School Spirits

Equal Spirits brings together a genre-defying mix of South African spiritual jazz, ambient improvised introspection, bursts of old-school hip-hop and electronica, soaring melodies, synths, samples and gospel-infused grooves, woven together with sung and spoken languages from Zulu, Sotho, Yoruba and Xhosa to Arabic and English.

Equal Spirits brings together a genre-defying mix of South African spiritual jazz, ambient improvised introspection, bursts of old-school hip-hop and electronica, soaring melodies, synths, samples and gospel-infused grooves, woven together with sung and spoken languages from Zulu, Sotho, Yoruba and Xhosa to Arabic and English.

Noc Na Zamku (2008). This seems to be a live recording (part of the Polish event "Olszty skie Lato Artystyczne 2007") although it overall sounds like a studio work. The album offers eight tracks of intense, fresh, versatile Berliner School, slightly Redshift-oriented sequencing and lush solo voices. The third piece "La Orkestra" accelerates into fourth gear, as the well rendered electronics, beats and rhythms venture into dance/trance territory as TD's "Kiew Mission" kindred vocal samples pass by through the sonic spectrum. Vocal phrases and breathing sounds mingled with holdback electronics slow things down again on "Ambient II". The following piece "Live" is made up of repetitive, mid-tempo paced hypnotic sequencer structures over which trance-like solo voices freely hover, as a dance beat shortly kicks in halfway…

Wedding the experimental free-folk of "New Weird America" to the more conventionally song-focused SF freak-folk movement, Six Organs of Admittance mastermind Ben Chasny comes into his own on this, his first-ever studio-recorded LP. Richly textured and three-dimensional, School of the Flower straddles the line between moody ambient madness and vintage sunlit psych-folk.

Ian Boddy has been at the forefront of the UK electronic music scene since 1983 when he both performed at the very first UK Electronica Festival in Milton Keynes and released his first vinyl album "The Climb". Ian Boddy provides the listener with a rich atmosphere of original timbres and floating soundscapes. He is one of the few of his generation to have successfully integrated electronic music styles as diverse as seventies-style sequencer structures, melodic neo-classicism and the post-rave Modern Ambient style. Next to Boddy's impressive solo career stands his collaborative live performance and studio efforts with several of Electronic Music's most innovative and interesting personalities including: Ron Boots, Chris Carter, Andy Pickford, Robert Rich, Markus Reuter, Erik Wollo, David Wright and the ongoing project ARC with Mark Shreeve…