![]() Hope you enjoy it or feel inspired to listen to something new today.“Music and celluloid have been used together countless times but never quite like this.”Īn extraordinary collaboration connecting the dark, intense music and visual work of Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack with the thought-provoking vision of documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, this site-specific event is a new kind of imaginative experience that integrates music, film, politics, and breathtaking moments of illusion in a hallucinatory ride through the dreams and hidden realities of our strange, anxious age.Ĭollaborating with Del Naja and Curtis are a visionary team of artists and designers that also includes the innovative art and design practice United Visual Artists (whose commissions for venues such as Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum intersect sculpture, architecture, live performance, and digital installation). For me it seems only to belong to itself. But I am not sure it is music that can be so easily labelled and neatly filed in a category. All features of the so-called Trip hop genre of which Massive Attack were pioneers during the 1990s. The musical content is otherwise pretty repetitive, but these techniques maintain momentum and our interest in the music.Ī slow tempo. This dynamic effect of building up the layers of the music (and increasing the volume) and then suddenly reducing it to its bare, quiet essentials occurs twice more during the piece, each increase in layers and volume being bigger than the one before making the dynamic contrast more significant each time. But no sooner are we rewarded for our patience in awaiting the arrival of the singer, the music pares back to the softest of drum solos that’s not much more than a whisper and a heartbeat. The ethereal nature of Fraser’s voice adds further atmosphere as it swoops and soars and rests on notes you don’t quite expect. The reverberations, echoes, crackles and hisses all give a sense of being surrounded by sound in the way that you might be in a cathedral or underwater - it is immersive. It is 45 seconds in before we hear any other bass notes and when they arrive they are reverberant and ground us into a key and a more familiar harmonic structure. Further layers build around that - a synthesised single note matching the lowest of those played by the harpsichord and emphasising the harmonic drone (a very early form of musical accompaniment using a single note that plays continuously or near so throughout a piece). Then emerging from the distance, the harpsichord enters with its distinctly ‘twangy’ string sound. The first sound you hear is literally noise - the hiss and crackle of an old vinyl record sampled from a 1973 song "Sometimes I Cry" by the jazz pianist Les McCann - and accompanied only by the drum section. There is a sense of that here, albeit it more subdued. Imagine waiting as a child for a carnival parade to pass by and hearing it getting closer and closer, the sounds of the individual instruments and melodies becoming clearer as it approaches and that rising sense of excitement as you strain your head for that first glimpse of it coming into view. Whilst it lacks in your face impact, it creates anticipation. That first minute uses a gentle crescendo (starting quietly and gradually getting louder), adding instruments one by one giving an effect of something growing or coming closer. For me, it’s a piece that rewards its listener’s patience, as it slowly but surely seeps into your soul.Ī bit of instrumental before the vocals begin is normal, but in this piece you wait a full minute for Elizabeth Fraser to start singing. It’s a piece that takes its time to get going, so I wonder if, in today’s streaming culture, where you can easily skip a track that doesn’t grab you immediately, it would have been anywhere near as successful if released now. And if you think the vocals are reminiscent of the Cocteau Twins, that’s because they are sung by its former lead singer, Elizabeth Fraser. Released April 1998, it is the only Massive Attack song to reach the UK top ten singles chart.
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