Dec 11, 2016

Sundaze 1650

Hello,

Today's artists are a British nu jazz and electronic music group, created in 1999 by Jason Swinscoe. The group is signed to independent record label Ninja Tune. The group's sound, in both live and studio contexts, employs a live band which improvises along with a turntablist and electronic elements such as samples provided by Swinscoe. In their studio releases Swinscoe will often remix the live source material to produce a combination of live jazz improvisation with electronica, such that it is difficult to tell where the improvisation ends and the production begins......N'Joy

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The brilliantly named Cinematic Orchestra is led by composer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Jason Swinscoe, who formed his first group, Crabladder, in 1990 as an art student at Cardiff College. Crabladder's fusion of jazz and hardcore punk elements with experimental rhythms inspired Swinscoe to further explore the possibilities of sampling, and by the time of the group's demise in the mid-'90s, he was DJ'ing at various clubs and pirate radio stations in the U.K.

The music he recorded on his own at the time melded '60s and '70s jazz, orchestral soundtracks, rhythm loops, and live instrumentation into genre-defying compositions, as reflected on his contribution to Ninja Tune's 1997 Ninja Cuts 3 collection and his remixes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Coldcut tracks. The Cinematic Orchestra built on this musical blueprint, letting a group of live musicians improvise over sampled percussion or basslines. The Orchestra included saxophonist/pianist Tom Chant, bassist Phil France, and drummer Daniel Howard, who also recorded the Channel One Suite and Diabolus EPs for Ninja Tune with Swinscoe.

Their debut album, Motion, was released in 1999. The critical success of that album led to them being asked to perform at the Director's Guild Awards ceremony for the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award to film director Stanley Kubrick. The band were asked by the organisers of the Porto European City of Culture 2001 festival to write a new score to Dziga Vertov's classic 1929 Soviet Union silent film Man with a Movie Camera, to be performed live in accompaniment with a showing of the film. The work differed from the band's usual compositions due to its live performance, ruling out the post production work that was present on Motion. The Cinematic Orchestra toured with the work and later released it on an album of the same name. Many of the compositions originally created for Man with a Movie Camera were later adapted from live form (adding in vocal tracks and electronic elements, among other changes) for their next album, Every Day. It reached #54 in the UK Albums Chart in May 2002.

In 2006, The Cinematic Orchestra created a cover version of the Radiohead song "Exit Music (For a Film)" that appeared on an album titled Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads. In this piece the band slowed down the tempo of the original, divided the timbre into four sections beginning with saxophone, to the classical guitar, to the electric guitar, ending the piece with the same simple acoustic guitar rhythm as the original version.

The Cinematic Orchestra released the album Ma Fleur on 7 May 2007. Several songs feature Patrick Watson, Fontella Bass, or Lou Rhodes on vocals, with Rhodes and Watson sharing vocals on one song. The Cinematic Orchestra recorded the soundtrack to the Disneynature film The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos, released in France on 15 December 2008 (orig. as Les ailes pourpres: Le mystère des flamants). The score was produced by the band and Steve McLaughlin. The score was performed live with the London Metropolitan Orchestra at The Union Chapel, Islington on 17 September 2009 and won the award for best original score at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in Wyoming, USA on 1 October 2009.

Ninja Tune invited The Cinematic Orchestra to perform at the twentieth anniversary gala performance of the label at the Royal Albert Hall in November 2010. In 2011, The Cinematic Orchestra commissioned a series of compositions for avant-garde short films that were performed at the Barbican Centre under the auspices of its curating a series entitled "In Motion", (also featuring Dorian Concept with saxophonist Tom Chant, Grey Reverend, and Austin Peralta), and it subsequently released the album In Motion #1 in 2012.

