Mychael Danna - Sirens
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Track Listing
- Sirens 4:31
- Deidre Of The Sorrows 4:53
- A Feather for Your Soul 6:50
- Inanna 4:12
- Durga 3:47
- Phoenix Anastasis 5:09
- Nakawe 3:53
- Selene 3:24
- Visions Of Bernadette 9:46
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- Sirens bears the influence of both spacemusic and film music. It symbolizes my search for the mysterious, the unknown, and the beautiful - the feminine qualities which hold an endless attraction. The voices of the Sirens will always call us. - MYCHAEL DANNA
- With Sirens, MYCHAEL DANNA takes a giant step beyond his previous work to establish himself as one of the ranking composers of what I'd like to call cinematic spacemusic. Without resorting to bombast or cliche, he's evolved a highly melodic, orchestrated style with very broad appeal.
In the four year hiatus between American releases, work on film soundtracks has brought the element of drama to Danna's music. "The last few years have taught me a great deal about the craft of writing music, mastering technical challenges, working with speed and concentration."
On a production level, his signature electronic orchestrations and three-dimensional spatial environments have developed significantly. On Sirens he broadens his sonic palette with vernacular pop and ethnic genre instruments like electric and pedal steel guitars, bamboo flute, and Scottish Highland bagpipes played by guest soloists including brother JEFF DANNA.
Thematically, the project emerged from a fascination with the mysterious qualities of the feminine and the perspective of the female psyche. In this post-feminist period of revaluation and rebalancing of our individual and cultural assumptions, Danna says he "wanted to create an album expressing aspects of the feminine spirit embodied by goddesses and historic female figures of myth and legend."
Each piece looks back in time and paints a sonic landscape with its own unique musical language, in a series of dramatic tableaux. Sirens fulfills the promise of contemporary studio crafting with stunning sonic imagery, solidly grounded in the traditional musical values of melody and harmony.
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Mychael Danna - Skys
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Track Listing
- Sky 1 3:43
- Sky 2 3:31
- Sky 3 4:07
- Sky 4 3:59
- Sky 5 4:35
- Sky 6 6:59
- Sky 7 4:44
- Sky 8 3:45
- Sky 9 6:32
- Sky 10 5:59
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- It seems ironic, but Mychael Danna's most beautiful and subtly orchestrated music to date was inspired by the unrelenting monochromatic greyness and the timeless grandeur of the great Canadian skyscape. "Skys originated from a series of photographs I took on a spring trip in 1986," says Mychael Danna. "The relentless rain and fog over wet sand dunes made for poor sunbathing, but left a strong and distinctively moody impression in my mind of these skies which dominated the landscape."
"What was so compelling to me was that all the apparent complexity was based on very simple ingredients - air, water, sun - and slow, ubiquitous change, creating panoramas of great sameness, yet never exactly the same in any two moments. Most important to me, they had the unexpected power to convey a detailed range of emotion."
Though originally planned as a suite of pieces for orchestra, in working them out on an inexpensive digital sampling keyboard Danna became quite attached to a certain murky string sound which conveyed precisely the mood he was looking for. In the final production, oboe, flute, cello, clarinet and trumpet were recorded live using classical musicians, but the digitized string section remains in all its rough glory.
Danna calls the resulting style "orchestral romantic minimalism" - the repetition of small melodic/harmonic cells, rendered with deep feeling, evoking the timeless grandeur of the great Canadian skyscape.
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