Into The Darkness K.f. Beene

This is an amazing double CD tribute compilation - to commemorate 40 years in the business, Kool & The Gang has teamed up and remade many of their top hits top to bottom featuring many of todays most up & coming vocalists and artists. I am quite surprised that this project has not made more of a splash in the states, yet…

The Orb virtually invented the electronic genre known as ambient house, resurrecting slower, more soulful rhythms and providing a soundtrack for early-morning ravers once the clubs closed their doors. Frontman Dr. Alex Paterson's formula was quite simple: he slowed down the rhythms of classic Chicago house and added synth work and effects inspired by '70s ambient pioneers Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream. To make the whole a bit more listenable - as opposed to danceable - obscure vocal samples were looped, usually providing a theme for tracks that lacked singing. The group popularized the genre by appearing on the British chart show Top of the Pops and hitting number one in the U.K. with the 1992 album U.F.Orb…

From pagan re-enactors to failed communes, black metal festivals to Arctic hermits, and the forever Golden Hour to the Northern Lights, 'A Spell to Ward off the Darkness' is an inquiry into the possibilities of a spiritual existence within an increasingly secular Western culture. A participatory ethnography in the best possible sense, A SPELL choreographs the actions of non-actors within existing Scandinavian landscapes in an effort to arrive at a hybrid document of the past, present, and future; it is a record of experience that proposes belief in transcendence as a viable outcome of living in the now.

After a few years of outdoing the Rolling Stones at their own game, Messrs. May and Co., clearly affected by their love of swinging London nightlife and all that went with it, injected their primal R&B roots with added spice (as Mike Stax, "numero uno Los Pretty Things fan," points out in his excellent liner notes). "Can't Stand the Pain" (from the 1965 Get The Picture album) has "a remarkably effective mood with a sense of a dreamy disembodiment that foreshadows what was yet to come with the arrival of psychedelia." By April 1966, B-side "LSD," yet another controversial shot in the Pretty Things' canon, helped pioneer the "freakbeat" sound, whilst the media's attacks on the Pretties slack, druggy values were foremost to the changing times - in fact, the record was a play on words about the English economy and not a celebration of the merits of LSD usage…

This is the kind of package which represents the best of the Philips Classics Duo series. Slightly older recordings, but in beautiful, clear, warm analogue sound; artists of the old school and the first rank; a compilation of potentially neglected music made available absurdly cheaply in attractive packaging with high production values and intelligent notes; what's not to like?