Boxhead Ensemble are not a well known group. In fact I can't even post video's because none of the songs from this album are on youtube last time I checked. The album is on grooveshark, and hopefully some of the other music streaming sites. It deserves to be heard.
The Boxhead Ensemble is in a loose sense a post-rock group. However they do not deal in crescendos or heavily electronic atmospheres, but instead create a sort of folky ambient chamber music. Their most obvious predecessors would be the Dirty Three, however the Boxhead Ensemble’s melodies are more drawn out, their textures denser, and their songs more blatantly a-rhythmic. Their expressive string arrangements and reverb heavy atmospheres may recall Godspeed You! Black Emporers music, however The Boxhead Ensemble has no pretensions towards classical austerity or apocalyptic theatrics.
Basically The Boxhead Ensemble work with Americana and folk music by replicating it arrangements, timbres and harmony, but then obscure it with long drones, lots of reverb, freeform rhythms and loose polyphony. The instruments sing out weeping melodic fragments, all flowing around each other in such a way to be not quite hummable, but still blatantly melodic and gorgeous. A track like nocturne 5 sounds like a simple duet of harmonica and violin on top of an reverby drone. Nocturne's 7 and 3 play with steady, quietly chugging rhythms and melancholy guitar playing. Nocturne 8 brings in glitchy electronic manipulation over what sounds like prepared-piano.
Nocturnes is one of the most beautiful albums I have ever heard. It conjures up exquisitely melancholy images of old sepia photos, expansive plains, run down forgotten homes, and the peaceful comfort of a cool summer breeze. I could listen to it over and over, and will probably will continue to do so for some time. I hope a few of you manage to give it a chance. I do not understand why their albums are so forgotten and ignored.
Boxhead Ensemble are not a well known group. In fact I can't even post video's because none of the songs from this album are on youtube last time I checked. The album is on grooveshark, and hopefully some of the other music streaming sites. It deserves to be heard.
The Boxhead Ensemble is in a loose sense a post-rock group. However they do not deal in crescendos or heavily electronic atmospheres, but instead create a sort of folky ambient chamber music. Their most obvious predecessors would be the Dirty Three, however the Boxhead Ensemble’s melodies are more drawn out, their textures denser, and their songs more blatantly a-rhythmic. Their expressive string arrangements and reverb heavy atmospheres may recall Godspeed You! Black Emporers music, however The Boxhead Ensemble has no pretensions towards classical austerity or apocalyptic theatrics.
Basically The Boxhead Ensemble work with Americana and folk music by replicating it arrangements, timbres and harmony, but then obscure it with long drones, lots of reverb, freeform rhythms and loose polyphony. The instruments sing out weeping melodic fragments, all flowing around each other in such a way to be not quite hummable, but still blatantly melodic and gorgeous. A track like nocturne 5 sounds like a simple duet of harmonica and violin on top of an reverby drone. Nocturne's 7 and 3 play with steady, quietly chugging rhythms and melancholy guitar playing. Nocturne 8 brings in glitchy electronic manipulation over what sounds like prepared-piano.
Nocturnes is one of the most beautiful albums I have ever heard. It conjures up exquisitely melancholy images of old sepia photos, expansive plains, run down forgotten homes, and the peaceful comfort of a cool summer breeze. I could listen to it over and over, and will probably will continue to do so for some time. I hope a few of you manage to give it a chance. I do not understand why their albums are so forgotten and ignored.
Everything this man just said is true. I thank Yourself for introducing me to The Boxhead Ensemble very recently. There are few albums I've heard that are this beautiful _________________ http://jonnyleather.com
I think the most striking thing about Past-Life Martyred Saints that it doesn't really guard itself; meaning the artist who made it doesn't at all play coy about what she's trying to do or what emotions she's trying to convey. There's no sense that EMA is just toying with the idea of something, like PLMS is supposed to be some sort of academic exercise, or that she's romanticizing some musician's past musical expression in order to fill the void of her own.
What particulary makes it hit hard is that it feels really intensely personal and yet manages to make all her varied stories feel like very universal experiences. even if we haven't experienced EMA's particular real-life (metaphysical or not) story here, all the different emotions and moods EMA has to convey are immediately recognizable. We can see someone's more vulnerable, masochistic sides in "Marked", the time-and-space-defying subconscious travel through a thorny family history in "Grey Ship", the indomitable defiance of "California", the creepy, erratic moodiness of "Butterfly Knife", to the substance-aided mental-and-physical numbness of "Milkmen". All these are, in their own wild way, an experience or mood that is oddly relatable (be it something we've lived through or can easily identity where the feelings are coming from) and help make an implosive record like Past-Life Martyred Saints so immediately engaging.
However, it's really one of the album's quieter moments where PLMS hits the deepest and where such an intense album of high's and low's really finds it's heart: the gentle "Anteroom", an expression of eternal, never-to-be-requited love that shows both her vulnerability and her headstrong determination to never play false or dismissive of what she really desires, it's one of the greatest and most well-rounded peaks into an artist's soul I have heard in a long, long time; it's a deceptively modest arrangement that is pure, beautiful and utterly heartbreaking. It brings together all the wild strands of the record and shows a musician who's not afraid to show not only her existential longings but also her unflinching honesty, and represents what makes a particulary powerful, voliatle record like this one so utterly vital.
EMA has some progressive qualities in structure I think. I used this word before, but "mild" comes to mind. I can't help but... "hear" the structure too much and it takes me out of the songs.
I don't have much thought about Nocturnes other than it feels American, I feel feels, and it's difficult for me to pull away from it after I've started listening.
Everything this man just said is true. I thank Yourself for introducing me to The Boxhead Ensemble very recently. There are few albums I've heard that are this beautiful
This.
I've just started getting into them myself thanks to being made aware of them from yourself.
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