![]() These precisely detailed sonic miniatures suggest their rural origins while Cracknell's clear, classically English voice projects lonesome character studies that are more art house than multiplex.įolk has been a longstanding element of Saint Etienne, going back particularly to 1994's Tiger Bay, and Cracknell finds great variety in it once again here. The image of a literal kite, fluttering against a cloudy sky, also helps evoke the record's contents the daughter of Stanley Kubrick's first assistant director, Cracknell has often turned the everyday into the cinematic, and here she's swapped her signature feather boas for something more like the wind in the willows. The title refers to a local bird of prey - which, at the risk of making too much of Cracknell's retro-modernism, happens to have been reintroduced recently. (Saint Etienne fans, never fear - Cracknell has indicated plans to record a new album with the band next year.) Brief descriptors fail to capture the breadth of styles at play in Saint Etienne's discography, from girl-group music and Tropicália to techno and Swedish pop this 12-song set embodies a quieter type of revisionism, based in quirky orchestration and folk-flecked acoustic instruments, but it's unerringly melodic throughout. A sense of place has long characterized the group's work, so it's more than usually relevant that Cracknell recorded Red Kite in a barn, near her current home in the Oxfordshire countryside. ![]() Now, 18 years after Lipslide, Cracknell has refreshed her solo career, and her second non-Saint Etienne LP is remarkably removed from such London urbanity. ![]() ![]() "Ready Or Not," a sublime example of the latter, returned recently in the soundtrack to the film How We Used To Live, a Wiggs-scored cinematic love letter to London there Cracknell goes again, reviving the past in a new form. three years later), a winning assortment of Saint Etienne-like dance-floor fare and melancholy kitchen-sink balladry. Cracknell shamed doubters with her first solo album, 1997's Lipslide (released in the U.S. In a group context, though, Cracknell's aesthetic contributions are harder to distinguish from those of the like-minded co-founders, veteran music journalist Bob Stanley and his childhood friend Pete Wiggs. trio Saint Etienne, which has released eight albums of chic, thrift-shop-rummaging dance-pop since the early '90s. She's best known for doing that as the frontwoman for the U.K. singer with the airy, pealing soprano has built a career: She can take what might seem retro and sing it in a way that feels contemporary, even timeless. The number of audio samples are shown in brackets.Sarah Cracknell made her solo debut on a rare 1987 single called "Love Is All You Need." Redolent of swinging-'60s London, the title hinted at the gift on which the U.K. This is very much a work in progress and only presents a very small segment of my sound library. The list at the right shows the species currently represented on the site. Each sample has a maximum size of 1 MB in MP3 format so on some slow systems they can take a while to load so be patient – there may be a short interval after you press the sound button. More importantly when editing, I don’t alter the intervals between successive phrases – the length of such intervals is as important as the sounds themselves. Where possible, I simply describe the situation - song is usually obvious. I try not to guess when describing the function of each call. If you want a copy you’ll have to record it through your speaker, perfectly good enough for most purposes. I can access the originals in most cases (some of them are on cassettes) but it can be very time consuming and I don’t do it lightly. ![]() So they are there for your interest and enjoyment and generally unsuitable for scientific purposes. They have been edited to remove unwanted sounds and sometimes filtered to remove unwanted environmental noise. I processed the sounds on this website using BIAS Peak and Soundsoap software on a Macintosh computer. I used a number of different Sennheiser microphones over the years until, in recent times, I have been using a Sennheiser Short shotgun microphone K6/ME66 in a Rycote Softee windshield, mainly with Olympus LS-10 digital recorders. With the advent of cassette tapes I graduated to Sony Walkman WMD6C Professional recorders. I have been recording bird sounds all over Australia since the early 1960’s when I started out with a Uher 4000-S reel to reel recorder. ![]()
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