acoustic

This is an official Propellerhead demo for the Reason Pianos refill. Read more…

This CD is a treat for anyone with open ears. Slack Key Guitar is a collection of some of the best guitar music of Hawaii. It features solo guitar pieces played by seven well-known slack key guitarist. It is a beautiful introduction to the music.

Hawaiian slack key guitar is one of the great styles of acoustic guitar music. “Slack Key” playing is known as ki ho’alu in Hawaiian, and is their term for the native fingerpicked style. The music often features alternate tunings, where some strings are loosened “slacked”, to create more attractive intervals between strings. This can also create sympathetic reverberations, where strings vibrate in harmony with other notes are played.

Sonny Lim, Bryan Kessler, Randy Lorenzo, John Keawe, Charles Michael Brotman, Keven Teves, and Ken Emerson are the guitarists featured on this 1998 release. All of the guitarist bring an effortless virtuosity to the music. The music is relaxing and beatiful, and may bring to mind images of tropical beaches.

Slack Key Guitar is a collection of exceptional beauty. It captures simple melodies played with exceptional grace, and is a relaxing introduction to this traditional Hawaiian musical art.

Beautiful, wonderfully recorded, and moving, Feels Like Home proves that Norah Jones is not a one hit wonder. Norah Jones is the real thing.

So what’s Norah Jones, acoustic chanteuse, doing on Synthtopia?

Every now and then, even electronica fans need to disconnect from the power grid and listen to some clean, simple, heartfelt music. Norah Jones delivers the goods, just as she did on her previous album, Come Away With Me.

Jones’ sophomore CD doesn’t suck, it’s not mediocre, and it isn’t marred by dreadful artistic ego trips. Jones could have done a Madonna and gone techno. She could have called up her dad, Ravi Shankar, and had him lay down some world beat sitar grooves.

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This album is unusual for SynthTopia. Instead of being synth heavy electronica, the tracks are almost entirely acoustic instruments. But they are acoustic instruments most of us have never heard before, playing in a style that fits right in with the modern pop-rock electronica sensibility.

And it is, of all things, a Concept Album. We hadn’t seen many of these since the 70’s.

Nevertheless, the Blue Man Group’s album The Complex is a concept album from a concept group. The Blue Man Group, for the two of you that haven’t heard of them, is a bunch of nameless bald guys made up with blue makeup so that they look a little alien. They create stage shows that feature new instruments made out of stuff that you’d see at Home Depot: vent tubing, PVC pipes, fiberglass tubes, and aluminum sheets. Most of the instruments are percussion, but many have an almost electronic sound, because they are outside the range of standard rock and orchestral percussion.

This album is themed around the ideas of loneliness, paranoia and individuality that people can feel living in a city. The album features guest appearances from Dave Matthews, Tracy Bonham, Esthero, Venus Hum, Dan the Automator and others. Most of the cuts are new for this album, but the album also features some covers.

The opener is a standout. It features a variety of acoustic percussion, and is reminiscent of some of Afro Celt Sound System’s work. Up to the Roof is a rocker, featuring Tracy Bonham. Bonham contributes a great vocal to a tune that combines the bizarre percussion of Blue Man with a straight-ahead rock song. Venus Hum helps with a great cover of Moroders “I Feel Love”. This cover is largely acoustic, but the alien percussive sounds work perfectly with it.

The album has a few weaknesses. Some listeners will be tired of Dave Matthews, who nevertheless adds a great performance to the record. A few of the cuts feature an announcer discussing various “rock moves” that are seen at a rock concert. These cuts probably work great in live performance, but not quite as well on an album.

The CD has a few extra treats. It’s an enhanced CD, and has an interesting video for the song Sing Along, with Dave Matthews and the Blue Men doing their thing. It also has a video on the making of the CD. If you’re interested in the new instruments, this is worth a watch!