Paul James + Mark Hawkins
Horse (FolkClub Ethnosuoni)
17.99
with Sheila Chandra, Eleanor Shanley, Carlos Beceiro, James Carter, Luke Daniels, Nigel Eaton, Victor Nicholls, Kenny Stone
Listen: (MP3 samples)
Binou
Horse
The Four Points
Grownover (w/ Sheila Chandra)
Blacksmith (w/ Eleanor Shanley)
Voodoo That U Doo
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The artists comment:
It's hard to describe music in words but imagine Paul is driving a car with a box full of traditional music experience on the back seat and a suitcase of European jazz influences strapped to the roof. Coming the other way is a truck driven by Mark a cargo of dance and ambient music-flavoured pies. Then they collide.
Paul and Mark come from the central South of England, a rural area where people have lived for thousands of years. The evidence is still there, from the oldest road, the Ridgeway, running along the hill tops. The idea for Horse was triggered by that as much as anything else.
One social commentator said that being rurally English in the 21st century is about living in a 17th century peasant's hovel surrounded by Japanese technology a rainy green landscape where the people worship the god Sony. A bit of an exaggeration but this album was mostly recorded at recorded at home in the countryside with technological tools and a credit card during the wettest winter for over 200 years.
Like a lot of musicians these days we play acoustic, electronic, analogue and digital instruments and sounds. Bagpipes were just as important as samples, and computers are just as useful as guitars.
Music is the organisation of noise. The music we play has something to do with who we are and where we're from, and that gets mixed up with all the noises we like and global influences, travel, TV and films.
| English musicians James and Hawkins put together a pastiche of dance, ambient, jazz, Celtic, Indian, Middle Eastern, and other flavors in this fine release. Cross-cultural experiments so often either fall flat or end up a tangled mess of limbs on the floor. (As a friend and excellent musician once put it, you can have the finest olives and the finest chocolate, but chocolate-covered olives are pretty rank.) Here the cultures manage to coexist without stepping on each other's toes... Horse is nothing if not quirkily varied, but all in all a rewarding listen. - Peggy Latkovich |
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