Orpheus the Lowdown

Orpheus the Lowdown Artist: Andy Partridge , and Peter Blegvad
Label: Pony Canyon
Category: Music


Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Format: Import
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1
EAN: 4988013588004
ASIN: B0000C9VJ6


Release Date: 2003-09-11

Orpheus the Lowdown


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Tracks:

  1. Savannah
  2. Brown-out On Olympus
  3. The Blimp Poet
  4. Night Of The Comet
  5. Necessary Shadows
  6. Galveston
  7. Beetle
  8. Heartcall
  9. Noun Verbs Eurydice
  10. Divine Blood
  11. Steel Bed

Album Description

Japanese edition of 2004 album has earliest release by 2 months. Pony Canyon.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars IMAGINE THIS.......2004-06-14

There seem to be some several things missing from music these days, one of which must surely be imagination. Given the sharp upturn in control and flexibility offered by the recording equipment and studios of the early 21st century, anyone working in music should be literally dumbfounded by the range of possibilities before them. Instead and more often than not, listeners get ever more of the same.

Except here. "Orpheus the Lowdown" is a carefully realized and intricate combination of words, sounds and images that offers no shortage of imagination or ideas. Here we have an ideal pairing: the respective backgrounds and output of Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge couldn't be better suited to this project.

Blegvad's words, (refer to his body of solo work and, of course, Slapp Happy) are mostly presented in the form of a poetry reading and are wonderfully inventive, playful and always beautiful: "Orpheus washes his hands in tears and thus anointed calls it a day though it is night". And, as remarkable as that sentence is, the sounds which support it bring the words to a better life.

The aural quality is not unlike Partridge's work with Harold Budd on "Through the hill", but instead of approaching these pieces as "songs" they are instead set in sound. Ranging from the overt (bowling percussion) to the subtle ( the ambience of a Savannah) the overall effect becomes something akin to musique concrete with an important distinction: these are not found sounds, they are clearly originated and composed to suit the language, just as the supporting images were assembled.

The visual and aural pieces are both realized by taking seemingly unrelated elements and arranging them into a new, single whole. In both cases, the music and the photo-assemblages (which have a feel not unlike Man Ray's Ray-O-Grams) create a sense of strangeness, surprise and the discovery of something new out of the ordinary.

Music Album:

  1. Purple People ~ Various Artists
  2. As On A Darkling Plain
  3. Trinity - Seas Seize Sees
  4. Live In Mexico 1999
  5. Escape To Horizon
  6. The Dragonfly From The Sun
  7. Virtual Sun
  8. Four Moments
  9. Live In Los Angeles 1994
  10. Not The Future I Ordered

Music Album

Music Album

Music

New Born ~ Calvin Newborn

The Promise ~ John McLaughlin

Soul of a New Machine ~ Fear Factory

Purgatory Afterglow ~ Edge of Sanity

Confessor ~ Confessor

Hino Tori ~ Mika Nakashima

Jahrhundert Hits Der ~ Various Artists

Serat El Hob

Invisible Borders ~ Invisible Borders

Kokoro No Tabibito ~ Agnes Chan