Album Review: Late Night Tales - Ólafur Arnalds

Picking up the batton on the latest release in the seemingly never-ending Late Night Tales series is Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds. More often known for his modern-classical inspired music, here Arnalds combines diverse soundcapes spanning techno, folk, pop, R&B and more classical sounds.

Upon hearing this album it is clear that Arnalds has poured considerable effort and heart into this album, his first real attempt at something like this mix. In his words, when he was first asked to do the mix his reaction was "This will be fun and easy, only a couple of days work. No problem!"... He claims he was still working on it six months later, weaving together music from his life, his friends and his collaborators, his influences.

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The album opens with the dreamlike Jómsvíkingarímur Ýta Eigi Feldi Rór by Hjálmar Lárusson and Jónbjörn Gíslason before melting into Julianna Barwick's Forever... Both are like fragrent vapour hanging in your soul, softly billowing and gently pulling you in.

Odesza's How Did I Get Here appears in an exclusive instrumental form that transforms it into a slow and considered piece of leftfield beauty. Odesza give way to Anois' A Noise - a stilted moment of melodic folk that recalls The XX's male-female vocal harmonies and stripped production.

Jamie XX himself is here, providing remix duties for Four Tet on Lion, creating the kind of slow moving ambient beauty only he can. Jai Paul's Jasmine shows up like the guy everyone knows at a party, but it's still always so good and therefore hard to resent. Spooky Black's Pull is a liquid post-rock ballad, melodies slowly tumbling in freefall to create a monument to the dramas of human emotion.

The album's only real misstep is in Arnalds' own contribution in the form of three exclusives... His techno side project Kiasmos has the slowly building Orgoned and includes Kinesthesia under his own name - these are both fine if somewhat unspectacular. It is on the staple Late Night Tales cover-version where Arnalds properly stumbles - his take on Destiny's Child transforms the original into the sort of earnest folk cover that I thought we had all grown out of. It lacks all the sass of the original and if I were the subject of the song I'd only be further convinced to never say the singer's name again.

Olafur Arnald's Late Night Tales maintains the series' record for high quality and thoughtfully created mixes, only it loses its way in the final third... Yet everything up until that point is so strong that it balances it out to make the album a valuable listen.

Late Night Tales by Ólafur Arnalds is out now - check out the preview below:

LNT: http://po.st/olafurLNT iTunes: http://geni.us/LNTolafurarnalds Bandcamp: http://po.st/olafurBC Standing at the intersection where techno meets classical music, Ólafur Arnalds directs the new Late Night Tales. “When I was asked to do the next installation of the Late Night Tales series I thought "This will be fun and easy, only a couple of days work. No problem!". Six months later, I was still pulling my hair out in some kind of quest to make the perfect mix. As someone who has never really done mixes before, I learned a lot of things along the way and the whole experience was very inspiring. I decided to approach the mix in a similar way as I would one of my scores. This is the soundtrack of my life. I included songs from many of my friends and collaborators and tried to deliver a mix that represents who I am as an artist and where my influences are coming from - both personally and musically.” - Ólafur Arnalds, March 2016 Follow Late Night Tales: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/latenighttales1 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LateNightTales Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/latenighttales Instagram: http://instagram.com/latenighttales

Album Review: Another "Bugged Out" Mix & "Bugged In" Selection - Erol Alkan

Erol Alkan encapsulated the spirit of the times back at the beginning of the last decade, a period when dance music seemed to fracture - trance got harder, house became more and more commercial. Supermarkets were overrun with 'funky house' compilations and trance CDs emblazoned with nightclub logos that had long since ceased to properly exist.

Honest music played with a guitar seemed to get a lot cooler. The Strokes and The White Stripes proved that rock music could still be interesting. Even in their fairly  derivative approaches they were still, you know, good. A void was left in dance music, and into that stepped the movement that ultimately triggered this blog - acts like 2 Many DJs played music for dancing that rocked harder and was far cooler than anything played by bands live.

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Another "Bugged Out" Mix & "Bugged In" Selection - Erol Alkan

The London night Trash, hosted at The End, became a key location in this transformation of electronic music. Within Trash you would find Erol Alkan spinning records by !!!, hosting gigs by a fledgling LCD Soundsystem and wearing skinny Batman tees.

But one thing you wouldn't generally find Erol doing is releasing mix albums in the supermarket. Or anywhere in fact. For some reason he seemed to be opposed to them, only ever releasing two - one as a cover CD to long defunct dance mag Muzik and one for the club night / cultural institution Bugged Out.

That last mix album was released in 2005 and now, seven years later, we have a follow up. Like the original this is an album of two halves - one disc is 'Bugged Out' (i.e. a dance mix) and the other 'Bugged In' (at home, chilled listening).

Other than that not all that much has changed. The first set is pretty strong - crunchy techno fused with grimey electro - but it could almost have been released in 2005 itself. Maybe that says more about electronic music than anything. There is the occasional nod to how things have changed - Scuba's warm, loved-up, soulful dubstep epic 'Never', for example, and Factory Floor's excellent (but also rapidly aging) 'Two Different Ways'.

There is still plenty to love - particularly Jimmy Edgar's scarily passive-aggressive rant 'This One's For The Children' and Erol's own dowdy post-punk-techno closer 'Forever Dolphin Love'.

The last time Erol released his Bugged Out compilation it was actually the laid back 'Bugged In' set that kept us coming back, and here it remains the one that is likely to age the best. It is little more than a standard collection of obscure left field tracks gently massaged together but Alkan can sure pick them - his music collection must be quite a thing. So from Jan Hammer Group's psychedelic soul opening 'Don't You Know' Erol barely misplaces a step.

Jai Paul's 'Jasmine' demo is disconcertingly claustrophobically sexy, throbbing bass and faint vocals seemingly calling out through the locked door. The synth line comes in more than halfway through like a chainsaw - it's a pretty much perfect pop record. Space Dimension Controller's 'The Love Quadrant' is equally funky - dense and filtered but nowhere near as creepy. Things end with the gentle jazz influenced 'Soaring and Boring' by Plush, a fittingly decadent end with an audible hum as the record stylus reaches the inside track.

Regardless of what you think of the passing of time since Erol's last compilation you can't really deny the quality of music here, nor the mixing. If you were a fan then, I would wager you still are now.

Another "Bugged Out" Mix & "Bugged In" Selection is out now, the full thing is available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, hiighlights on LP and the "Bugged Out" Mix is on MP3 [affiliate links].