“Many of the ideas in this collection have now been so completely assimilated into popular listening that it may sometimes be hard to remember how surprising it all was on first outing. Some of it still sounds pretty exotic. These CDs are important as part of the story of how we got to where we are now—the cultural conversation so far—and as a still fruitful repertoire of future possibilities.”from the Foreword by Brian Eno
There have been previous attempts to marshal a lot of British psychedelia into one compilation, but Real Life Permanent Dreams is a little different from those. This four-CD, 99-song box set isn't a best-of, but more like an attempt to assemble a very wide (though still representative) cross section of material, most of it pretty obscure to the average listener. For the most part, it succeeds in delivering a high-quality anthology that manages to offer a lot to both the collector and the less intense psychedelic fan, though it's by no means the cream of British psychedelia.
For a band that named itself after the first dog in outer space – and previous albums called Sounds of the Satellites and Silver Apples of the Moon – you'd think Laika would make spacey ambient music with a focus on quirky beats. And they do, sometimes. The emphasis, though, of Good Looking Blues, the London quartet's third album, is to give equal attention to Margaret Fiedler's smooth, somewhat gothic-and-soul-influenced vocals and the band's mixture of rock, slow electronic, and sit-on-your-couch dance music. Fiedler, who went to grade school with Liz Phair in Winnetka, Illinois and later played in a Smiths-sounding college band with Moby, speak-sings dark fictional stories about life's basic themes: love, sex, death, and work. But it's not quite that simple. For instance, on one of the album's standouts, "Black Cat Bone," she tells a story of a woman who kills her evil husband with voodoo: "Rocks for my pillow and sand for my bed/For better or worse, I left him for dead." Laika's talent is crafting a particular mood.
Music is indeed boundless and transcends all lingual and cultural borders. Anyone who loves music wants not just to hear it, but to experience it: authentically, naturally and dynamically. As a musician or a music enthusiast – people all around the world are united by music.
PINK FLOYD - A Tree Full of Secrets. A temporary ultimate Pink Floyd rarities compilation. There are in fact 17 audio CDs and 1 data CD. This latter CD contains all the artworks and booklets, and some bonus files. The 17 CDs are split into 9 volumes (each volume is a 2 CD set, except volume 9, which is a single CD). So, there are 9 different artworks, and the whole Rarities compilation will take the place of 9 jewel boxes in your CD collection.