|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
VAA 007LP
|
Whisky soaked, nocturnal, brooding. Aging's album Troubles? I Got A Bartender was a noteworthy, film-noir infused suite that quietly slipped out on cassette in 2015 by a then budding Manchester avant-jazz ensemble, led by David McLean. In 2020, amidst the pandemic's tempest and winter's gloom, the idea manifested of showcasing McLean's slow burning, wistful soirée in a new light via a curated effort by Berlin's Vaagner label, which invited a series of hand-picked artist to rework selected compositions from the album, rendering its mournful, smoke-tinged resonances into new shapes. Its result is Reworks (Rewoven), and it presents six new interpretations by five artists. These range from ruminating, tape smudged ambient works interlaced with sublime acoustic strums by fellow Manchester musicians The Humble Bee and Tape Loop Orchestra, to poignant steel guitar renditions by Nashville based Kelby Clark. Furthermore, Barcelona based Dania and London based Laila Sakini, each present pieces that draw the listener into opaque realms harbored by swooning reverie and eerie, glistening prophecy. Carefully assembled across two sides of vinyl, McLean's penchant for hard-boiled detective novels, vintage Japanese crime flicks and film noir iconography have a continued lurking presence in the reworks, yet the new pieces each add a modern facet to the original's cinematic narrative, its morose and sulky mood now opening into new avenues of interpretation. And whilst some artists have chosen to dive further into the themes of contentious ambivalence and pensive solitude, others have sought to slightly lift the haze, stirring up melodies tinged with a sense of hope, hinting at times, towards instants of poise and vivacity. In the end this leaves us with a new body of work that manages to feel poignant in its complexity whilst remaining dissonant and elusive in its renditions, hinting at a moder-day existence even more opaque, intricate and convoluted than the film noir classics of old might have pictured the world.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
GZH 095LP
|
Directly influenced by the film noir tradition and the hardboiled detective novels of yesteryear, Aging craft gloom heavy mood music that aspires to create a cinema without image. Sentenced To Love is the pinnacle of the band's work. Led by David McLean, Aging's fourth album is a direct continuation of the music he was commissioned to make during his 2017 Samarbeta Residency with The Crime Scene Ensemble, a 15-piece band of actors and jazz musicians formed to live soundtrack the short stories of pulp fiction writer and collage artist Phil Carney. Chronicling tales full of obsession, longing, double crosses, and murder, the same thematic and melodic gravitas is present in Sentenced To Love, largely due to a handpicked selection of musicians from Manchester's avant-garde and experimental music scenes being involved in both. Whereas previous records by the band have largely been improvised, the six brooding scenes that complete Sentenced To Love reveal a new compositional rigor and emotional weight, whilst still retaining pockets of nocturnal improvisation, each carefully crafted to create their own distinct and filmic sound world. From the low lit, dive bar blues of "Nights In Amber" to the gun out chase theme of "The Trapped Man", the nameless cowboy ghost story "A Shadow On My Name" and the redemptive odyssey of "Cursed With The Thirst", Aging's detailed mise-en-scene full of brass, double bass, simmering drums and reverb drenched guitars conjures the pantheon of noir cinema. This is no truer than on the album's title track, a vampiric torch song whose crescendo soars with Ali Bell's lamenting, tremulous vocals, which act as a midnight confession of a doomed romance. In an age where most musicians are attempting to free themselves from limitations, Aging's Sentenced To Love stands proudly as a genre record, one evoking the tradition of the jazz ballad, designed to swallow the listener into the dark cascade of its drama.
|