The Underground of Happiness

A mix of some of my favourite instrumental music. There are some vocals involved here, I hear you say, but voices used in an instrumental way, I would say. Non lyrical voices, let's say. What strikes me listening back is the range of emotions in these tunes. Romantic. Melancholy. Reverie. Delirious. Stoic. Noirish. Beauty and strangeness. Electronic. Stringed. Ambient. Gothenburg. Tokyo. Dublin. Down. Philadelphia. Berlin. Tucson. Toronto. Enjoy. x Playlist Ennio Morricone – Come Maddalena (EMI) Moondog – Theme (Columbia) Áine O’Dwyer – For the souls of our fleas (Fort Evil Fruit) Faten Kanaan – Ebla (Fire Records) ( playing Union Chapel, London, Apr 28, w/ Colin Stetson ) Silver Servants – Spailing farrows (Second Language) Pieter Nooten – Lo-fi lullaby (Rocket Girl) Maggie Bjorklund – Flow (Tompkins Square) ( Luke Schneider presents Imaginational Anthem Vol XI: Chrome Universal – A survey of modern pedal steel ) Edward Williams – Japanese m...

I was a huge fan of Jherek Bischoff’s first album (http://theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.ie/2012/07/jherek-bischoff-composed-leaf-label.html) which featured a host of great vocal cameos from David Byrne, Caetano Veloso, Zac Pennington, Carla Bozulich and more. His second album is an instrumental affair but it packs tons of drama into the orchestral arrangements without use of words. Key thing to know – the album recordings were begun in a giant underground water tank (now empty) located at Fort Worden, an old army base in Washington state. Bischoff took himself and computer with a couple of friends down into the depths for some initial improvising and recording. The intriguing thing from this exercise is that the sounds produced informed or even directed the overall album. The length of the reverb decay in the “cistern” – 45 seconds supposedly – forced the arrangements to be slower, more measured. As he says, “I found it so interesting how much the space itself seemed to tel...

Every week the radio show is a series of mixes, usually a sequence of mini-mixes, 3 or 4 song runs put together to fill an hour. Every now and again though, a bunch of music comes together on my radar, drawn from albums sent to me as well as my own listening habits. Over the last few months I’ve noticed an amount of striking and powerful instrumental music coming together in this orbit I call The Underground of Happiness . All of this has received an airing on the show at some point, but given that I only have 1 hour per week to play with live on air, I thought it would be good to give some of this music an extra platform. Firstly, as you would expect, these are all instrumental pieces, which is to say they don’t contain vocals (although Polar Bear flirt with humming at one stage in ‘No more goodbyes’). In fact, most of these artists are what you would call either exclusively or largely instrumental artists. The cellist Julia Kent for example, exploring the outer reaches of her inst...