On 20 October 2016, The Cinematic Orchestra released a new song from their upcoming album. The title of the song is "To Believe" featuring singer Moses Sumney. The group have also announced a tour, including shows with Thundercat, Gilles Peterson, Jameszoo, and others

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Whether to categorize Motion as a jazz or electronica album is an intriguing conundrum, because it truly turns out to be a combination of both musical forms, and it is an unequivocally brilliant combination, at that. British arranger/programmer J. Swinscoe -- who virtually is the Cinematic Orchestra -- gathered samples of drum grooves, basslines, and melodies from various recordings and artists that have inspired and influenced him (spaghetti-western composer Ennio Morricone and Roy Budd's spy film scores, '60s and '70s jazz and soundtrack scores from musicians such as Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Andre Previn, David Rose, and John Morris). He then presented the samples that he had collected to a group of musicians, the core of which consisted of Tom Chant (soprano sax, electric and acoustic piano), Jamie Coleman (trumpet, flugelhorn), Phil France (bass), and T. Daniel Howard (drums), to learn and then improvise. Those tracks, in turn, were sampled and rearranged by Swinscoe on computer to create the tracks that make up this first Cinematic Orchestra album.

The album bears all of the atmospheric hallmarks of ambient electronica, as well as Swinscoe's soundtrack inspirations and all the improvisational energy of jazz. Most of the songs are built with wave upon wave of repeated loops and instrumental phrases that work into a groove. Yet it feels at any moment as if the music is about to explode, like a steam whistle boiling to its screaming point. On "One to the Big Sea," for example, the same four-note bassline plays over and over with the same ride cymbal rhythm, but instead of seeming rote or mechanical, the riff just seems to continually bubble up and throb, slowly building anticipation and pressure. When a looped piano riff and horn charts enter the music, the juxtaposition seems almost jarring; yet, as they continue to repeat, in turn, atop the bass and cymbals, you can't help but feel that you're waiting for another dramatic leap, which eventually comes by way of the song's cornerstone: a thrilling drum solo. Each song is just as accomplished in its own way, so expertly arranged by Swinscoe that the impression of both structure and improvisation is created, while never sounding for a moment anything less than organic. The music is constructed piece by piece until it is a seamless whole that lives and breathes on its own merits, much like the soundscapes of DJ Shadow. Regardless of how they were made, though, the songs on Motion are by turns eerie, lush, edgy, expansive, gritty, intensely powerful, and gorgeous. Sometimes an album comes along that forces you to reconfigure and re-evaluate all of the assumptions you had previously made about music in order to realize how vast and endless the possibilities are; this is one of those albums.



The Cinematic Orchestra - Motion    (flac  273mb)

01 Durian 7:00
02 Ode To The Big Sea 5:42
03 Night Of The Iguana 13:21
04 Channel 1 Suite 5:50
05 Bluebirds 5:06
06 And Relax! 4:55
07 Diabolus 9:15

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Featuring a mix of jazz charts, DJ culture touches, and soundtrack-level layers of sound, Cinematic Orchestra's Remixes 1998-2000 includes seven reconfigurations of electronica gems from the likes of Kenji Eno, DJ Krust, and Piero Umilani. Atop their own core sound of bass, drums, and keyboards, the band deftly mixes in samples from the original tracks. The result is a loose-sounding mix of lengthy wide-screen pieces, which conjure up thoughts of Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jah Wobble, DJ Spooky, Herbie Hancock, and King Tubby. An albumfor the sophisticated electronica fan.



The Cinematic Orchestra - Remixes 98-00  (flac  276mb)

01 Faze Action - Moving Cities (The Cinematic Orchestra Remix Extended Version) 7:50
02 The Cinematic Orchestra - Channel One Suite (Tom Tyler Remix) 5:15
03 Kenji Eno - The Fear Theme (The Cinematic Orchestra's Re-interpretation) 5:48
04 Les Gammas - Guauanco (The Cinematic Orchestra's Extended Version) 7:35
05 Piero Umiliani - Panoramica (The Cinematic Orchestra Remix) 6:27
06 Nils Petter Molvær - Vilderness (The Cinematic Orchestra Remix) 6:21
07 DJ Krust - Re-Arrange (The Cinematic Orchestra Remix) 9:48


