The Underground of Happiness

It's been a good month for Double 6 . The ex-Coral guitarist’s debut album is an imagined soundtrack for the Italo Calvino novel If on a winter’s night a traveller . I’m a pushover when it comes to soundtracks (isn’t all music a soundtrack for something?), but even so this is still a beautiful album with lots of shading and texture, aswell as an emotional punch. The considerable talents of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra are employed throughout for many memorable and sweeping, cinematic moments (the majestic Enlace , in particular, has a series of wonderful brass smears), but for my money the vocal pieces have the most impact. The plaintiff Leaning (Star of Sweden) has an air of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci to it; By the Church of Apollonia sets a wordless, female keen brilliantly against a military tom beat, which manages to suggest Ennio Morricone without sounding anything like him as such; the miniature guitar picking and intimate/lost vocal of Le Grand Désordre are striking e...

One of the best albums of this year was the collaboration between the veteran Scottish pianist Bill Wells and ex-Arab Strap man Aidan Moffat , Everything's getting older on Chemikal Underground (go here to refresh your memory). Wells has a new album coming out on Double 6 next week, Lemondale , for which he recruited a host of Japanese musicians for one day's recording in Tokyo , as well as Jim O'Rourke , who lives there now I believe. The press release has this nice detail - Musicians that had never met and had come from different sides of the tracks suddenly found themselves together in the same recording booth. Tori Kudo, self proclaimed Japanese 'King Of Error' was coupled with virtuoso pianist Satoko Fuji, a classically trained graduate of Berkley Music College in Boston. The recording also brought together instruments as seemingly incongruent and unrelated as a modified electric fan played by Tetsuya Umeda and the entirely unique and heavenly voices of Sa...

Bill Ryder-Jones – A leave taking (from the A leave taking Soundtrack EP, Double 6) The Coral cropped up recently in relation to Neville Skelly and here they are again, kind of. Bill Ryder-Jones was the original guitarist in the band, before striking out on his own a few years ago. Here's a quote from him worth copying - ‘ When I left the band I wasn't playing much music at all but in 2009 a friend got in touch asking if I would write something for this short he was making, which I did. It's pretty much the only thing I wrote that year but the process opened another world up to me. We thought it'd be nice to give it away to the people who have been interested in what I've been doing on my own and also to hint at the future a little bit. My album, which is a soundtrack inspired by a novel, is pretty much a progression from the things learnt when writing for Leave Taking .’ And apparently, this is the novel. As he says above, this 4-track EP is available ...