Tag: 1994

Sequentia – Canticles of Ecstasy: Hildegard von Bingen, 1994

Another favorite collection of compositions by Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179), a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, poet, doctor, visionary, Christian mystic, and polymath. She founded the practice of scientific natural history in Germany, lived to the age of 81 at a time when the life expectancy was early 40s at best, and wrote the oldest surviving morality play (sometimes called the first musical drama). Despite having no formal musical training, she was responsible for some of the most hauntingly beautiful and enduring music to come out of medieval Catholicism. Her compositions broke many of the existing conventions of plainchant, using extremes of register, dramatic leaps of pitch, melismas and flourishes to express rhapsodic, overflowing emotion.

Canticles of Ecstasy is performed by the venerable early music ensemble Sequentia, who have been active since 1977 and are known for contributing original research about the music that they study and perform. While Feather on the Breath of God featured the organistrum (aka hurdy-gurdy) drone on several tracks, Canticles of Ecstasy also includes gorgeous medieval harp and medieval fiddle arrangements. It’s also exclusively female voices, both solo and ensemble (#nunsonly). It’s also…profoundly beautiful? And it’s an ideal too-cold-to-leave-the-house shut-in soundtrack.

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Maurice Ravel – Ravel Plays Ravel, 1994

For a torrential spring. I love Ravel for his humidity and his drippiness–swerving, suffocating greens, sometimes saturated and vibrant, sometimes murky and choked with algae. It feels appropriate for this time of year in New York, with bursts of spring euphoria, violent last gasps of winter, and water.

I’m not completely sure of all of the details surrounding this collection of tracks, but as best as I can understand it, these were recorded in 1994 from a series of reproducing piano rolls made between 1913 and 1933. The rolls were mostly played by Ravel himself, with at least five of them performed in London on June 30, 1922 on a Duo-Art reproducing piano. (For context, here’s a picture of a refurbished 1929 Duo-Art Steinway with a roll in the playback mechanism.) Though this wasn’t the first time Ravel had been able to listen back to himself performing, it was one of a small handful of known instances of such “recordings,” and as I understand it, there might be some suspicion that not all of the rolls attributed to him are actually his performances. There are four tracks by other prominent pianists of the time, and just to make this even more confusing, I’m using the album art from a 1965 collection of recordings, presumably from some of the same rolls, because I can’t find the art from the 1994 collection included here.

Regardless of the details, it’s pretty special to hear this collection (which includes some of my favorite Ravel compositions) performed in a way that we can assume is more faithful to the styles in which they were originally written than many more recent recordings, and it’s even more special to imagine Ravel himself tearing through some of the more torrential moments. Happy spring!

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Nobuo Uematsu – Phantasmagoria, 1994

The first (and from what I gather, one of the only) non-Final Fantasy release from legendary Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu. Alternates between candy-sweet synthetic puffs of new age, ominous baroque, and spoken word. The instantly familiar “Dogs on the Beach” belongs on Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast, the title track feels like a very tasteful score for a Tim Burton ballet, and of course, “Final Fantasy” is an even more (!) baroque spin on the video game theme, this time with harpsichord and vocals from the incredible Chinatsu Kuzuu, whom we’ll probably be hearing more from soon. Thanks for the tip on this one Mike!

[RIP] Susumu Yokota – Acid Mt. Fuji, 1994

Guest post by Jon Williams (synths, Excepter)

I was disheartened to learn of electronic composer Susumu Yokota’s passing this past spring after a long illness. Like Florian Fricke – another musician who passed too young – Yokota’s works frequently evoked pastoral landscapes. Acid Mt. Fuji, in particular, marries the metronomic stomp of Robert Hood with the shimmering pads of Popul Vuh. Yakota’s palette of sounds was always distinctly his own, extending beyond the traditional acid staples found in the Roland TR series to include hand drums and animal noises.

This summer I took the occasion of my first solo hiking trip to listen to Acid Mr. Fuji, letting the drums set the pace as I struggled up the slopes of the Appalachian Trail, passing down swamps rimmed in Rhododendron bushes.

Baby Ford – Monolense, 1994

Not technically an LP, but enough of a world that I’m making an exception to our albums-only rule. I still don’t know how to talk about techno, so I’ll just say that this is a formative piece of minimal techno history and is as elegant as they come. Also, Richard D. James album and Amnesiac probably wouldn’t have happened without this.

Ata Kak – Obaa Sima, 1994 (reissued 2015)

Ghanaian musician A Yaw Atta-Owusu, aka Ata Kak, recorded and self-produced Obaa Sima in 1994 in his home studio while living in Toronto. In spite of only 50 cassette copies being produced, the tape has enjoyed cult status over the past decade. Still, scouring the internet turns up virtually no information about him, which will change today. Awesome Tapes From Africa‘s Brian Shimkowitz has finally tracked him down after years of searching, and is restoring and rereleasing Obaa Sima on all formats, 21 years after its original release.

Obaa Sima lies somewhere in between highlife, house, hip hop, new jack swing, and electro, produced rough and dry. Without wanting to suggest that this is a kitschy bedroom-tape artifact (it’s not), what makes this so exciting is its rawness and deliberate playfulness. Ata Kak seems to have exploited his minimalist production methods on purpose and clearly had a lot of fun doing it. The music feels pixelated and hyper-saturated at the same time, like playing Pacman through 3D glasses.

Ata Kak is a wicked rapper, and his hopped-up flow takes center stge, sometimes backed by pitched-up backing choruses of what sound like his own voice. The result is joyous and strange, a window into something that children of the internet will never be able to experience firsthand–this having been made in 1994, right before dial-up became ubiquitous in America and the world began to shrink. Obaa Sima is the end of an era, the end of (global, if not local) anonymity and microcosms, the last of glee and spontaneity. It’s a vibrant moment that presumably happened without documentation, leftfield and DIY to its core. Obaa Sima has a lot more going on than just nostalgia, though–it’s warped and frenetic and a little scary in its relentlessness. We’re looking forward to reading more about Ata Kak Yaw Atta-Owusu. For whom did he make this music? Was he homesick? How much did it circulate in Ghana? We like to imagine that he was dancing as if no one was watching, because no one was watching, and that was totally fine by him.

Preview the anthemic, blazing “Daa Nyinaa” below. It belongs on every summer mixtape. Side note that this amazing video footage is unrelated to the song and there’s a bit of mastering on the audio. If you want to hear the original recordings, they’re all over YouTube.

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