Ray Mantilla - High Voltage - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Beginning his career with Latin music greats such as Xavier Cugat and Monguito Conjunto, Ray has played with such wildly diverse personalities as Eartha Kitt, Freddie Hubbard, Larry Coryell, Morgana King, Gato Barbieri, Cedar Walton, Michael Urbaniak, Kenny Burrell, Shirley Scott and countless others. Together with Max Roach, he was a founding member of the popular percussion ensemble M'Boom. Here is a lesson in Latin music from the man who perhaps knows it best, having helped define it's evolution during the course of his remarkable career, Ray Mantilla.

French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms - how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as Incha record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.Inch Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself InchWhat am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?Inch The answer gradually revealed itself InchWith small gestures recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody.Inch In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and cu

Ray Mantilla & the New Space Station - Man-Ti-Ya [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/17/2004