The latest update to my Stasis Report ambient-music playlist. It started out just on on Spotify. Now it’s also on Google Play Music. The following five tracks were added on Sunday, August 19.
✚ “Bread and Wine” is from the score by Peter Gabriel to the 1988 Martin Scorcese film The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s one of three films that Gabriel — once upon a time the lead singer of the progressive-rock band Genesis, and later a formidable part of the foundation of MTV’s vision of pop culture — has scored. The soundtrack release is titled Passion: Music for the Last Temptation of Christ. Another of Gabriel’s is Long Walk Home: Music from Rabbit-Proof Fence, the 2002 film. In both cases he chose a title other than the film’s for his score’s release. The third, his first, is Birdy: Music from the Film, from 1984. They’re all of note right now because they finally appeared on streaming services this past Friday, August 17. It was the same day the estate of the late Prince released almost two dozen albums across streaming services, so the news got a bit buried. The first two had a big impact on me. Birdy came out my last year of high school (I remember hearing his music in the background as a local news TV station’s film reviewer talked about the movie, and I recognized it as Peter Gabriel’s immediately) and Passion my last year of college (we were fresh off the debate about cultural appropriation that had surrounded Paul Simon’s Graceland; Gabriel had the grace to release an album of the material his score drew from, Passion – Sources).
✚ “Self-Recognition (For Pauline Oliveros)” is from Diminution by Leila Abdul-Rauf, released on Malignant Records in mid-April of this year. Abdul-Rauf lives in the San Francisco Bay Area: malignantrecs.bandcamp.com.
✚ “Scraped (Kara-Lis Coverdale ‘Serpentine Rework’) is off the three-cut EP Arborescence {remixes}, based on the “Serpentine” track from the 2017 album Arborescence by Úlfur. The EP also includes remixes by Oren Ambarchi and Alex Somers. Arborescence {remixes} was released in July on the label Figureight. Úlfur is an Icelandic musician now based in New York. Kara-Lis Coverdale is based in Montreal, Québec: ulfur.bandcamp.com.
✚ “Lapis Lazuli” is from Lady’s Mantle by Jake Muir, who is based in Los Angeles. It was released in July on the label Sferic, which is based in Manchester, England: sferic.bandcamp.com.
✚ “Anno / Four Seasons: Meadow (Spring)” is from Anno: Four Seasons by Anna Meredith & Antonio Vivaldi (“in which original pieces of work by the classical-electronic composer are intertwined with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons”) by Anna Meredith and Scottish Ensemble, and in the case of this track some birdsong as well. The record will, no doubt, be considered alongside Max Richter’s 2012 reworkings of the same Vivaldi music, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons (Deutsche Grammophon). It’s worth wondering if the attraction ambient-minded composers find in “The Four Seasons” is related to the merits of the original composition itself, or to the background-music reputation it has garnered over the years, or some combination thereof. Meredith is based in Camberwell, UK, and the Ensemble in Glasgow. The album came out last week on the Moshi Moshi label: annahmeredith.bandcamp.com.
Some previous Stasis Report tracks were removed to make room for these, keeping the playlist length to roughly an hour and a half. Those retired tracks (by Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie, Ekin Fil, Sarah Davachi, Jet Jaguar, and Rezzett) are now in the Stasis Archives playlist. (Note: one track on the Spotify list isn’t on the Google Play Music version, because it isn’t showing up on the service: Simon McCorry’s “The Third Stone,” off the album Song Lines.)