SusannaSonata
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Visit product page →Something wicked this way comes. Something dark, menacing, fathomless. Shadows within shadows. Electricity from other planets. This is the heavy weather sound of Minibus Pimps: a perfect storm of crystalline chimes, low end rumbles and slow-blowing galactic hurricanes.
Minibus Pimps is a duo featuring John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin's legendary multi-instrumentalist), and prolific electronic musician, improviser and producer Helge Sten (Deathprod, Supersilent), which has existed since its first performance in 2011. This unique and unconventional UK/Norwegian collaboration is named after a track discovered on a compilation of Chinese experimental music (a street recording of people who work the crowd to fill taxis in Beijing).
The debut album Cloud To Ground contains seven tracks all recorded live at different venues, from London's Café Oto to venues in Norway and Denmark. The secret of Minibus Pimps'colossal sonic gas giants is their use of the Kyma computer system (created by Symbolic Sound). Instruments such as guitar, bass and violin are fed into the system and radically transformed by self-designed digital instruments and processors until their sources are barely recognisable.
I would say that the music contains composed and improvisational elements on an equal scale,'says Helge Sten of the pieces on Cloud To Ground. With titles referencing what scientists call remarkable luminous phenomena in nature', the tracks are scintillating exercises in bending timbres and refracting sound signals. Black Aurora'is an electronic suite in four movements, pulsing and hovering like some collapsing dark star. The title track is a monstrous duet for icicles and cathedral organ, and the other pieces are masses of sound and noise explored in different densities.
A prolific session musician in the 1960s, John played, arranged and recorded with artists including Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, The Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, Françoise Hardy and many others until co-founding Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page in late 1967.
Following Led Zeppelin's unparalleled career he has collaborated, produced and arranged for a range of artists including Diamanda Galás, REM, Foo Fighters, Peter Gabriel, Merce Cunningham and many more. In 2009, he formed Them Crooked Vultures'with Dave Grohl and Josh Homme. He is currently writing an opera based on The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg.Helge Sten has been making electronic music since the early 90s, both under the name Deathprod and, since 1997, as one of the improvising group Supersilent. One of Norway's most innovative and uncompromising artists, his audio virus'has spread across the music of many collaborators including Motorpsycho, Susanna, Biosphere and more. Supersilent first teamed up with John Paul Jones at the Punkt festival in Kristiansand in 2010, a fruitful meeting that eventually spawned Minibus Pimps.
Cloud To Ground is a giant step by two fearless sonic cosmonauts.
Tracklisting:
1. Black Aurora Pt.1-4 (John Paul Jones & Helge Sten)
2. Cloud To Ground (John Paul Jones & Helge Sten)
3. Arc (John Paul Jones & Helge Sten)
4. Superbolt (John Paul Jones & Helge Sten) -
Visit product page →Highly acclaimed and recommended album from Susanna.
Susanna's first soloalbum since 2012, and her eleventh album in total, is a mastodont of a singer/songwriter release. Near 70 minutes of intensely expressive, deeply felt and spiritually probing lyrics, presented and performed in layers of voice, electronics, effects and programming together with instruments as piano, violin and tuba.
The artist known for personal interpretations of songs by Joy Division, Leonard Cohen and AC/DC among others but also her strong originals , has dissected her own musical expression, collaborations and projects, and put the pieces together again creating a unique and diverse world for her songs.Triangle'is composed, arranged, played, recorded and produced by Susanna. Musicians from Norwegian bands like Supersilent, Broen, Moskus, Splashgirl and Sudan Dudan participated alongside americans Alison Chesley (Helen Money) and Emmett Kelly (The Cairo Gang).
Even in this golden age for female singer-songwriters, Susanna stands out. Her vocal has become ever more versatile and fluid, recalling at times Kate Bush, the Laurel Canyon balladry of Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro, or the acrobatics of the Cocteau Twins'Liz Fraser. But it's always recognisably her own: calm and determined in the face of enormous forces and looming fears.
On the terrifying This / Phenomena'it's distorted into a digital mush, while on We Don't Belong'it's multitracked to a lush and enveloping chorus. Muted electro track Hole'features Anja Lauvdal and Heida Mobeck from rising art pop group Broen besides Skrap, Skadedyr and Moskus - not since Prince in the mid-80s has an existential religious crisis been so beautifully expressed with the tools of electronic pop.Triangle is soul music for lost souls.
Tracklisting:
1. Holy / Sacred
2. We Don't Belong
3. Texture Within
4. Fear And Terror
5. Before The Alter
6. Hole
7. Shepherd
8. Under Water
9. This / Phenomena
10. For My Sins
11. Burning Sea
12. In The Need Of A Shepherd
13. Born Again
14. Triangle
15. Pyramid
16. Ebb And Flow
17. Decomposing
18. The Fire
19. Sacred Revolution
20. Purple
21. Death Hanging
22. In My Blood -
Visit product page →The CD comes with a 8 pages booklet, and the LP is cut from the original 24/96 masters on 180 gr vinyl.
Barely one year after the Rune Grammofon-release of critically acclaimed 'Wild Dog', Susanna returns with a new album. Released on her own label SusannaSonata on CD, vinyl and download in September 2013.Susanna is known for both her own songwriting, with songs such as Believer'and her huge range of highly personal interpretations of other people's songs. She is an intensely arresting performer; holding audiences captive with her hypnotizing vocal timbre and the powerful, all consuming sound of her band, her concerts are truly magical.
Active for more than a decade, through eight albums so far asSusanna and the Magical Orchestra/Susanna/Susanna Wallumrød, the Oslo based artist has recently been taking great steps towards greater independence and autonomy, while increasing the range of her considerable talents as a songwriter, vocal interpreter and producer.
Combining the antique notes of the Baroque theorbo, woodwinds and strings, and Susanna's sparse piano, The Forester' - a co-production with the Norwegian Ensemble neoN - features Susanna's strongest songwriting to date.
The Forester'began to take shape when composers Julian Skar and Jan Martin Smørdal requested some material from her to arrange for the Norwegian contemporary music group Ensemble neoN. Picking from new tracks and several already released songs, the composers made new arrangements suited to the eight-piece group, and extended the title track into a fifteen-minute, three-part suite in which dark woods shroud a wanderer in a symbolic landscape of searching and loss. Being lost, or deliberately straying from the chosen path, are recurring themes on The Forester', whose subject matter ranges from disturbing natural environments to alien visitors, painted on an eerily exquisite canvas that recalls Mark Hollis, Tim Buckley, Kate Bush and Claude Debussy while remaining uniquely Susanna's soundworld.
Recorded entirely live in one single, emotionally intense day at Oslo's legendary Rainbow Studio, produced by Deathprod and Susanna and engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug.
