Terrible Beauty in Slow-Mo

My current musical obsession is the piece below from the soundtrack of a new dystopian sci-fi fave of mine which I re-watched a few nights ago and has become my latest cult favorite movie, to wit, Dredd. This second go-around watching it, was in super 4K HD. Not only did I notice how much more of a great movie it is the second time around but the sound and video quality were stunning at times, none more so than when this music is playing when people are using the fictional futuristic drug Slo-Mo which makes the user experience time at 1/100th of reality in a very hazy dreamy euphoria. The movie is set in an environmentally and socially post-apocalyptic dystopian future where life is rough for the urban-bound denizens of the super-cities where the survivors try to eke out a soul-crushing existence, many of them in "tower blocks", 200-story apartment tenements designed to house many thousands of people. This movie centers around a conflict in a tower block named "Peach Trees". To see this Paul Leonard-Morgan-created haunting atmospheric ambient musical score played to scenes from the movie in which it is played go HERE.

Purifying Fire of LUSTMORD

I tend to find the subgenre of ambient music known as dark ambient to be too dark for my tastes. However, I make an exception when it comes to the Lustmord. I first discovered it when the track  "Black Star" (below) from the album "Purifying Fire" was playing on some esoteric music radio station in the Bay Area about a dozen years ago one night while sitting in my car outside my grandmother's house during a difficult visit with her and while looking for some aural massaging of my soul. This music most intrigued me but I could not ascertain what it was and by whom until by chance I figured it out later. This is not for everybody and even for those for whom it is one must be in the right frame of mind and soul for it to resonate.

Halcyon Evolution of It's A Fine Day

Back in the hey day and Golden Age of trance and house music in the late 1990's and early 2000's, tracks came out that often bridged both genres (or at least seemed to). ATB's 1999 remix of the original Miss Jane's "It's A Fine Day" is one such gem from that era (below).


As is often the case with musical genius and instant classics, such works immediately and/or eventually become synthesized into other formats and genres or otherwise altered and revised by other artists smitten with the potential of such musical gems to be given a creative new twist. Such is the case with "It's A Fine Day" for which Opus III came out with an earlier version several years before in 1992. Below is the Opus III version performed by the inimitable Kirsty Hawkshaw who is still big in the electronic dance music business lending her haunting vocals which have actually improved as she has aged.


However, our little story does not end there as the evolution of this particular piece took an interesting turn as not only did a good many other artists remix or otherwise come out with their own versions or interpretations of "It's A Fine Day" but Orbital took elements of the Opus III version and created the aural gem "Halcyon" whose video below is an ode to the mother of one of the band members whom suffered from addiction to the drug of the same name to which this song refers. Kirsty Hawkshaw does the vocals for this version and the Orbital re-remix further below and while playing the drug-addled mother in the video below.


The story doesn't end there as in a subsequent album, Orbital remixed the track and entitled it "Halcyon + On + On" which appears in the soundtrack of the 1995 movie Mortal Kombat and can be sampled below set to sumptuous scenes of nature. Note: I like this version better than the original as much as I like that, too.


But wait, there's more! There is the matter of that original 1983 Miss Jane (Jane Lancaster) a capella rendering of "It's A Fine Day" written by her boyfriend, English poet, artist, and musician Edward Barton which is found below.


By now you're thinking, "How can there be any more elements to this musical story?" Wrong-o! Since I originally posted this in January, 2013, few months later in May, Kirsty Hawkshaw got the inspiration to do an updated treatment of her version of the Opus III rendering of "It's A Fine Day" which can be viewed below.


Comprehensively updated 3/24/2017.

Heaven in Sound - An Ending (Ascent)

One of my favorite music genres is that first coined by Brian Eno as ambient music. Indeed there is none other luminary in that genre brighter than Eno who did not invent it but arguably popularized it and helped bring it into the fold of electronica music. His most beautiful and perhaps most famous piece or as he called them, "treatments", is "An Ending (Ascent)" from his 1983 studio album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. To me this "treatment" comes closer to Heaven on Earth than any intentionally organized grouping of sounds I have ever heard to this point in my life. Upon hearing it I always am overwhelmed with such a complex rush of emotions from euphoria to melancholy, afterglow to loneliness, inspiration to desolation. Watch it and tell me what you think?