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With Every Day, Cinematic Orchestra move beyond the electro-jazz fusion of their debut to make a record more natural, more paced, and, surprisingly, better than the justly hyped Motion. J Swinscoe is more the arranger/conductor here than the producer, but of course, there's little need for samples or effects with such an accomplished band sharing the burden. For the opener "All That You Give," Swinscoe and Co., plus harp player Rhodri Davies, spend a few minutes delicately paving the way for a deeply felt vocal by soul hero Fontella Bass. "Burn Out" is a lush, meditative track with a pleasantly ambling solo from Phil France on electric piano, a few appropriately cinematic-sounding horns, an age-old vocal sample, and occasional creaking static phasing through. Bass returns for another splendid track ("Evolution"), and the mighty Roots Manuva appears on a magisterial, spoken-word quasi-autobiography, "All Things to All Men." Except for a pair of detours into highly programmed "broken beat" production, Every Day is a textured, acoustic work; Cinematic Orchestra take their time setting up these songs -- of the seven tracks, four last over nine minutes. The sounds and styles heard may not be revolutionary, but instead of simply pushing stylistic boundaries, Cinematic Orchestra display a real gift in making emotional, artistic music.



The Cinematic Orchestra - Everyday  (flac  388mb)

01 All That You Give 6:40
02 Burn Out 9:30
03 Flite 6:30
04 Evolution 6:30
05 Man With The Movie Camera 9:15
06 All Things To All Men 11:10
07 Everyday 10:00

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It was just a matter of time before the Cinematic Orchestra received a commission for a film score, but this 2003 release actually dates from 1999. The genesis of Man With a Movie Camera lies in the selection committee of a Portuguese film festival, which asked Cinematic Orchestra to score their re-airing of Dziga Vertov's 1929 film of the same name, a silent Soviet documentary focused on a day in the life of an average worker. Performed live by the orchestra, Man With a Movie Camera doesn't allow J Swinscoe to indulge in his usual post-production magic, but it is a surprisingly adept score, with occasional bursts of on-the-one jazz-funk wailing to break it up. (Pity the poor comrade who's soundtracked 70 years later with a hyper-speed Pretty Purdie-type drum solo and some old-school-rap samples in the background.) Scattered moments of brilliance abound, and at one point, someone on sax comes up with a brilliant foghorn recreation. The cinematic material lies in '70s astral jazz, with evocative, tremulous work from soprano sax and violin. Some passages have a baffling, you-had-to-be-there quality.



The Cinematic Orchestra - Man With A Movie Camera  (flac  333mb)

01 The Projectionist 0:06
02 Melody 0:20
03 Dawn 4:00
04 The Awakening Of A Woman (Burnout) 10:20
05 Reel Life (Evolution II) 6:58
06 Postlude 1:45
07 Evolution (Versao Portuense) 5:47
08 Work It! (Man With The Movie Camera) 8:06
09 Voyage 0:22
10 Odessa 2:05
11 Theme De Yoyo 2:20
12 The Magician 2:26
13 Theme Reprise 2:53
14 Yoyo Waltz 1:17
15 Drunken Tune 4:50
16 The Animated Tripod 1:12
17 All Things 6:06

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Big Ninja Tune ♥

Roger Roobarb said...

Hi Rho

Just seen this, (I should have scrolled down further).
Excellent, thank you for this.

Kindest regards

Rogerthedodger

Roger Roobarb said...

Hi Rho

Seems FileFactory has gone weird, it's reporting
"Server Load Too High"
Not sure if it's permanent or not.

Kindest regards

Rogerthedodger

Emblem said...

Hi again. Any chance you reup these albums? I got the amazing Motion, so you don't have to upload it if you don't want. Thanks a lot for your kindness!

Emblem said...

Thank you for the reups. I listened to some Cinematic Orchestra yesterday and... Oh boy... What a group!