Shadowfall Equinox VII

"The Garden, by Moonlight, Turning Dark"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

In the race to the most volumes in a mix, Salsatic Vibrato has definitely been leading the pack.  However, Shadowfall Equinox is catching up.  Probably this is because, for the past few years, I’ve been involved in an intense project at my work that’s required more thinking than mindless doing.  And, as I talked about last volume, this is the perfect mix for music that lets me concentrate.  This time out, things seem to have taken a strong neoclassical bent, though we do have many returning artists: in fact, all of the top 5 most featured artists for the mix¹ are here, plus a couple more.  But the neoclassical thing probably shouldn’t be ignored.

Neoclassical music (not to be confused with neoclassicism) is definitely not classical, but only in the same way that retro-swing is not really swing.  It’s music composed in the classical style, but produced with modern sensibilities.  We’ve dabbled in neoclassical before, with dark neoclassical such as Dark Sanctuary² and Arcana,³ ambient chamber music such as Kevin Keller⁴ and Amber Asylum,⁵ or folks who like to combine electronic with classical leanings, such as Tim Story⁶ and Mira Calix.⁷  Of those folks, only Keller is back this time—technically, credited to the Kevin Keller Ensemble—with a bit of ambient chamber music called “Reflection.” It’s a piece with Keller’s characteristic spare piano, accompanied only by a string trio at first, then a light woodwind instrument (according to the Bandcamp page, it’s an English horn) comes in; true to its name, it’s a calm, reflective piece.  And speaking of spare piano pieces, Ruben Garcia isn’t too far from neoclassical himself.  “Eyes Wander” is a dark, not quite menacing (but verging) solo piano track that’s right at home here.  “Danse Morialta,” on the other hand, appears to be a piano duet, and is very light and fluffy.  It’s the first appearance in these mixes by prolific modern composer Kevin MacLeod, whose policy of creating royalty-free tunes “has led to his music being used in thousands of films, millions of videos on YouTube, and in video games such as Kerbal Space Program.”⁸  A lot of his music is more electronic, and more suited to an entirely different mix (we just haven’t gotten that far yet), but this one is very neoclassical in its formulation.  But perhaps the neoclassicalest neoclassical entry here is Eklipse, a proper string quartet of goth-appareled German women who like to take modern songs and neoclassical them up.  In this case, the original version of “Where the Wild Roses Grow” (by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue) was already chamber-music-adjacent, so it didn’t take much.  Eklipse’s instrumental version somehow retains all the haunting beauty of the original, despite losing the lyrics about murdered lovers and all that.

Still, I think the biggest find here is A Winged Victory for the Sullen, who was suggested to me by a coworker, one of the few I’ve had who also likes ambient.  For the most part, his taste runs to bands like Sigur Rós, who I’m not the hugest fan of,⁹ but we still find common ground.  I turned him on to Greinke, and he turned me on to AWVftS.  Now, this duo (Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran) were (individually) mostly known for flim and television composing and sound engineering, until a chance meeting in Italy led to AWVftS; originally planned as a one-off project, it’s now produced 4 full-length albums, 2 soundtracks, and an EP.  Personally, I find their output a bit uneven: some tracks are nothing special, but a few, including the opener to their third album The Undivided Five, “Our Lord Debussy,” are simply sublime.  This track takes nearly 5 minutes to reach its peak, then settles into a 2-minute long crescendo, then takes another 3 minutes of denouement before it fades into silence.  It seemed like the perfect opener for this volume.

And just as any discussion of neoclassical must inevitably drift into the cinematic—A Winged Victory for the Sullen themselves produced a number of soundtracks—“Our Lord Debussy” doesn’t actually fade into silence, but rather into “Rain,” a piece from the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack by Hans Zimmer (whose excellent soundtrack for Inception was featured on Classical Plasma) and Benjamin Wallfisch.  “Our Lord Debussy” plays with silence so much that it’s really hard to notice where one track ends and the next begins, despite the very gradual fade-in of “Rain.” But the two have a very similar vibe, with a lot of slow notes and building minor chords.  It’s one of my best transitions, I think, and therefore makes the perfect bridge to talk about my use of cinematic music as an offshoot of neoclassical (although probably it’s really the other way around).  There are a whopping five soundtracks represented here, which is a lot outside of mixes such as Classical Plasma or Phantasma Chorale.  Blade Runner 2049 is the only film; there’s a short piece from television’s Grimm called “Juliette Wakes Up.” Like pretty much all music from that show,¹⁰ composer Richard Marvin starts out slow and pretty, but quickly builds to something much more menacing.  The other three soundtracks are from videogames: “Vale of Shadows” by Jeremy Soule is a short, mildly spooky bridge from Icewind Dale; “Galean Bayle Sailing” by Michael Hoenig is a darker, exploratory bridge from Baldur’s Gate II; and “After the Storm” by Mikolai Stroinski is bridge-length, but more self-contained—it’s a light, reflective piece from Witcher 3.  All three are fantasy videogames, and I was mainly mining them for Eldritch Ætherium, but they also had a few pieces which fit in nicely here.  And cinematic music is by its very nature closely aligned with neoclassical.

For the volume title, I was suffering another dearth of lyrics to draw from, so I fell back on the naming scheme I’ve used for Classical Plasma and Eldritch Ætherium: I just cherry-picked a few phrases from 3 of the track titles and strung them together into an interesting title.

