD. The first one "Club Mix By Thomas Skyldeberg" is a melodic techno remix which contains all the elements of that genre (you know, the changing LFOs, the speeding up snare drum, and the 4/4 bass drum) and for this reason is nice but it isn't my cup of tea. The second version, "Never Remixed by Notch", is always club friendly but it's more intriguing with its distorted pauses which break the rhythm, creating in this way a crawling tension. This single seems to be the first one of a serie of The Mourning After's remixes. Strange operation for a band that did a good job but only a four tracks single...

This is not the soundtrack to John Cusack's movie, like the title might trick you into thinking, but rather a great record by a collective of Brussels-based musicians who really understood the potential of crossover and adopted it to make it their very own language. Finally a band whose influences are so disparate that you can't really not like the entire album. As for me, I like it all! I first saw Studio Pagol (Pagol is Bengali for "insane") performing live in Southern Italy and immediately enjoyed their mixture of sounds and cultures: established in 1994 by eclectic multi-instrumentalists Marc Van Eyck and Philippe Boulon (also founding members of acclaimed Beglian marocca'n'roll group Largo) and later joined by guitarrist Pierre Vervloesem (producer of Deus, member of X-Legged Sally and A Group among others), engineer & machine man Renaud Houben, a Bengali singer, an Arab singer, a Maroccan singer/dancer, an African percussionist and a number of other musicians and special guests performing a great visionary blend of electronica, world music and rock on instrumentation that ranges from the classic electronic/electric/rock set-up to unusual and even unheard things such as medival computer, waliha, short scaled bass guitar, five strings guitar, Hamelrijk accordion, pillar, bombarde, bendir, spanish claps and many others. And if so far it sounds more like a world music record I should probably mention that it is heavily backed by electronic textures, programmed beats and sequences, keyboard floors, samples and a digital recording/editing/mixing job that is very well done (I belive it was entirely done on Steinberg's Cubasis or Nuendo). Speaking of which, praise also goes to Studio Pagol for what is an entirely do-it-yourself release. They did everything, from performing, to recording, from editing to mixing (great snare drum sounds among other things!), from mastering to funding (with some help from the local city hall's department of culture and arts), from releasing to promoting the record. My hat always goes off to bands who take the necessary steps to total independence, and Studio Pagol deserves all the support you can give them. I also like the fact that they are taking somewhat of a political stand with the final sentence printed on the inside of the nice folding digipack: fuck cannon merchants! That's the way to go, let the world know you disagree! "Serendipity" could be the new sound of a globalized world where different cultures live together in peace, as opposed to the globalization they wanna sell us, where rich people get richer and poor people get poorer and where racism and war is an every day constant. Chants of distant places hovering over intricate textures of rhythm and electronica, rock drums alternating with pounding simil techno beats and programmed drum patterns, the accordion that gives it that romantic quasi-French touch, the rhythmic guitar that enriches the fabric of the sound, the keyboards and the bass lines that introduce new sonics into the mix, the many layers of percussions that take the grooves to a whole new level and so much more... The 70 minute-long album also has an unlisted percussions-only bonus track, a Beatles remake of "Tomorrow Never Knows" and a couple of other songs that aren't remakes but really remind of famous tunes ("Tane Tane" sounds like 007's new theme song and "Kali" starts out just like a famous Bach piece). So while you count the money in your pocket to make sure you have enough to order this record, let me go over what we have here, one more time: great musicianship, great performance, great music, great cultural blend, great melting pot, great sound, great fucking CD! Don't miss out, do the right thing! Given all these variables the final equation's result is absolutely amazing, genre-bending, challenging, innovating and fresh! "Serendipity" (Happy Meeting) is an ideal title to represent the successful outcome of the encounter of all these musicians and their instruments and if you have an open mind and you like open-minded music, it should definitely be the next CD to go in your record collection.