For today’s Lazy Sunday, Worm lowers the temperature with some icy tunes to listen to under a duvet…
Brrrrrrr. For symmetry’s sake we all wish The Bleak Midwinter happened at Christmas, yet every year without fail the coldest snap seems to arrive this time in February. Its not exactly Siberia out there, but it’s still chilly enough to feel slightly like Captain Oates as you set off for a bracing walk with the dogs to a nearby pub. Apart from that there’s not much else to do outside for the next few weeks as we wait for the hawthorn blossom to arrive, whilst fervently thanking the god of Gregorian calenders for making February the shortest month. Forsaking any warm and cosy Valentine’s Day fripperies, today’s selection of tunes was put together in an attempt to match the frosty climate and put you in mind of snow bound European forests, icy steppes…and lonely sex-starved Russian scientists shivering in the coldest spot on earth, drilling down into history; to the dark lake that creeps beneath Antartica. As a fan of 1950’s sci-fi B movies, I’m hoping they find something really nasty…
Biosphere is Geir Jenssen, a Norwegian ambient artist from beyond the Arctic circle. Released in 1997, his concept album Substrata is regularly voted as one of the best ambient records ever made. Instantly transporting you to the blasted wastes of Ultima Thule with its samples of warning buoys, blizzards and breathless Russian voices that sound like the final recordings of doomed submariners on the stricken Kursk, Substrata rewards loud headphone listening on dark winter nights.
Young people listening to Goldfrapp’s current filtered disco sound would have little inkling that they burst onto the scene in 2000 with a decidedly glacial and un-dancefloor friendly first album that attempted to distil the sound of the Swiss Alps into panoramic, Theramin-filled electronica, via John Barry. The melancholy Horse Tears ends the album, which must be one of the best I can think of for having on the ipod as you walk out into a wintery landscape.
From the other side of the frozen Baltic comes Arvo Pärt, Estonia’s greatest living musician, with Silouans Song. The Dabbler previously featured his haunting and wintery Spiegel im Spiegel on an amazing video posted by Mahlerman, (unfortunately now blocked on copyright grounds). Thankfully, youtube comes up trumps again here, as this short and simple video perfectly matches the deeply felt spirituality of the music.
Franz Schubert’s Winterriese is one of the most famous wintery song cycles, set to a collection of poems by Wilhelm Müller. Der Leiermann is the final song in the cycle and conjours up a dark european gothic that chills to the bone. Considering the subject matter, hinting at Death’s shadow, it seems somewhat apt that Schubert was revising Der Leiermann at the time he died. There’s a much better version on youtube with Barenboim and the added medieval Bruegelism of Thomas Quasthoff, but I just liked the way this particular video carries some of the intensity of Klaus Nomi performing Purcell’s Cold Song (a video that would have fitted perfectly with the others here too). It’s spooky stuff – Elena Gerhardt said of the Winterreise, “You have to be haunted by this cycle to be able to sing it.”
I’ll clear my desk and collect my P45 then……
Hope not MM, your LSA posts are one of my weekly Dabbler highlights!
Great stuff. And thanks for the link to Quasthoff, too. He’s recently announced his retirement as a performer, and his consummate art should be celebrated. This is the way I like to hear Schubert sung, but Winterreise lends itself to all kinds of interpretations. The oddest I know is the version accompanied by hurdgy-gurdy (not just the final song, about the hurdy-gurdy player, but the whole lot). The arrangement is by hurdgy-gurdy evangelist Matthias Loibner, and he has recorded it with Natasa Mirkovic-DeRo.
Thanks Philip- I think that hurdy gurdy version is quite good – it brings out that medieval feeling that matches the words
Lovely selection Worm, although I’m in spring mode. West Cornwall seems to have largely missed this cold snap. I was walking though fields of flowering daffodils in bright sunshine last week…
Lovely stuff, Worm. On the subject of Purcell, whom everyone around here seems to be digging (possibly since Mahlerman gave us that extraordinary song to which you link), I’ve invested in a few collections and have become quite addicted.
It is a lovely post, Worm.
For me the greatest painter of bitterly cold landscapes is Sibelius. In his later years he described his music as ‘pure cold water’ I think he was simply contrasting it with modern ideas in music but for me it captured the essence of the great tone poems such as En Saga and the astonishing Tapiola. The latter, his final major work, chills to the bone:
‘Widespread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty God,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8noD7PhA-po
Brrrr! Thanks John, that video is excellent! Thats the sound of a needling horrible ice blizzard swirling in
Wonderfully warming work worm, in this kalt weather.
Pronouncing the name Pärt giving the hardcore aficionados duodenal ulcers, I say pert, you say pyart.