Shadowfall Equinox VII
[ The Garden, by Moonlight, Turning Dark ]

“Our Lord Debussy” by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, off The Undivided Five
“Rain” by Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch, off Blade Runner 2049 [Soundtrack]
“Danse Morialta” by Kevin MacLeod, off Calming
“Reflection” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“The Kiss: Juliette Wakes Up” by Richard Marvin, off Grimm: Seasons 1 & 2 [Soundtrack]
“Where the Wild Roses Grow” by Eklipse, off Electric Air [Covers]
“After the Storm” by Mikolai Stroinski, off The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Eyes Wander” by Ruben Garcia, off Lakeland
“Entr'acte (The Garden Awaits Us)” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off As One Aflame Laid Bare by Desire
“reading the leaves (by moonlight)” by Falling You, off Touch
“Gunga Din” by Dr. Didg, off Dust Devils
“Galean Bayle Sailing” by Michael Hoenig, off Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Turning Dark” by Jeff Greinke, off Ride
“Illuminata” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“Vale of Shadows” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Element of Hope” by Carmen Rizzo, off Looking Through Leaves
“The Big Sleep” by A Produce, off Smile on the Void

Total:  17 tracks,  78:12

Of course, we can’t have all neoclassical tunes, now, can we?  I wouldn’t let a volume of SfE go by without at least a touch of darkwave, which here is provided by the usual suspects: Black Tape for a Blue Girl¹¹ and Falling You.¹²  “Entr’acte” is a quiet, flute-driven bridge, but of course retaining that ominous, grumbling undertone that almost every BTfaBG tune has.  It leads nicely into “reading the leaves (by moonlight),” which is another excellent, ethereal outing from Falling You, only more or less instrumental—there are some gorgeous, swooping vocals from Aimee Page,¹³ but they’re completely wordless.  What really makes this track, though, is the heartbeat-like thump of the bassline, which will forever be the defining characteristic of Falling You for me.

When it comes to the “proper” ambient, we can’t of course skip over Jeff Greinke.  As I’ve noted previously, every album of his is a little different; Ride is strangely jazzy, occasionally even funky, so there are few tracks on it that will work here, of which the aptly named “Turning Dark” is easily the best.  It’s slow and meandering, with a lot of synth notes reminiscent of bells, and a subtle but almost groovy bassline.  I thought it was pretty perfect here.  And it flows nicely into the soaring, angelic but somehow also tribal “Illuminata.” This is from Deborah Martin’s collaboration with J. Arif Verner Anno Domini, which we first heard from last volume.  In this one, there’s some mumbled vocals in the background that provide yet another layer of mystery.  And of course you can’t get more ambient than A Produce, who describes himself as “exploring the vast realm of trance-oriented musical expression.” Which is why it’s a bit surprising that we haven’t seen him here before.¹⁴  “The Big Sleep” is fairly typical of his output, although perhaps a bit mellower than such outings as “Insect Justice” or “The Dreaming Room.” But I often find that A Produce provides the best closers, and the nearly 9 hypnotic minutes of “The Big Sleep” is the perfect end for this particular volume.

There’s nothing really unexpected here, but I did decide to take things a bit farther afield by adding a couple of touches of worldmusic.  This is our first time hearing Dr. Didg proper, although its founder and primary member is Graham Wiggins, who of course provided what must surely be the only other didgeridoo track we’ve heard on these mixes: “Aziz Aziz,” from Apparently World.  After Outback split up, Wiggins went on to form the band based on his old college nickame and gave us 3 albums across a 7-year stretch.  “Gunga Din” is from the most recent one, and pairs the drone of the didgeridoo with some interesting woodwinds which go back and forth between sounding like bird calls and snake charmers.  Overall it’s a very interesting pairing.  And I couldn’t forget about my all-time favorite worldmusic-meets-downtempo artist, Carmen Rizzo, who I’ve featured a number of times on a number of other mixes,¹⁵ and once previously on this one.¹⁶  “Element of Hope” dispenses with the breathy female vocals many of his songs feature and opts instead for really interesting mixes of synth washes, digitized beats, and the occasional brassy electronic break in this mostly upbeat tune.  It’s the closer for his second solo effort Looking Through Leaves, but I thought it made for a good penultimate track here, sliding into the long wind-down of “The Big Sleep.”

Next time, we’ll go a bit lighter as we return to that happy-making music that makes you feel like you’re in a videogame.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox VI

Shadowfall Equinox VIII ⇒

__________

1 As of time of writing, naturally.

2 On volume II.

3 On volume VI.

4 Every volume except the first.

5 Volumes I and II.

6 Volumes II and IV.

7 Also on volume VI.

8 According to Wikipedia, of course.  They also add: “One of his compositions, ‘Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,’ is among the most-played on TikTok; from January through June 2021 it was played 31,612,975,915 times.” Whoa.

9 Don’t get me wrong: they’re perfectly fine.  I’m just not the fanboy that many ambient afficionados are.

10 Which we’ve heard before, on Eldritch Ætherium II.

11 Seen on every volume so far.

12 Seen on volumes I, II, and V.

13 Who’s done all the vocals on Falling You tracks for this mix so far, except for “Varenka” on volume V (that was Erica Mulkey).

14 We did see him on other mixes though: once on Smokelit Flashback V and twice on Dreamtime I.

15 Specifically: Smokelit Flashback IV, Moonside by Riverlight II, Rose-Coloured Brainpan II, and Dreamsea Lucidity I.

16 Volume IV.