Wednesday, December 16, 2009

A Walk In The Snow

The snow has finally started to surround me here in my little town of Tandarei, and I could not be happier, as it is perfect to just walk around and listen to a mix or two...

The basis of this mix started while I was spending a weekend in Bals, in the South West portion of Romania. Me and a friend were walking towards the train station in order to meet another friend, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's brilliant piece Hibari from his album Out Of Noise came on, and it fit the situation perfect: the look of snow on benches, the calmness of the small lake near the station, the dogs running through the streets; it was then that I figured a nice "walking in the snow" / "wintertime" mix would do me, and you readers, pretty good.

So, this mix is a bit odd, in terms that it does not really feel a feeling per se, but rather a notion I had, so some of the music might sound a bit out of place, but in my mind and in my ears it goes perfectly...

I started off with Hibari by Sakamoto simply because it is a perfect opening song, as well as being the song that created the idea for this mix in the first place. We then move onto Fly by Nick Drake, and then right on to Trucker Talk Ch. 4 by Transona Five. After that, we move onto a nice piano ballad by Jens Lekman, and then we have one of my favorite Low songs, Closer, off of the album Things We Lost In The Fire. At this point, it would be a good idea to re-read the sentence before this paragraph as it seems like this mix is kind of all over the place at the moment (looped piano into folk music into psychedelic drone into indie pop into "slowcore").

Nico's The Fairest Of The Seasons moves us towards the second half of this mix, and I can tell you that the scene from the Royal Tenenbaums where this song is used greatly impacted my selection of this song. Next we have the beautiful melodies of the Stars of the Lid, but only a fragment of it... I selected the Requiem String Melody, which is the string section that accompanies the song Requiem For Dying Mothers Part 2 off their album The Tired Sounds of... Bat For Lashes moves us towards the end with the song the Big Sleep, which was my original ending piece, but that new designation goes to Akira Kosemura's Light Dance. Light Dance may not seem like as good an ending to this mix as Big Sleep, but for some reason I just love it so much, and I feel the end just matches the mood perfectly (the song itself starts off somewhat happy and erratic, and then slowly and slowly moves towards a minimal ending, almost like this entire mix).

Well, this completes my second mix, and there should be another in January, as I am off to visit my family in America and will not be taking that much music with me...

Link and tracklist in comments...


-James

1 comment:

  1. http://rapidshare.com/files/321794367/Walking_In_The_Snow.zip.html

    Tracklist:

    01 Hibari by Ryuichi Sakamoto
    02 Fly by Nick Drake
    03 Trucker Talk Ch. 4 by Transona Five
    04 At The Dept. Of Forgotten Songs by Jens Lekman
    05 Closer by Low
    06 The Fairest Of The Seasons by Nico
    07 Requiem String Melody by Stars Of The Lid
    08 The Big Sleep by Bat For Lashes
    09 Light Dance by Akira Kosemura

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