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Avg: 4.0 (134 ratings)
- Date Released: March 26, 2007
- Genre: Electronic
- Label: Ninja Tune / PIAS Digital
"Oh that song… it carries me out into the sea and swallows me into the deep… and comforts me."
-
We Say...
The Cinematic Orchestra are all about the beauty of melancholy. Ma Fleur is this loose aggregation's fourth album. Apropos of the band name, New York-based Scottish composer/producer Jason Swinscoe — he plays not, neither does he sing — says the album is a "narrative," a soundtrack to an unmade movie. But that's pretty hypothetical for the listener. The musical experience is about minor keys, blue notes, sounds that hang in the air and demand you feel them — whether they're sparse jazzy piano chords or the rich orderly sorrows of a string quartet.
It helps that about half the tracks include vocals. Most come from the Antony (of the Johnsons) soundalike Patrick Watson, a Canadian newcomer. But the real treat is that, for two songs, Swinscoe has gone back to Fontella Bass, the soul immortal remembered for "Rescue Me" who also guested on Cinematic Orchestra's 2002 album Everyday. In her late sixties and frail after a stroke, Bass has the knowledge and lack of ego to carry the weight of substantial reflection on mortality when she intones, "Oh that song… it carries me out into the sea and swallows me into the deep… and comforts me." -
They Say...
For the true follow-up to 2002's Every Day -- since 2003's Man with a Movie Camera soundtrack had actually been recorded four years earlier -- J. Swinscoe & co.'s Cinematic Orchestra produced another soundtrack, this one virtually invisible. Not long after Every Day's release, Swinscoe began writing music for another Cinematic LP, but in another direction from where he'd gone previously. This was a series of quiet, contemplative instrumentals, with Rhodes keyboards and reedy clarinets, simply begging for a narrative (call them orchestrations for cinema). With scripts for each supplied by a friend -- each track got its own story, together comprising different scenes from a single life -- and a series of unpeopled photographs supplied by Maya Hayuk, Cinematic Orchestra had the narrative they needed for their invisible soundtrack. (Added vocals from Fontella Bass, Lou Rhodes, and Patrick Watson represent the same person at different ages.) The results form an intensely affecting record, but one whose monochromatic format unfortunately serves no large purpose; when every song attempts to become a mini-masterpiece of melodrama, patience grows thin. Swinscoe tells us that he wanted to record an album where "leaving the spaces as empty as possible was paramount," but he can hardly complain if we choose to leave him the space to himself. [The promo edition divides the album's material into 99 short tracks ranging from about ten seconds to a minute and a half in length.]
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| 01. |  |
To Build A Home |
6:13 |
|
| 02. | |
Familiar Ground
|
4:37 |
|
| 03. | |
Child Song |
5:17 |
|
| 04. | |
Music Box
|
5:06 |
|
| 05. | |
Prelude |
2:45 |
|
| 06. | |
As The Stars Fall |
5:57 |
|
| 07. | |
In To You |
3:05 |
|
| 08. | |
Ma Fleur |
4:35 |
|
| 09. | |
Breathe
|
6:36 |
|
| 10. | |
That Home |
1:46 |
|
| 11. | |
Time and Space
|
8:42 |
|
11 Total Tracks, 54:39 Total Length
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