DiS likes Angil & The Hiddntracks, what do you think?
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Mickaël Mottet's latest project, already critically acclaimed in his native France, gets its worldwide release in November this year. Composed entirely on a discordant piano and based on the sounds of brass and woodwind instruments, Ouliposaliva contains no song written in the key of E. Not only that, but Mottet also chose to omit any words containing the letter 'e' from the lyrics - his orchestra The Hiddentracks obediently dropping the offending letter from their name for the release.
Sounds like some pseudo-concept album bollocks, right? Wrong.
Instead, it plays like a theatrical pot of poetical jazz mixed with delicious, gothic undertones: listening to this album is like stumbling into a pleasurable Tim Burton dream; one where you're the star. You simply can't scan over this album as though fanning through the racks at your local record store. You will need to put some time aside to reap the rewards of this imaginative, mad and unforgettable experience, but we certainly recommend you do.
Angil & The Hiddntracks, 'Narrow Minds'
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i liked that
a bit like early elbow or something. good.
nice
I like the album, saw them at a Chemikal Underground night not long ago and it was even better live - noisier.
typo?
;)
Never heard of them but this seems to be
a nod to the Georges Perec novel "La disparition". A whole novel not containing a single "e". Quite a trick in French.
sounds like
pseudo concept album bolloks to me.
La disparition
Thanks for the tip - will look into it.
For deffers.
There's a genuinely amazing translation in English called "A Void", which is equally astounding- pretty much the ultimate in combining form & content.
For trivia fans, the Oulipo (OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle, if I remember rightly) are a group of writers imposing restrictions on their writing to make strangely creative things- books with no text and only footnotes, novels without the letter e and so on. Always done with quite a lot of humour, as well...
Not just Perec
There is a huge amount of 'constrained writing' out there, some of the most interesting is 'univocalic' which only uses one vowel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univocalic
Have a listen to Christian Bok, he's written a cycle of poems each using only one of the vowels (and one using all the words with no vowels at all). It sounds incredible: http://www.ubu.com/sound/bok.html
This is the first time I've heard of it being applied to music, though of course there are similar tricks like spelling words with notes (most famously, BACH writing his surname in notes as a signature).
Also, writing an album that has no songs in the key of E is really not difficult!
This is educational.
Will pop down to the library at lunch. I've never written those words on here before...
An album without using the *note* of E...
...that would be more interesting.

DiS meets Angil & The Hiddntracks
Angil & The Hiddntracks
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